Tag: livejournal

Ancient Ruminations on London

On By StevenIn Life At Home, Travel Posts4 Comments

I have been slowly going through the old posts on my ancient LiveJournal, deleting most and saving some as pdf. There are a few, the rarest of posts, that are worth preserving, so I’ve been adapting or revising them to bring forward to this blog.

One such post was my answer to a question-meme, “If you won a trip to anywhere, where would you go, and why?” While I travel quite often now, that was not so when I wrote this on LiveJournal. This particular LJ post was written before I had ever been to Europe.

Anyone who’s known me for more than a week knows that I want to go to England more than any other destination; <lj user=’raptorgirl’> even gave me a London travel book a few years back as a birthday gift, The Irrevent Guide To London. I just need a travel buddy and a little lead time to put together the money and the vacation request.

It’s true, I used to go on and on about London. By the time I lived overseas, the money and vacation time was no longer a hindrance to going, and I realized pretty quickly that if I kept waiting for a travel buddy, I would never make it anywhere. So, I started traveling alone. And before long, I took that first trip to London- the first of many. By the time I finally made it to the UK, “The Irreverent Guide To London” was wildly out of date, but it was still a fun read. (And for those who aren’t hip to the LJ lingo, raptorgirl is the LiveJournal username of Vanessa, a dear friend here in Orlando. I met her originally when we were both students at the University of Central Florida, and it feels really weird that we’ve known each other now for more than two decades.)

I want to ride the London Eye. I want to see Stonehenge. I want to visit Stratford-on-Avon. I want to see that giant odd looking tower in Cardiff that figures so heavily in the early seasons of Torchwood. I want to see a show in Picadilly. I want to get drunk and lie in a field in Cambridge. I want to ride the Tube and mind the gap. I want to visit a very particular grave in Highgate Cemetary in London. Years of watching British television and reading British authors have given me a laundry list of things to do and see.

I’ve actually decided that I’m going to get there before I turn forty- that gives me just over a year and a half to get my shit together.

I’d like to see other parts of the world too, but that can all wait. London first.

All in all, I did pretty well on this list- In my first trip to London, I managed to ride the London Eye. (And again on a subsequent trip.). I took a day trip from Paddington Station to Salisbury to see Stonehenge. I went to Cardiff with one of my best friends on a subsequent trip to see Roald Dahl Plass, which was used for establishing shots as the Torchwood Hub. (Today is that friend’s birthday, actually- Happy birthday, Lorrie!) We went to the Doctor Who Experience on the same trip- alas, the. DWE has since closed. I’ve watched three different shows in Picadilly. I went to that grave in Highgate. I rode the Tube and minded the Gap. And I did so, so much more.

I didn’t get to go lie in a field in Cambridge, but maybe I’ll manage to do that after this pandemic wraps up. And while I still haven’t made it to Stratford-on-Avon, I did tour the Globe Theater in London, so maybe that’s close enough?

While I was wrong about the sequence – I was living in Germany before I ever made it to London- I did manage to see London before the deadline. Just barely. My first trip there was the summer before I turned forty. I’ve been back a couple of times since though, and there’s always more to see.

After seeing 28 different countries away from home, London is still my favorite place to visit in all the world. I miss it. I hope I can get back there sometime soon.

If you won a trip to anywhere, where would you go, and why?

16/52

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[Ancient Repost] It’s bloody Brigadoon!

On By StevenIn Florida2 Comments

I’ve been clearing out an ancient LiveJournal in preparation for deleting the account. While most of the stuff there is utter fluff, a tiny portion of the posts are worth preserving. What follows is one such post.  Although I have updated this post with new material, some sections were originally written in May of 2005.

In the late 1990s,  I took a trip to Orlando with a friend to see another friend. I grabbed a hotel out of some guidebook or other, and based on the fact that it was listed as being “near Disney,” I just made a reservation blindly. I was at a place called the Sheraton Lakeside Inn, and it was on Highway 192 not far from I-4. The aforementioned friend and I stayed in that hotel for a few days, and when the trip was done, I mostly forgot about it all.

Flash forward to May of 2005.  I was traveling to Orlando again, this time for an Erasure concert, and I realized that I had forgotten to make a reservation for a hotel.  The place that I normally used for Orlando visits was booked solid, so I turned to Priceline.com. I told it to find me something near Disney, since the concert was at House of Blues.

Can you see where this is going? I didn’t. At least not right away.

I got a result at a La Quinta Lakeside, for $25 a night. Fine. Drove up, pulled in, got my room. Thought to myself, this looks a little familiar. Wonder why.

Drove around to my room after checking in, and found even more familiar looking stuff. The stairs looked familiar. The doors looked familiar.

Then I wandered around the hotel and really looked. At the restaurant, the general store, the pool, the mini-golf, the lake…

It was the same fucking hotel. The exact same one. I was even in the same building I stayed in when it was still a Sheraton. For all I know, it might have been the same room.  Crazy, right?

I was amazed and confused. It’s a little creepy to wander around and see the exact same things more than a decade later. The same, yet different. Wild.

Then it happened again.

Another ten years later, in September of 2015, Amelie and I were going to Orlando for some theme park time.   Once again, I used Priceline.com to nab a room, and once more, I got a place for $25 a night.   This time, it was called the Maingate Lakeside Resort, but I still didn’t catch the “Lakeside” part of the name.

This time, I realized what had happened as soon as we arrived-  the hotel still looks exactly the same, despite changing from a Sheraton to a La Quinta to a no-brand hotel over the span of more than twenty years.  They even still had the little mini-golf course.

I guess I’ll be back in 2025.

Things end.

On By StevenIn Life At Home7 Comments

This week, I received a notification that AOL Instant Messenger is ending.    On December 15th of this year, the service that was the biggest part of my social life from the mid-1990s until just a year or two ago will go offline for the last time.

Up until fairly recently, I was always logged into AIM-  if my computer was on, my screen name was active.  At one point, I had collected nearly a dozen screen names-  some were used for work, but most were personal.  AIM was the way that we spoke between departments during my early years at my previous Mr. Company, because nobody had invented Slack yet and “team chats” were a fairly nascent idea.

Lately, the AIM buddy list is a ghost town-  there are only a handful of people who still connect, and most of those have their screen names configured to mobile devices.  I would venture a guess that at least half of them don’t even realize they’re still signed in- it’s that slow there now.

AOL Instant Messenger is just one more thing in the ever-growing bucket of things from my past that are gone now, things that I miss quite a lot.   AIM and Yahoo Messenger, both removed from heavy usage by their parent companies were one giant part of my life for most of the last twenty years.

So too was LiveJournal, at least from 2002 until around 2011.  The communities there were wonderful, and I made fast friends through those interactions.   I’ve been commenting in recent posts about the process of going through my old LiveJournal to move worthwhile content over here to WordPress while simultaneously preparing to close out the original LJ.  This is for two reasons:  The first is that LiveJournal was purchased by a Russian company a few years back and they have since moved their data from US-based servers to hardware that is actually located in Russia.  The second, and far more personal reason to close out LiveJournal is that it’s a ghost town-  most of my closest LJ friends have since deleted their accounts, and there’s only a handful of people from my list who still frequent the platform.  Posting there in 2005 was like being in a well attended warm and friendly party.  Posting there now is like shouting into an empty factory.

Things change, time passes, and many of the things that I love have faded away.

When I moved to Orlando, there were two restaurants downtown that I really enjoyed:  Frank & Steins, which was a delicious hot-dogs and beer joint, and the Red Mug diner, which was a 24 hour diner at first.

First they cut the Red Mug in half-  they said that the right side would be a new Poke concept restaurant.  Then they cut the 24 hour aspect on weekdays, saying that it was summer hours and you could still go there in the middle of the night on Friday and Saturday nights.   Finally, they said never mind all that other stuff we said, and we’re just closing the place up.

Frank & Steins was closed up to renovate and reopen as a “food hall” concept, but all the super delicious food on the original menu is gone, and my tongue weeps in gustatory grief.

I was going to include Smash Burger in this list, because the one in Oakland Park closed, but I was delighted to find this chain is alive and well in Central Florida.  Smash is one of my top-five favorite burgers, although my brother doesn’t like it so much.

So many of my memories are about food, now that I think about it.  My mental map of my adopted German hometown Regensburg is marked almost entirely by where the food is.    And then there’s the Navajo.

The Navajo sandwich was a Cheesecake Factory staple for years-  chicken, avocado, lettuce, tomato, red onion, and a dash of mayonnaise served on this delicious thick sourdough bread, and I would order it more than any other thing in the restaurant.  When I came back from Germany, the Navajo was nowhere to be found.  Gone from the menu, without a trace.    A Google search shows that I am not the only person who laments its absence from the menu.  Someone even set up a Twitter account as the sandwich looking for work, but even that faded out after 2013.

Damn, now I’m hungry.

What thing do you miss that is gone from your past?

A silly post about my t-shirts.

On By StevenIn Life At Home8 Comments

I’m pretty sure that nobody else is going to be even remotely interested in this post, but I’m trying this new thing where I actually put stuff in my blog more than once every two months, so I’m talking about whatever random weird thing is on my mind.  Right now, that thing is t-shirts.

I wear a lot of t-shirts. I always have. While going through my old LiveJournal, I found a post from ten years ago in which I was thinking about my t-shirt collection.

This was my shirts in January of 2007

This made me curious.  I know that the predominant color in my wardrobe was black for a long time, but it’s been ten years since that last count.  I’ve mellowed a bit, and I’m less interested in wearing all black all the time.  Naturally, I was curious to see how the colors had shifted in the last ten years.  To sate my curiosity, I waited for laundry day.  Once everything was clean and hung up, I took a new census.

The result?  I’ve got less than half the white shirts that I had ten years ago, and less than half the black shirts as well.  Almost every other color has a bigger part in my wardrobe than what 34 year old Steven would have worn.  Except that one purple shirt.  I haven’t seen that thing in at least a decade.  Truth be told, I’m pretty astonished even now that I had eighteen white t-shirts back then.

I am very fond of blue shirts, apparently.

January 2007 October 2017
White or off-white: 18 8
Green: 4 4
Brown: 3 4
Yellow, Orange, Gold: 1 2
Blue: 3 15
Red or Maroon: 1 3
Purple: 1 0
Grey: 2 6
Black: 36 15
Long Sleeved Black: 7 4
Note: The 2017 column doesn’t include the seven shirts that I designated as “just for the gym.” I keep those separate.

Another thing which is interesting to me, but probably not to anyone else:  In 2007, I had 69 short sleeved shirts and seven long sleeved.  Now I have 57 short sleeved, and four long sleeved.  I feel like I have way more shirts than I did before, even though it’s actually a smaller number.  I wonder why that is.

I’ve also changed my shirt-keeping system over the years-  I kept the shirts folded in a drawer (or, more accurately, a couple of drawers) for years, but Amelie has converted me to the ways of fuzzy hangers.  It’s a lot easier to see ’em all now.

This leads to a fun little aside-  in order to better randomize my shirt-wearing,  I play a little game with Amelie. I count off the shirts from front to center and back to center, and then decide which side will be “heads” and which will be “tails.  Next, I  ask Amelie to choose heads or tails and a number which varies depending on how many shirts are in the laundry hamper already.  It’s usually around 20-23, though.

Much like the shuffle player on iTunes, this “random selection” tends to bring up certain things more frequently than others.    I suspect that probability is warped where funny t-shirts are concerned.

My shirts, resting in their natural habitat.

What color is your favorite t-shirt?

 

[Ancient Repost] The most dangerous item in the drug store.

On By StevenIn Life At Home3 Comments

I’ve been clearing out an ancient LiveJournal in preparation for deleting the account. While most of the stuff there is utter fluff, a tiny portion of the posts are worth preserving. What follows is one such post. The original was written in April of 2011.

Some time in the past, on an otherwise nondescript day, I was standing in the family planning section of the local Walgreens. I was looking to purchase condoms, because while I’m sterile, I’m not stupid.

The condom section, however, makes me feel stupid. Very, very stupid.

There is far too much variety, you see- there’s latex and lambskin and polyurethane and polyisoprene. There’s regular, large, and magnum. There’s lubricated, non-lubricated, with spermicidal lubricant, with or without a receptacle tip, ribbed for her pleasure, and spiraled for his. There are, and I’m not making this up, currently eighty-three (83) separate varieties of condoms on sale at Walgreens. As if that’s not complicated enough, you also have to figure out which boxes don’t contain condoms at all, but rather contain vibrators of various sizes and shapes.

The reason I bring this up is that there are so many varieties in so many brightly colored boxes that I was standing in front of the row reading boxes and trying to make sense of it for quite some time. After a while, just after I’d picked up a large box of Lifestyles, a small voice said, “Are you ok?”

The source of the voice was a small girl, about five or six years old. Parents nowhere in sight, although we were about twenty feet from the waiting area for the pharmacy, so I’m sure they were over there. I said something in the general vicinity of “yes, I’m ok,” and then she started to ask other questions.

Anyone who’s ever seen me with a very, very small child knows that I can only parse and understand about fourteen percent of what they say. I never developed the little C3PO kid-translation circuit that most grown-ups seem to have, so I have absolutely no idea what she was asking next.

Since I had no clue what the questions were about, I just did a lot of smiling and nodding and hoping that she would go away. After a moment, she said something which seemed like she was about to get her parents to help me- I’m still not sure why, and she toddled off toward the pharmacy to get their attention. I did not at all feel like explaining to another grown human being why I was conversing with a very small female child in the condom aisle of all places. It was at this moment that I did what any other sane human being would do.

I ran.

I ran to the opposite end of the aisle and stood with my back to the “As Seen On TV” end-cap, so that the little kid wouldn’t be able to spot me. I peered around the corner, just to make sure I wasn’t within line of sight of the kid, and then I briskly walked to the front registers, paid for my purchase, and got the hell out of there. I did manage to buy a box of condoms, but I didn’t know until I got home which type I picked up. That sort of thing happened to me the last time I bought condoms, too.

I have this horrible notion that one day, I’m going to have some sort of a heart attack or stroke during one of these rubber-purchasing events, and when they cart off my body, they’ll have to pry the box of rubbers out of my cold dead hands and explain to my family that I appear to have died over the most stressful and dangerous of all of Walgreens’ inventory, the birth control.

So stressful!