Blog


A Groan to Spring Cleaning

I awoke this morning to see such a mess That I thought a flame-thrower would be best To rid my apartment of the gunk and the grime That has been collecting since around Christmas time

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  • March 29, 2015

Elderberries and the Equinox

Depending on where you live, the first day of Spring might as well have been April Fools day. I woke up on Friday morning and looked out my window, expecting to see swarms of birds cruising in and out of the frame in a flurry of activity, chirping their morning songs and pecking at last night's pizza crust. Instead, I witnessed the accumulation of an inch or two of snow on my grill outside while the voice of a talking head weatherman was preparing me to understand that this would continue all day long. And continue it did. Hour after hour, large, wet flakes fell from the ...

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  • March 22, 2015

The Return of Saturn & Spaghetti

Tomorrow marks the first day of the last 366 days of my twenties. A tip of the hat to the Laws of Leap Year for seeing it fit to allow me one extra day of sweet, sweet immaturity before the inevitability of time strips me of my youth and issues me a pair of bifocals and an antacid. Somewhere up in the astral heavens, Saturn is swinging around its orbit of the Sun around the same place it was when I was first brought into this world, a time when crapping my pants and crying for various reasons dominated my schedule. Depending on who you ask, they might tell you not much has ...

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  • March 15, 2015

For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow

Tomorrow, March 9th, is my dad's birthday and a week after that, it'll be my birthday. We've shared the month of March and a similar disinterest in celebrating our birthdays for as long as I can remember, with our wishes each year falling more on the side of a UNC victory over Duke, or a deep run into the ACC and NCAA tournaments, as opposed to wanting any sort of party or pile of presents. Since leaving home for college, it's more common for us to spend our birthdays apart than it is for us to spend our birthdays together. In addition to the bummer of not being able to ...

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  • March 8, 2015

There’s Still Time

If your 2015 has been anything like mine, you may be looking at your calendar today and scratching your head in confusion. March? Huh? Where the hell did January and February go? I know February is the shortest month of the year and all, but I didn't think it was that short. We're now closer to Spring Break than we are Winter Break and I could have sworn it was just last week that we suffered through watching Ryan Seacrest bore us into another January. Yet, somehow, the calendar clearly states that today is unequivocally March-mothafuckin'-First. What happened? Where did ...

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  • March 1, 2015

And the Oscar goes to…

This weekend brings the 87th annual Academy Awards ceremony and along with it, one of my favorite minor family traditions. Every year, I watch the Oscars with my wife and brother-in-law who lives a few blocks away from us in Brooklyn. We’re big fans of movies in my house and while there has been a recent dry spell in terms of a good variety of quality films being made in lieu of more and more big-budget superhero romps, there are still a few filmmakers out there making movies worthy of giving an award to. I haven’t been able to catch as many of the nominated movies ...

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  • February 21, 2015

Cheesecake, a Higher Love

Ahh Valentine’s Day. With its origins having as many variations as reasons for you to love it or hate it, the idea behind Valentine’s Day is perhaps as complex as love itself. Some more conspiracy inclined minds will assert that it was invented by Hallmark to sell cards and chocolate. Others will say that it is based on the ancient pagan holiday, Lupercalia, which was observed from February 13th through February 15th and was meant to purify the city, revitalizing health and fertility among its inhabitants. And then there are up three different Roman saints and / or ...

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  • February 14, 2015

BBQ in Brooklyn

BBQ Dinner
Since moving to New York, I find myself starting many a sentence with “Where I come from we…” So much so that I am beginning to wonder if I’ve turned into the dude from the song “Land Down Under.”  But alas, there are no vegemite sandwiches in my recipe collection, no flute solos on my iPod, no glowing women and plundering men…oh I am getting off track. My point is, I am long way away from the thick green woods, the flat lazy rivers and the wide open spaces from my homeland in North Carolina. While I have adapted to my new normal in many ways, one thing ...

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  • January 31, 2015

Firehouse Food Run

By day, I work for a busy IT company in Chelsea, a lively and foodie-friendly neighborhood in Manhattan. While I wear many hats in the office, one of my more appropriate-to-my-personality to do list items on a weekly basis is to keep our team of technically inclined dudes stocked up on snacks and beer – hard to troubleshoot computers hungry and sober, right? There is a grocery store right around the corner from my office that I frequent for said snack runs and as with most establishments in NYC, you find out sooner or later when you should go there and when you should ...

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  • January 10, 2015

Be A Good Wing Man

Well folks, we've made it to yet another Thanksgiving. The gateway drug of the holiday season. The beginning of the end. We drudged through winter, swam through spring and sweat through summer just to get here. Ghosts and ghouls have flown through town and scared away the lingering pockets of August heat, carelessly taking the beautiful golden and rusted leaves with them. The only things left to harvest are the coats from our closets and the decorations from our attics. With the birds migrating south and the Sun taking off work earlier each day, nature is gently pushing us ...

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  • November 22, 2014