Once inside, he would reach into a can of oats and pennies, while shouting "Happy New Year!"
I must admit, on its own this does not sound terribly dramatic.
1: Drat you. I caught that mistake only after publishing (and have since fixed it).
I think that you also misspelled "penises".
We (which is to say Blume) made black-eyed peas cooked in pork, a tradition which has perhaps mutated from its sephardic roots.
If someone came and threw a bunch of oats in my house, I'd probably actually vacuum. The carpet is brown, so I can't ever tell if it needs vacuuming. Which it probably does, even right now.
This happened to the same people more than once?
If you didn't let them in, Polish tradition called for keying of the car.
We took the oysters we had left after we got tired of shucking last night and made oyster pan roast sliders for lunch today, which I could totally get behind as an annual tradition.
My wife's family always eats pork on New Years Day. I always eat pork, so it wasn't a problem. She bought black-eyed peas, but never cooked them.
9: If you have a lot of clothes to try on, you can always shuck between fits.
I had dim sum for brunch. Now I should track down some black-eyed peas or hoppin' john.
Nestled gently within a mountain of pork.
Attached to the DoD appropriation bill.
18: I was up your side of the river to look at the Christmas light show. Nothing like driving past 3.2 miles of lights so slowly your speedometer needle never moves high enough to reach the lowest number on the dial.
19: Never been. went to a New Year's Eve party at someone who lives very close by, so took a back route to their house, but turned out it was light traffic anyway (maybe it wasn't even open). It's a nice park when the freaking lights aren't there. Will try to setup a free summer concert meetup if there's an appropriate one.
As long as there are no blinking lights.
Speaking of marking the passage of time, this kind of thing is a really good example of how thinking too hard is self-punishing.
22 is interesting. I'd say it's pretty clear that the inconvenience of changing the world's whole timekeeping system is likely to vastly outweigh the small inefficiencies inherent in the current system.
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I take it Becks has good news to report.
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23: What really irks them is the current calendar makes it hard to calculate interest.
25: My understanding is that the banks actually use that as another way to subtly screw over their customers. Also it's not actually that hard now that they have computers, but they've retained the old customer-screwing techniques anyway because they're profitable. So yeah, I'm not imagining that the banks are really clamoring for a more rational calendar.
Why not the Eastman calendar?
We also had black-eyed peas and greens today, though the pork was really more of a flavoring in my version (chunk of salt pork).
The pork was actually a flavoring in our version, too. Nosflow caught me in an inapt phrasing.
27: The linked article links to a Cato Institute paper what goes into more detail. That says, "Eastman's effort at calendar reform failed because his proposed calendar did not respect the Sabbath." I assume it really failed for reasons aptly summarized in 23.
I like oatmeal quite a bit but I cannot say that it has ever occurred to me that having it thrown at me would bring, or constitute, good fortune.
I used to hate New Year's Day when I was kid. Such a grim mockery of the Christmas Day that had occurred just a week earlier. We'd go to Mass in the morning (it was a holy day of obligation, of course), and then receive visits from relatives and etc., and then sit down to a big meal at about 3 pm. It was all just like Christmas, except that it wasn't, wasn't at all, and therein lay the sadness.
The New Years Day meal was the final insult: it was the same damn menu that we'd enjoyed just seven days earlier (turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, and etc.), now just mocking us. Because: no presents, and no Santa Claus, and the tree about to come down (well, maybe kept up until the 6th, but who the hell cares about the epiphany, I mean, c'mon, let's be honest here?), and another whole year to wait for the really good stuff, but you're supposed to pretend that this afterthought is almost as good, which it never is, never was.
When my dad was a kid, he had a tall, dark-haired cousin who used to 'first-foot' their home on New Year's Eve, his name was Ed and his father came from Co. Kilkenny, and he worked for the pulp-and-paper factory across the river in Hull (now Ville de Gatineau). But we didn't even have Ed, who died a year before I was born.
who the hell cares about the epiphany, I mean, c'mon, let's be honest here?
The Spanish love it.
I considered posting an account in comments here of how my NYE ended up going, but I decided it made more sense to put it on my largely dormant personal blog, so here it is.
I had time to eat hopping John before I went to the hospital, along with greens and cornbread, so I'm covered...
I already hate 2012, since I know this is the year my father will leave us, or will be taken from us, or will just die, to put it bluntly. A few weeks ago (still in 2011, actually), a medical oncologist gave him about three months without chemo, with perhaps months ("but not years") to be gained from chemo, except that he's already on dialysis, and probably can't take too much chemo.
He spoke to me quite candidly of his prognosis at Christmas; and then called for music at every turn ("well, why not a bit of song? when we're just sitting here like bumps on a log..."). Me and my sisters sang Farewell to Nova Scotia and The Wild Colonial Boy and When the Shanty Boy Comes Down. I got a bit choked up with "An old man said to me, won't see another one" (Fairytale of New York), but I got it together to sing the chorus to Siúil a Rúin. Remember Da playing his fiddle when I was 3 or 4 years old, and my uncles Michael and Orville and Gerry teaching me the words to those songs. It is all over before you know it, which still comes as a surprise to, well, you, me, and everyone: and it is later than you think.
37: Really sorry to hear that. Best wishes to you and your family. Speaking as someone who's been through that ordeal (more or less exactly), it's rough on everyone, but it's hard to say in advance exactly how rough it'll be.
so sorry zoé. my thoughts are with you. it's bullshit for people who haven't been there to say "oh, at least you'll watch him suffer," but nonetheless, at least you get the chance to love him up extra while you've got him. just makes me think of how we don't have any tapes of my dad playing guitar; I'd be gut-shot if I thought I'd never hear that music again. really, so sorry.
it's bullshit for people who haven't been there to say "oh, at least you'll watch him suffer," but nonetheless, at least you get the chance to love him up extra while you've got him.
I wouldn't say it's bullshit. These things really do vary a lot, and it's not necessarily the case that a given person in that situation will be in agonizing pain the whole time. My dad had his ups and downs, but I don't think he was really suffering intensely and continuously until the very end, i.e., the last day or two. We had plenty of time to enjoy his company even while knowing on some level that it wasn't going to last forever.
Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.
Sorry, Zoé. There's not much upside to helping somebody close to you die, but try to enjoy his company as best you can. And always remember that it's going to be exhausting for you and the rest of your family too. Cut yourself and each other some slack.
42: Yes, exhausting, and the emotional swings can be astoundingly rapid and large. Or not. I'm not sure there is a right way to go through this sort of thing tho' it's probably good to be extra careful about driving.