Mild Amusement

As the pandemic has worn on, life has adjusted to what is effectively our new normal. I've mentioned a few of these things on this very blog, as my diet , my pastimes , and even my driving habits have changed as we've all had to adjust to circumstances. We are very fortunate so I'm not complaining, but every now and then, I am reminded that life looks different than it did nine months ago. And every now and then, one of those changes makes me laugh. You see, the Mild Wife and I have focused a lot more time on stuff around the house. Like I said, the pandemic has forced some changes in our routine. It hasn't felt burdensome or anything, but it's just different. We cook more because we can't exactly go out to eat all the time. We spend more time at home, so we try to keep our living space tidy and organized. Heck, I started brewing kombucha because we wanted that particular creature comfort at home. As our attention has shifted, though, the Mild Wife and I have ...

Recently, a friend I haven't heard from in a while mentioned that he's found a new pastime during the Coronavirus pandemic. I can't exactly fault him, since I've taken up brewing kombucha during my time. We're all doing things a little bit differently these days, you know? So, what was this new hobby? A virtual version of the Telestrations game, played among a group of folks he knew. Now, if you're like me and you've never heard of this game before, it's based on the Telephone game that people often played as kids. If you're unfamiliar with that  game as well, the basic premise is that no one can repeat a phrase with 100% accuracy. So, you get a string of people, and you have each of them whisper a phrase to the person next to them. More often than not, the phrase will be transformed in unexpected ways because someone in the chain will have added a slight tweak, and those tweaks add up over the length of the chain. Eventually, the phrase becomes s...

Over the years, I have mentioned once or twice that I speak more than one language . That's just a circumstance of who my parents are, but it's one of those things that I am quite grateful for. There have been times when I have been able to switch languages in order to communicate with folks, and even times when my use of words in other languages has led to much laughter . All in all, it's a good thing. Now, there are certain things about switching between languages or being bilingual that bring up unique bits of fun. There's a reason why "Spanglish" is a common enough word that you can find all search of articles and Google hits for it (seriously, try Googling "Spanglish"). Heck, it even has its own Wikipedia page . You know it's a real thing if it's managed to make its way onto Wikipedia and stay there. This also means that when one of us bilingual folks finds another one, it leads to all sorts of extra hilarity that we can talk about. It...

As the Mild Wife and I have found ourselves with more time in the house on our hands, one of the simplest ways to solve this problem has been to watch some Netflix together. To a certain extent, this has already been part of our lives, since I will pick code words to describe movies to the Mild Wife. Still, with the advent of more time on our hands, we have found ourselves picking a long-running show and watching an episode or two every day. Now, it sometimes takes a little bit of time to settle on a show that we like, since we prefer to watch it for weeks and months at a time. So, not only does it have to grab our attention and hold it for the majority of a season, it has to have some staying power. Plenty of shows are entertaining for a little while and then sort of trail off, so it takes a bit of futzing sometimes to settle on a show. That means that we value staying power and good storylines over how recent the show is, so it's not uncommon for us to pick "new to us"...