Family – Regular Guy

London Reviews: Family Selfie Gallery

brian — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 21:08:53 +0000

[tribulant_slideshow gallery_id=1]

London Reviews: Icelandair

brian — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:24:48 +0000

This is one in a series of reviews/commentaries on things that happened during a recent trip I took to England with my wife and daughter.

When we started planning our trip, the flights over gave me the biggest concern. With all the ways flight prices can fluctuate, I worried about getting stuck in a deal that made no sense in the long run. There were so many questions:

Would we find an affordable non-stop price?
If we connect, where do we connect through?
What is too long of a layover? What is too short?
What time works best for our return flight?

In the end, we went with Icelandair from Dulles (between 90 minutes and two hours from home) to Heathrow through Reykjavik. The next best option would have been Aer Lingus from Philly through Dublin. I dreaded that drive, but that would have avoided our less than awesome experience in Cambridge on our last day (more on that another time) because the flight to return home would have been too early for us to go there.

But the choice ended up to be fine. We did have delays on almost every leg, but none of them made a serious impact on our trip. The biggest negative was the whole “use a bus to get to and from the plane in Iceland.” It was cold and rainy and the bus was packed. They obviously have more business than working gates.

That said, we had comfortable seats, and I enjoyed the entertainment options (even if I didn’t have headphones to plug in on the way to London and didn’t feel like springing for them). We ate on the way home and liked everything we bought. The crew members were pleasant and helpful. Plus, they didn’t lose our luggage!

I don’t know if they would be my first choice if/when we go to England again, but I certainly wouldn’t avoid using them.

Big Mouth Success

brian — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 13:33:24 +0000

The beginning of the York Fair reminds me of my first introduction to the event in 1992. They had bungee jumping that year at the fair.

One day, I went to lunch with a group of fellow Evening Sun reporters. This was our routine. I want to say we were at the Little Red Schoolhouse or the old Blue and White downtown. The discussion turned to the bungee jumping at the fair.

As the only sports reporter in this group, I did not have to cover the fair. Everyone else was assigned to one day of fair coverage. I took this opportunity to declare that if I did have to spend a day at the fair for work, I would totally bungee jump and write about it.

Someone at the table said, “Well, I’m covering the fair this afternoon. I’ll give you a ride so you can do it.”

My big mouth had caused trouble before. This time, however, an extra layer to the story – I had a huge crush on the person who dared me to put my money where my mouth was.

So I got in that now familiar blue Dodge Colt, scared shitless, but also worried that I could never ask this girl out if I backed out on this.

We made it to York, I kept true to my word, and we spent the rest of the day hanging out together at the fair. A week or so later, we started dating for real.

Little did I know that the bungee jumping boast would be the first of many, many, many times where my wife would call me on my BS.

A Different Dream

brian — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 13:08:34 +0000

Seventeen years ago, I daydreamed about what my daughter’s life would be like. As we anticipated her birth, I would think about what she would accomplish in life. I generally focused on what sport she would pick and how she would set the world on fire.

After watching her take part in the York County Encore Awards – an annual competition for the high school musicals across the county – I am so glad none of that came true.

I’m not bashing sports. I love sports and probably spend way too much time thinking about them and watching them on TV. I just see how happy the path she has taken makes her.

My wife and I have made some amazing friends along the way, people who I am sure will be part of our lives forever. I have watched their kids accomplish amazing things along with my daughter.

I am a sap so I spend days like the Encore performance pretending Ihave something in my eye as I watch amazing young adults control the emotions of an entire theatre. I never saw that when I daydreamed 17 years ago, but it’s better than anything I could have ever imagined.

Generic Issues

brian — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 12:53:42 +0000

More than a decade ago, one of the regional grocery stores called their generic brand “Finast.” Around that time, I secured a new job which included a nice bump in salary.

As Maria and I celebrated, I told her we could now buy “the finest meats and cheeses.” She replied, “Instead of Finast meats and cheeses.”

The joke has hung around our house all this time. I really have nothing against generic brands and often buy them myself. The markup for the name on the box isn’t always worth it.

My wife, however, made a grave miscalculation about that last week. She bought generic Cheez-Its.

To say this caused controversy at home would not accurately capture the situation. There were text messages followed by a long discussion at dinner followed by Facebook posts that allowed friends and family to weigh in on the matter. One of my older sisters taunted us with a picture of a bag of Cheez-Its with the caption “looks like we made it.”

That kind of hurt. I have turned into a little bit of a cheapskate as I have gotten older. I don’t make impulse buys like I used to. When I do, I make sure I am getting a really good discount.

But some things shouldn’t even enter into the conversation when it comes to cutting corners. I mean, if you really have money problems there is absolutely no shame in getting generic cheesy snack crackers.

Thankfully, we don’t have that kind of issue right now. We’re not diving into swimming pools filled with money (well, not yet because I am writing this before Friday’s lottery drawing) like Scrooge McDuck, but we can easily afford the 50-cent difference between the generic and name brand on this item.

When we took this topic to social media, some folks suggested a blind taste test to see if the hubbub about this purchase really mattered. I would have no problem with that. In fact, I bet I would enjoy the generic brand just fine.

Some products transcend the whole name brand vs. generic debate, however. The name defines them.

Cheez-Its falls into this category. So do Oreos. I would argue that Fritos do, but the price difference between the two is pretty stark so I supported my wife buying the generic ones as long as she put them into the name-brand bag to quell any potential uprising.

I also have no problem with generic salsa or salad dressing or other condiments. We eat generic yogurt sometimes, and I regularly eat generic granola bars in the morning at work.

This is a pretty fine line in my mind. While we never reached a consensus on this issue, people pretty much agreed that generics as a whole aren’t bad. It all depends on the product.

For instance, I have no problem with generic soda. When I see a sale on the off-brand stuff, I will sometimes grab a 12-pack or two.

One of my wife’s guilty pleasures is a diet soda in the afternoon. I wonder what would happen if I bought her a generic brand?

On second thought, I don’t know if I want to go down that road. She could retaliate with generic beer.

Looking Over My Shoulder

brian — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 11:18:36 +0000

A few recent news stories have uncovered behavior by websites that shock and worry some people.

First of all, we all learned that Facebook allowed researchers to mess with people, I mean “tweak the algorithm,” to learn how people reacted when they saw predominantly happy or sad news in their news feed.

Then I heard about the dating website OkCupid, which matched up people for dates even though the pairs were incompatible. Once again, they said they just wanted to mess with people for fun, I mean they said they wanted to see if the expectation of a good match outweighed the reality of the situation.

I wish I could tell you the results, but I really didn’t care enough to do more than pay attention to the story on a surface level.

It’s not that I’m an advocate for websites doing bizarre social experiments on people. I just don’t see what all the big fuss is about.

You see, I grew up with seven older siblings, including four older brothers. My whole life has been a social experiment.

I had to explain this to someone at work recently. I had trouble opening one of the doors leading into our office area. My key went in, but I needed to jiggle the handle to get the thing to properly open.

One day, I struggled with this as someone walked past the door. I asked if he had experienced the same thing. Thankfully, he had because I sometimes fall into a default mode of assuming that my brothers worked together with the people who run our building to mess with my key while setting up a webcam to enjoy my struggles.

I don’t like walking around this way. I have learned how to eliminate flinching from my life, but I have a nagging feeling in the back of my head much of the time that someone is just toying with me.

This doesn’t usually manifest itself in imagining elaborate plots involving my workplace, but it does mean I can jump a little higher than the average person when I get engrossed in a task and someone comes up behind me.

In essence, I sometimes live with the specter of a Wet Willie hovering over my head.

That’s why I can’t get too worried if Facebook makes it so some people see a preponderance of bad news in their news feed just to see if that person posts negative items or positive items as a result.

That’s why I don’t feel a ton of sympathy for an OkCupid user who hates sports, but accepted a date from someone who plans their entire social calendar around ESPN’s broadcast schedule.

Those folks can probably move on with their life. They don’t have to scramble for the furthest back seat in any vehicle because that guarantees that they won’t get fish-hooked.

That’s the kind of invasion of privacy that really impacts your life.

Another Bethany Success

brian — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 10:55:44 +0000

The signs that we would have a fantastic beach week with my family started early.

First of all, we saw something we have not seen in ages on our ride down to the Delaware shore – the absence of lines at the Bay Bridge toll plaza. I almost didn’t know what to do when I had the opportunity to drive right up and pay my toll.

We have tried a number of different strategies to try and beat the bridge traffic, all of them abject failures. We just had an abundance of good fortune this time.

Then, we had very few delays along the way. We had a little stop-and-go in a few familiar places, but nothing that really put us behind schedule.

Finally, we had smooth sailing on an alternate route laid out by my brother-in-law to help us avoid construction on the main road leading to our destination.

Since any week at the beach with my family ranks as a good beach week, I saw all these small moments as evidence that we might write a few pages in the family history this time around.

We had much of the same fun as we have had other years. We played the family cornhole tournament, albeit with a smaller field due to some scheduling conflicts. We sat around and talked as long as we could on the beach. We ate a whole mess of crabs one night, so many that the place where my sister buys them informed her that we are the largest order they have to fill all summer.

And all of this on a somewhat down year since some folks could not come down due to my niece’s wedding, which took place on the final day of our vacation. We stayed the whole time at our rental and changed at my sister’s before heading to the ceremony. That’s beach week dedication.

While we did all of those usual things, we also created some new memories.

For the second straight year, a heavy rainstorm flooded the street in front of one of the houses where my sister and her family were staying. That meant we had another opportunity to get the kayaks out from her rental house and patrol the flooded street.

I didn’t take part this year, but to see my nieces and nephews paddling down a residential street once again made me pretty happy.

We also got a chance to mess with one of the lifeguards on the beach, a new family activity. After we saw him input his phone number into the cell phones of multiple attractive young ladies, we sent two of my elementary-school age great nieces to see if they could get his digits. He liked knowing that he was playing to an appreciative crowd.

In the end, however, it’s not about those momentary jokes or how to deal with a quick rainstorm. Beach week means hours sitting on a beach chair with the people who know you best, sharing stories, trading gossip or putting food and other assorted items on the heads of those who fall asleep on their beach towel so someone else can take a picture and put it on Facebook for all the world to see.

That’s what makes vacation with family so special.

Losing Streak

brian — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 11:56:01 +0000

Every day, I take my life into my own hands. I need a lot of courage to survive.

No, this has nothing to do with my commute on windy country roads. I’m talking about playing Scrabble with my wife.

The computer program we use to play the word game throughout the day isn’t called Scrabble, but that’s what we’re playing. We use one of those Facebook games to take each other on throughout the day.

A better explanation, however, is that Maria uses the game to beat the pants off me. She wins more than 80 percent of the games. So why do I worry about my life?

Those other 18 or 19 percent of games could spell doom for me. I have recounted the Parcheesi incident in previous columns and don’t want a repeat of that. (In short, she was one move from beating me at Parcheesi, I made an amazing comeback, she got mad and wouldn’t play the game with me for years.)

My wife isn’t unbalanced or anything. She just gets some pretty serious competitive juices when playing board games. And not only do I run the risk of stirring them up on those occasions when I win, but I do something on occasion which might send her over the edge.

I cheat.

There, I said it. She knows it, but I needed to admit it publicly. Now I don’t really think I’m cheating, but I need to conform to the generally accepted public definition of the word.

If I ever got dragged in front of a court of law on this matter, I would throw myself on the mercy of the court. You see, when you play Scrabble online, and you know that the Internet also contains websites where you can input the letters you have and get a list of every possible word you could play, you pretty much have no choice, right?

I think that’s true, especially when your regular opponent has a distinct advantage. She’s really, really smart and reads a lot of books. I’m just a poor TV watching, sports-loving, chicken-wing eating guy. How can I expected to know all those words?

To be fair, I don’t cheat all the time. I do hunt around the board and see what words I can make, but when I have a rack with a Z, a Q, three E’s, a W and a R, I pretty much have no choice.

I also think the whole aspect of cheating goes out the window when she plays an 82-point word on her first play of the game, pretty much dooming me to yet another loss. At that point, I’m not cheating. I’m just trying to make the score respectable.

I have a ton of fun playing so I keep it up knowing that I’m tempting fate. I won three times in five games in February so I started to get a little worried. But she keeps accepting my game requests and has won six of the last seven as I write this.

Even though I’m losing, I feel a little safer.

The Gravy Train Has Ended

brian — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 19:22:52 +0000

As the youngest of eight children, I grew up with a bunch of perks. Some recent developments, however, make me think the gravy train has started to slow down.

My siblings remind me all the time how easy I had it growing up. They joke that I was my parents’ favorite. I don’t deny that I had it good, but I think that happened more because the first seven kids wore out my parents. They didn’t like me more – they just were sick of dealing with things.

That’s how I ended up having a small exception to the “we won’t buy anyone a car” rule. I didn’t get a car, but we did end up with an extra vehicle during my later teenage years when my Dad got a company car at the same time we already had two perfectly fine vehicles (well, if a green Ford Pinto hatchback qualifies as “perfectly fine”).

The brother and sister closest to me were home from college for the summer around this time so the rationale I remember is that the extra car would make life easier for all of us. But I probably did benefit more than anyone else, especially during the busy school year.

I look back on things like that more and more fondly with each passing year, especially since my siblings are starting to ruin each and every great memory I have of being the youngest. They have started to do something which completely changes the family dynamic.

They have started to retire.

When the first one announced her plans, I felt a wave of joy. I knew she had worked hard and deserved to enjoy the next phase of her life. Her husband had retired a few years ago so they had plenty of adventures ahead.

Then a second sister retired earlier this month. And a brother made a comment about the kind of place where he would like to set down roots after retiring.

Pretty soon, I’ll be outnumbered. I love social networking but will eventually have to quit Facebook because my feed will have nothing but pictures of my siblings enjoying the good life as I continue to slave away.

Sure, I may have had a few more chances to drive a car by myself as a teenager, but that hardly makes up for the constant trips to Disney or the beach that I will have to hear about over the next decade or so.

To pile on, another sibling has started to work from home so I have to hear about the “difficult” commute down the hall to his home office. I just can’t catch a break these days.

One of the worst things about growing up the youngest in a large family is that I had seven historians following my every move. Well, not every move, just the ones that would make embarrassing stories.

They have continued this role, but now they only chronicle the good things in their lives. And I can’t even get my revenge because they won’t care when I get a chance to retire. This just isn’t fair.

Wearing a New Hat

brian — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 16:00:42 +0000

I got really worried for a few moments. One of my sisters-in-law wanted to present me with a special gift in front of everyone at our family’s Christmas Eve celebration.

I had no reason to distrust her. It’s the ones I am related to by blood that I didn’t trust.

As the youngest, this feeling comes natural. One Christmas, my brothers wanted to show me that Santa thought I hadn’t measured up to his standards by putting baked beans and dirty underwear in my stocking.

My parents thankfully stepped in and, always appreciating a good joke, put the items in one of my older brothers’ stockings. I was probably 4 or 5 at the time so they could have scarred me for life.

So I came by this nervousness honestly. You can put me on stage in front of a bunch of strangers, and I have no problem making a fool out of myself. But put that into play in front of my family, and I get a little worried.

She started off with a little speech, telling everyone how she and my brother get a kick out of my regular updates about life in a small town like Hanover. Most of my siblings live in larger communities and don’t get to enjoy the amount of civic interaction that we do.

I stood there waiting for the other shoe to drop as she said nice things about me. If she liked the way I had decided to live my life, how could this be turned into a cruel prank? What did these people have up their sleeve?

When I opened the bag, I could not believe my good fortune. They had somehow come up with the perfect way to recognize me for getting involved in groups like the Knights of Columbus, the Girl Scouts and the Lions Club.

We watched a lot of television as kids. I think the constant viewings of programs like TheThree Stooges, the Dick Van Dyke Show and M*A*S*H have played a big role in my ability to make people laugh.

One of our favorite selections was The Flintstones. That doesn’t make us unique – who doesn’t love the most famous residents of Bedrock? Whenever a wedding anniversary happens, you can pretty much guarantee at least one member of my family will post a picture of 88 Fingers Louie and the fellas singing their famous song.

That’s why I could not believe my eyes when I pulled the blue Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes Lodge No. 26 hat from the gift bag. They didn’t want to make fun of me (OK, maybe they did a little because the hat is absurd in the most awesome way possible). They wanted to recognize me for having the qualities of the Grand Poobah.

I could not think of a higher honor. Plus, my teenage daughter gets horrifically embarrassed just at the mention of the hat.

Part of me wants to wear it proudly everywhere, but a bigger part of me knows that she would feel the same way I did standing in front of that room. A true Grand Poobah would never abuse his power like that.