BLOG RERUN: I generally don't cook because I end up bleeding into the food

I prompted the AI Blog Post Image Generator with the phrase "man bad cook," and it returned this. Which is...actually pretty good, though it appears that steaming pot is not in fact resting on top of either stove burner.

NOTE: Today's Blog Rerun was originally posted here four years ago today on December 20, 2020. You will note that I continue not to cook.

As I type this, I have a batch of Moroccan Lentils bubbling in the slow cooker on the kitchen counter.

This is an extraordinary sentence in that I very rarely have anything bubbling, cooking, roasting or otherwise being turned into something edible through the application of heat. I don't cook. Or at least, I hardly ever cook.

There are reasons for this, the chief one being that I married an incredible cook and she feeds me and my family delicious food every day. Terry and I laugh over the fact that in 28 1/2 years of marriage, she has made exactly one dish I didn't like. And for the record, she didn't like it, either. It was an eggplant thing, though I generally like eggplant.

That means she's batting something like .99998, which is a championship-level culinary performance by any measure.

To be fair, I am also the least picky eater you may ever run across. I like everything. I really do. You would be hard pressed to name a food I haven't eaten and enjoyed, or at least wouldn't be willing to try. So that helps.

Still, she's a great home chef.

So I don't really have a need to cook. Plus (and maybe this is just because I haven't done much of it and therefore haven't developed the knack) I don't really have the talent or inclination for cooking. It doesn't interest me. Only the eating part does.

One of the last times I tried cooking a full meal for my family, I think the main dish was fennel chicken. As I was chopping ingredients, I sliced my finger and, despite my best efforts to staunch the flow, managed to bleed directly into the pot.

I look at it as added protein.

Anyway, these Moroccan Lentils caught my eye when I saw the recipe in one of Terry's cookbooks, so I bought the ingredients and am making them. And really, there's no "making" involved. It's a slow cooker recipe, so you measure everything out, dump it in, mix it, set the slow cooker going, and that's pretty much it, other than occasionally wandering over to smell your creation and stir it.

If that was all there really was to cooking, I would be the Gordon Ramsay of our house.

The old band uniforms in our living room are full of meaning

As recently as mid-November, these old band uniforms and hats were still sitting on a table in our living room.

Just before our local high school was torn down a year and a half ago, my wife heroically rescued a wealth of Wickliffe Swing Band artifacts that otherwise would have been destined for the dumpster.

Like someone pulling valuables out of a city about to be overrun by an invading army, Terry loaded up her car with old band photos, trophies, uniforms, recordings and other memorabilia.

The fact that the school didn't appear interested in making the effort to save most of it was somewhat despairing, but that's a different conversation for a different time.

The result was that, for many months, our basement and garage have been filled with band stuff. This has only been an inconvenience when I've had to haul around boxes of heavy old trophies and plaques from as far back as the 1950s. Those were the only times I complained.

Otherwise, I'm glad our house could serve as an impromptu storage facility for what I consider to be vital artifacts from our city's history.

Because all of these items mean something. They are reminders of generations of Wickliffe musicians and their directors, and of the hard work that went into countless halftime performances, Christmas concerts and jazz band performances.

They are not nuisance items to be swept aside in support of some vague notion of "progress." They are tangible remnants of an institution that has, for decades, been important to our community. They should be preserved. They should be with the people who care about them and about the band itself.

As I type this in mid-November, we still have most of these items in various places around our house. Terry was able to give away some of the uniforms to various alumni, and her plan is to give away as many of the other items as possible at some point soon (with an encouragement to make a donation to the band if you take something).

In the meantime, it's all still here. The trophy the band received for its participation in the 1981 Nordonia Festival of Bands, the plaque it was given for marching in the 1977 Fairview International Band Festival, the composite photo of band members from the 2001-02 school year, and countless other bits of nostalgia are strewn about our living room, our basement storage room, and our garage.

And I couldn't be more proud.

Any community or organization is the product of its own history. That history shapes us all. We really shouldn't be so quick to throw it away.

The guy who almost never works from home is working from home

My company's headquarters building is undergoing some pretty extensive renovations, so they kicked us all out and told us to work from home for a couple of months.

That makes it sound harsh, but the renovations are very much welcomed, and we're already an organization in which office-based employees work from home two out of five days each week anyway.

Or at least most people do. As I've mentioned here before, I go into the office every day, even on Mondays and Fridays when only a relative handful of people are there. It has nothing to do with being anti-work from home. I just focus better and prefer being in the office environment.

What happens when you do that, though, is that you kind of forget how to work from home when you have to. And by that I mean I have trouble getting into the right mindset when it's time to head upstairs to my office and start the workday.

All of the things that are so convenient about working from home are the things that distract me from my work tasks.

Like, for example, you can do laundry when you work from home! But on laundry days, I mostly think about when it's time to put the clothes into the dryer and when I can fold them rather than the things I'm supposed to be doing for my job.

You can also see your spouse/housemates when you work from home! Yes, but while this is enjoyable, it's also distracting. And while I know my wife loves me dearly, when I'm working from home, I'm invading the space she's used to occupying alone Monday through Friday. I totally get where she's coming from here after 32 years of marriage.

You can run to the store if you need something or schedule an oil change when you work from home! Again, yes, but again, distracting. I lose focus.

I realize this is a me problem, and that most people are mentally strong enough to be productive when they work from home. I'm simply not one of them.

So while there have been certain conveniences during this extended period of the office being closed, there is admittedly part of me looking forward to January 20th, which is the day our building is supposed to open back up and I can return to some semblance of a routine.

Somehow I think Terry is looking forward to that day, too.

Look, if the guy in front of me is driving slowly, there's not much I can do, so stop tailgating me

This happens to me all the time on my drive to work. I take mainly one-lane (each way) side streets, most of which have posted speed limits of 35MPH and on which the majority of drivers do about 40, maybe a tad faster.

The system works well for everyone involved until one person decides to go under 30, even on the driest, clearest day when driving conditions are optimal.

A line of cars quickly forms behind them, but they are insistent on proceeding well under the speed limit.

Not the worst thing in the world, but admittedly a tad annoying.

Quite often I will be the car directly behind the offending dawdler. I will move a bit to the side so the other drivers can see what's going on, and to convey the message, "Hey, it's not me, it's that guy. What are ya gonna do?"

Yet even when I do this, the car behind me will often position itself about 6 inches from my back bumper, as if tailgating me is going to make Slow Poke Rodriguez speed up.

Why? Why would anyone do this? What do you think you're accomplishing riding my butt when I have absolutely no control over the speed we're going?

Back. Off.

I hate to generalize here, but almost every time this happens, I will look in my rear view mirror and notice that the driver behind me is a young person.

Pardon my old man ranting, but what exactly are they teaching these kids in driving school?

Ease up on the gas pedal, Sophia, and put some more distance between you and me. You're accomplishing nothing.

You know, most of the time my blog posts are meant to convey something funny, touching or otherwise positive. It's not often I complain, or at least not often I end with a complaint.

But that's all I have today, along with the following bit of advice:

If you're someone who does this, stop it.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Liam. You're not getting to first-period Biology any faster by rear ending me.

I told Terry, "No more cats!" And then along came Cheddar...

I became a cat person only because I married a cat person.

Having grown up with dogs, I didn't know much about caring for felines until the spring of 1992 when Terry and I got ourselves a little kitten that we named Alex.

This was during my three months of bachelorhood after I moved out of my parents' house and into the house on East 300th Street that Terry and I bought before we got married. Alex and I lived there alone until June, when Terry moved in following our wedding.

I quickly learned that cats are self-sufficient, territorial, and depending on their personality, varying degrees of affectionate.

In the three-plus decades we've been married, Terry and I have had a range of cats, including a long stretch in which we owned five of them. Over time, I became the one who fed them all every day and cleaned their litter boxes.

Thus, while I was sad when our cats Fred, George and Charlie all died within about 15 months of each other, there was also a sense of relief that morning cat duty might someday be lifted from my shoulders.

At that point we had just two kitties, our girls Ginny and Molly. I was fine with this arrangement and was always the first one to say no when someone suggested we take in a stray or claim a kitten in need of a home.

Meanwhile, our daughter Melanie had moved out of the house, and she was building a little cat army of her own. That included an orange stray who started hanging around her place last winter, and who she would regularly feed and pet.

She eventually took him into her home and named him Cheddar. She loved Cheddar, and with good reason. He's a good cat.

The problem was that one of Mel's other kitties, who generally hates the world and everything in it, took to tormenting Cheddar. They couldn't even be in the same room together, which forced Mel to keep Cheddar locked up in a bathroom while she figured out what to do.

I didn't want any more cats, but I also didn't want Mel taking Cheddar to the Humane Society. One night she came to our house for dinner and mentioned him, and I went ahead and said what was on everyone's mind.

"Oh, just bring him over here," I said. "He can live with us."

And so she did. And so he does. It took a little while for Ginny and Molly to accept him, and even then, at best, they tolerate him.

But Cheddar has been a big hit with the three humans in our house. He's affectionate, inquisitive, entertainingly vocal, and fun to watch whenever he goes into kitten mode and starts playing with whatever he can find on the floor (a hair tie, a cat toy, a piece of string, a dust ball, etc.)

So now we have three cats again. It's not five, and I don't intend for it ever to be five again. Or even four, for that matter.

We're sticking with the ones we have. And once they're gone, no more.

And this time...I mean it.

The Atari 2600 was the greatest Christmas present I received as a kid

I don't know these kids, but I'm very familiar with the thrill of unwrapping an Atari on a memorable Christmas morning in the early 80s.

I had great Christmases when I was growing up thanks to my parents, who were not only generous and loving but also big fans of the holiday itself.

Until maybe the late 1980s, in addition to a tree and the usual household decorations, my mom would also set up a table in the living room on top of which she would lay out various Christmas desserts, candy, nuts and fruit. It would all just be sitting there for the taking for the two or so weeks leading up until December 25th, and believe me when I say I did plenty of taking.

When I woke up on Christmas morning, my presents would usually be laid out on the couch in the living room. And they were all unwrapped, which in retrospect seems a little odd, but that's the way it was.

Well, I should say that some presents were unwrapped and some were wrapped. Until I was maybe 9 years old, those unwrapped presents were the ones from Santa, while the wrapped ones under the tree were from Mom and Dad.

There would always be one expensive "featured" present. In 1984 (maybe '83) it was my Commodore 64 computer. Other years it was usually some electronic game or simply a physically large gift like an electric race track or something.

The most memorable of these marquee presents put an exclamation point on Christmas 1980 (or maybe '79...again, these years are getting fuzzy). It was an Atari 2600 video game system, and it changed everything.

Until the Commodore 64 came along, I played lots and lots of Atari games. I even had a little black case that was designed to carry 8-track tapes but in which I stored my Atari cartridges. Or at least I stored some of my cartridges, because after a while I had way more cartridges than the case could hold.

I would not only play Atari at home, I would also pack up my most popular games in that case and take them to my friends' houses to play on their Ataris. Those friends included Kevin, Mike, Todd, Ray and Dave, among others.

My friend Matt lived right across the street, but he had an Intellivision instead of an Atari. The Intellivision featured graphics and sound that were clearly superior to the Atari 2600, but the game play was sometimes lacking and it never quite earned the market share it probably deserved.

I have great memories of Christmas mornings and afternoons spent playing with everything I had received, and I will say that even at a young age, I was very grateful for it all.

It's a little more than two weeks until the big day, and even now at 55 years old, I can't wait.

Internet pro tip: There's probably no need for you to repeat what 14 other people have already said in the comments

I'm sure Dr. Rick would appreciate what I'm saying here.

Quite often I'll come across a Facebook post in which a person is asking a question that has a short, definitive answer. It's usually something like, "Hey, does anyone remember the name of the auto parts store that used to be at the corner of Main and Orchard? What was it called?"

Someone will immediately post in the comments, "Bob's Auto Mart," to which the original poster will respond, "That's it! Thank you!"

And that should be the end of it. Yet within minutes, there will be a dozen other essentially identical comments:

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"It was Bob's Auto Mart!"

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"Definitely Bob's Auto Mart"

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"Bob's Auto Mart"

"I think it was Bob's Auto Mart, but I'm not sure."

And so on...

I don't claim to know a lot about a lot, but I am confident in giving you the following piece of Internet posting advice:

If someone asks a question, and you're pretty sure you know the answer, check the comments/responses to the post first. Did someone else already give the exact answer you were going to give? Great, mission accomplished, no need for you to respond at all.

If anything, you might want to "like" the comment of the person who already said what you were going to say.

No need to post it yourself. though. You wanted to help, which is admirable, but someone else has already done the job. Move along. Thank you for your service.

Now, are there exceptions to this rule? Yes, at least one.

Using the example above, if you knew the answer was Bob's Auto Mart, but you also have an interesting bit of detail to add to the conversation, then feel free to reply. Like maybe you want to say something like, "As others here have mentioned, it was Bob's Auto Mart. They closed in 1978 when Bob moved to Florida to join a Hare Krishna commune."

That is interesting. That is new. That is something no one else has added. Please, post away.

But for the love of Mark Zuckerberg, understand that posting the 28th "Bob's Auto Mart" comment is not helpful.

When I become Internet czar under the new presidential administration, violating this policy will result in either a $5 fine or imprisonment for life. I haven't decided yet.