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Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

The 2018 Holiday Stroll – Part 2

Saturday opened with a burst of happy sunlight, which unabashedly illuminated the undrained kitchen sink. Our time was too precious to be bothered with a five-hour window for a plumber, so Kira came up with the idea of transferring the dish water to the bathroom for draining. She took a plastic container and scooped the water into a pot. Once it was full, I ran it into the bathroom and poured it down the toilet. Our bucket brigade hummed along for several trips until the sink was mostly drained. Such is the making of a meal in the midst of Mercury in retrograde madness. We had a fast breakfast of panettone and tea, then began the stroll in earnest.

We began with a route from an earlier stroll, turning right onto Columbus and stopping at the Luke Adams gift shop, which was still closed. Apparently we were just a bit too early for its 10:30 opening, so we walked on and headed up Mass Ave. Kira loves Dorothy’s Boutique, so we paused in the costume store where she found a cozy winter hat in the style of Elmer Fudd. I told her not to do it, but when you’ve known me for twenty years you know enough not to listen.

As we crossed Boylston, the wind picked up. In spite of the sun, December’s chill was in full effect. We ducked into Muji for a moment of sweetly-scented calm, before braving the frenzy of Forever 21. (Where else can one find a unicorn headdress for a Rainbow Unicorn Holiday Party that we’re hosting in a few weeks?) Kira found a top (to make up for some items she forgot to bring) at Uniqlo, where we walked the rainbow staircase and realized it would soon be time for a proper meal. After browsing a few more stores, we took our lunch at Cafeteria. Like Sonsie’s, Cafeteria has become one of those Newbury mainstays that I have largely avoided, for no real reason other than I assume there will be time to visit in the future. On this day, we tried it out for the first time. The drinks were good, but the bacon was soggy and flabby, so hit and miss, and it’s now on the record books. We meandered along the rest of Newbury, turned back on Boylston, then headed to the condo for a very quick break before heading into Cambridge.

These little breaks, of rest or rejuvenation, are usually the favored corners of memory, where a few choice relics occupy stately yet subtle space in some cherished cabinet of curios. The sun streamed in through the bedroom bay window, and it was my favorite time of the day to be home there. It was due to rain that night and all the next day, so we stopped and took notice of the light. Always make time to bask in the glory when it’s good enough to present itself.

I tried on my outfit for the Boston Children’s Holiday Hour, glittering in the ample sunlight, while Kira lounged on the couch, resting tired feet and sipping tea. It was the perfect little siesta, and without reservations for dinner, or any concrete plans at all for that matter, we didn’t need to rush. Still, there were dangers and wastes involved in getting too cozy and comfy, so we rounded up a second wind, changed into evening attire, and headed back out, where the sun was already well on its way down.

{To be continued…}

 

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The 2018 Holiday Stroll – Part 1

Kira and I tried to figure out how long we have been doing these Boston Holiday Strolls, and the nearest we could guess was that this marked our seventh year. As such, we tried to change things up a bit which left us feeling slightly off-kilter. Mercury still being in retrograde didn’t help matters much either, as we had to contend with a kitchen sink that didn’t drain, key forgotten wardrobe items (I’m told that when you’re wearing a sheer shirt and no bra, some other sort of undershirt is required), and some uncharacteristic indecision on my part. (See, I’m so much better with an itinerary.)

It began on Friday afternoon, when I did some shopping for the upcoming Children’s Holiday Hour (which now has a planned nine children in attendance, and their various parents). I stopped at the market to pick up the ingredients for a quick pasta dish for Kira, then returned to the condo to finish the holiday decorating and making of a meal.

The candles were lit, and I was hoping to be too. I tried concocting a gin/Campari/grapefruit/rosemary cocktail that was largely a failure, but it looked pretty enough for a holiday picture. Taste-wise, it was a big fat no, thank you Mercury. As the kitchen sink filled with the incidental water from filling pasta pots, washing hands, and rinsing various utensils, dinner came together and by the time Kira arrived we were almost ready to eat. After a quick gift exchange and toast, we sat down to dine and decompress.

Some of the best moments of our Holiday Stroll weekend are the ones in which we are not strolling or roaming around Boston. Catching up with an old friend over dinner, as candles flicker and Christmas music plays softly in the background, will always be one of my favorite holiday escapades. As will our annual viewing of ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner’. Before the latter, we hunkered down in our holiday pajamas, popped a pair of sweet potatoes in the oven for our mid-point movie break (they pause for ‘Hot Sweets’ during the skating scene) and prepared for the show. Sleep came, as it usually does, before we finished the whole thing, but upon waking we saw the happy final scenes, at which point the strolling portion of our weekend finally began.

{To be continued…}

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Tiny Threads: An Insignificant Series

How is it that I can type a perfectly-spelled and perfectly-punctuated text message 200 characters long with my thumb on a screen the size of a walnut, but cannot fit one of these things back in the shelf unit in less than five tries? 

#TinyThreads 

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Pomegranate, Rosemary, Gin and Fizz

A relatively simple cocktail makes its holiday debut, and it’s a little glass of rosemary-tinged juniper glory. At its heart is the blood red fruit of the pomegranate, married to the juniper of gin. Taking the edge off, and imbuing the whole thing with some sparkle is a topping-off of seltzer. The secret ingredient, and the potent punch of this glass is a bit of simple rosemary syrup, made from equal parts water and brown sugar, heated to boiling then imbued with a few fresh sprigs of rosemary for about ten to fifteen minutes. That brown sugar lends it more depth, and rich color, than the usual simple syrup which utilizes plain white sugar. 

The original recipe was found at the Riegl Palate, courtesy of Nicole. I followed it pretty faithfully, choosing a returning Malacca Tanqueray that was said to have notes of cloves, peppercorns and rose. That spicy background works wonders here with the pomegranate juice and rosemary syrup. I might try adding a little Carpano Antica Formula Sweet Vermouth on the next go-round to give it one more layer. The holidays demand a dose of decadence. Topped with some seltzer for fizz, it’s a bright and bubbly jewel of a cocktail, with a surprisingly rich undercurrent that becomes more than the sum of its parts. 

This is one of those cocktails that seems designed to show off its garnish: a sprig of fresh rosemary and a dozen pomegranate seeds which, depending on how much seltzer you add, will rise and fall in a festively mesmerizing dance. 

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Tiny Threads: An Insignificant Series

Remember when your cassettes encountered something magnetic and the next time you played them you were a DJ bringing the volume up and down like the real thing?

#TinyThreads

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Bros Amid the Ho-Ho-Hos

My brother and I will bring the twins to select my parents’ Christmas tree next week. It’s a holiday tradition that goes back to an impromptu trip to Bob’s Tree Farm when I was home from college in the mid-90’s. Somehow, we’ve managed to preserve this rare moment of brotherly bonding, as we wind along the curving roads of Galway in the dark of an almost-winter night. The holidays, at their best, bring out the better sides of brotherhood, and this is one ritual to which I always look forward.

This blog is littered with little recaps and references to our previous tree-seeking trips and the dinners that often follow. One day I’ll do a comprehensive list of links to that; for now, let these scattered highlighted portions offer a few portals to the past.

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Holiday Structure

Every once in a while I’ll miss the carefree days of my retail career, when I first started working at the Faneuil Hall Structure (before it became Express Men or whatever it is these days), and the thrill of earning my own paycheck while doing something I loved was novel and inspiring. By the time the holiday season rolled around, I had made a name for myself in my home store, and the crew we had working then was a good group. I genuinely liked them all, to a person, and they accepted and liked me in return. It took a retail job to finally feel like I belonged somewhere, and that sort of realization cannot and should not be undervalued. It changed my life. But this post will not be going that deep – holidays bring back enough of those memories. No, this post is just a light-hearted memory of what it was like to work in retail during these hectic shopping weeks.

It started on black Friday – and the first time I worked it I stood by the entrance door eagerly awaiting the crush of people. One of the first customers through the door was Nancy Kerrigan. Starstruck (this was only one year after the whole Tonya Harding ordeal), I asked her if she needed help looking for anything. She gave me major stink-eye and attitude, causing me to wonder whether I was Team Tonya after all. I left her alone after that.

There was no mad rush then, not at the start of the day. It came in waves, slowly building until a line snaked through the store and we were just frantically ringing sales instead of trying to sell anything on the floor. For break time, I would go downstairs and into Quincy Market and the long double row of food vendors that was crowded even in non-holiday times. The crush now was even more maddening, but my Structure name badge, indicating that I was working, seemed to give me extra berth. Or maybe it was the annoyed-to-the-point-of-breaking countenance I wore as soon as I exited the sales floor. Whatever the case, I navigated my way through the sea of tourists, picked up a bread bowl of clam chowder, and somehow found a seat in the center atrium section.

The decorations blinked and sparkled, hanging above us and lending light to the darkened reaches of the room. I sat there, alone in a sea of people, perfectly content and happy to be taking it all in from a distance, and this was a change from my usually-anxious appearance. I watched as parents herded their children ahead of them, and husbands wearily followed their wives or vice versa. I listened to their worries and their laughter and their insignificant stories – the stuff we say to those who mean the most to us but who have already heard all the important things. In the maelstrom of this holiday madness, I sat happily dipping into my bread bowl and witnessing the scene around me. It was finally ok. They didn’t bother or annoy me with their holiday sweaters, they didn’t agitate or irk with their petty disagreements – it was all all right because I belonged somewhere, even if it was on the sixth floor of the Limited Building shelling out ties and khakis, and three pairs of socks for ten dollars. That’s the thing about feeling like you belonged somewhere: suddenly you belonged everywhere.

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Tiny Threads: An Insignificant Series

In the immortal words of Miss Janet Jackson:

“Ain’t no acid in this house.”

#RhythmNation1814

#TinyThreads

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How to Translate My Office Email

I saw these posted on FaceBook the other day, which is about the only thing that FaceBook is good for these days. These are translations of typical office email phrases, and I am completely guilty of using these all the time. (I may also have been guilty of using their translations at various points in my state career, but I digress.) Some days I think that working in Human Resources is just one big exercise in not-so-veiled passive-aggression. Emails like these are spot on, and I imagine it’s not only in the realm of HR. 

On a serious note, in case anyone is stumbling upon this looking for real-world advice on how to write an office email, I have a system that works wonders for me. If ever I’m in doubt that one of my messages is too harsh or might be misconstrued (like, all of them) I write everything I want to say in a draft, then minimize it and get up and walk away from the computer. By the time I return, I will re-read it in the most negative way I can muster, and chances are I’ll have to severely edit that shit down into something that won’t result in tears. And I do. That’s how you don’t get fired. Anyway, enjoy these and see if you can relate. 

 

 

 

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Tiny Threads: An Insignificant Series

How come only guys get caught with their zippers down? 

#TinyThreads

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The 1st Recap for Dec. 2018

What a week!

This year’s Holiday Stroll should have concluded last night, but since I write this well in advance, who knows? Mercury is still scheduled to be in retrograde and there’s no telling what went down with Kira. This past week was a doozy – considering it included the release of this year’s incendiary Holiday Card. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back first…

One mean meme.

Finding joy at the utterly inept JoAnn’s Fabric Store.

A Clockwork Cactus.

Hold on for the holidays.

Madonna in motion.

Portal of sunlight, into the past.

Joan Crawford gives us entertaining advice, and I suppose she should know.

November went bye-bye-bye.

A two-part look at Holiday cards from the past: Part One and Part Two.

The Holiday Card 2018.

In the words of songstress Paula Abdul

A few #TinyThreads as we delve into the holiday season.

Hunks of the Day included Omari Hardwick, Arno Diem and KJ Apa.

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C-C-C-Cold Hearted, Ohh Ah, Ahhhhh…

When the rhododendron leaves disappear, curling into themselves for warmth, you know the day is a cold one. The shrubs you see here are actually a miniature version of their more common broader-leafed relative. We used to have one in front of our house, and whenever the temperature dropped well below freezing, this was their disgusted stance. It must be their way of survival, because being a broad-leafed evergreen in this climate zone is no mean feat.

We dug our rhodie out years ago; it simply got too big and unwieldy for its space. I rather naively planted a wedding cake viburnum in its place, which outgrew the area in a few years. Currently there’s a slow-growing umbrella pine in that spot, which looks to remain for the foreseeable future. It’s airy enough to allow for sightlines beyond its elegant whorls, and it too remains evergreen the year round. The neighbors across the street still have a few rhododendron shrubs, so if we need a quick gauge of how cold it is we have only to look up the road and see whether the leaves are in hiding.

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The Holiday Card 2018

I’m not going to explain this year’s Holiday Card. It is, quite simply, a reflection of our country and our world at a dim moment in our history. It is no longer enough to pretend that life is beautiful. It is time to bring the ugly things into the light, to examine and try to understand how we got here. We share this burden, and I hope we share a way out from under it. Let these images remind us of where we came from, of what we once allowed to happen, of what might possibly happen again. In this holiday season, may we find kindness and compassion and a desire to promote good in the world. May we treat each other a little better, may we find common ground, and may we reach an acceptance and reconciliation of our differences. We are all in this together.

“Those who are cannot remember the past…

Are condemned to repeat it.”

~ George Santayana

{The complete ‘PVRTD’ project may be found online on The Projects page.}

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Years and Years of Holiday Cards – Part 2

Continued from the first part, this post will bring us through last year’s Holiday Card before this year’s big reveal tomorrow. While 2010 had a sweet focus, the photo I used for 2011’s card was perhaps the sweetest one I’ve ever done, and was the first, and thus far only, time I’ve appeared with children. My niece and nephew – Emi and Noah – co-starred in this summer shot, as I pulled them along in their Radio Flyer. It personified family fun and was proof that they loved me in spite of my cut-off jeans.

Following a couple years of innocence and sweetness, the tiger in me was ready to unleash a more provocative card for 2012. With Janice Joplin’s classic ‘Piece of My Heart’ as inspiration, I staged this macabre holiday heart scene. I think I loved it most for the fact that I didn’t have to worry about my hair for the first time in forever. It’s the little things that matter. (This was also the first front and back photo card that I produced, and as such I wanted it to be striking.)

Making amends with those who weren’t enthralled with the bloody turn of 2012, I offered this saccharine throwback, which was the easiest card I’ve ever done because it had been created in the early 1980’s and all I had to do was scan the thing in. It’s me and my brother in our sleeper pajamas, gleefully surveying a Christmas morning from our childhood. I miss those pajamas.

From childhood innocence to adult/illegal activity, the Holiday Card from 2014 – aptly entitled ‘Let It Snow!’ – found me sniffing the white stuff (baking soda, if you must know the truth) – and was part of the rollercoaster journey of ‘The Delusional Grandeur Tour: Last Stand of a Rock Star‘, hence the rock-star antics on display. This might have been disliked even more than the torn-out holiday heart card as seen above.

Veering from illicit powder to lumberjack beefcake, the evergreen-backed card from 2015 was a simple and quick one-off shot from our backyard. Fun fact: that ax has never been used to chop wood, nor would I know where to even begin.

Easily my most-hated Holiday Card thus far (though this year may give it a run for its money), my image from 2016 was inspired by the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but nobody seemed to get the baby-in-cheek humor. Hey, child-birth isn’t all rainbows and roses, and the fact that I have to explain this to people is wonky in itself. I happen to love everything about this card, especially the misunderstood reactions and across-the-board refusal of everyone to display it. In all likelihood, it will never be topped.

Finally, we have arrived at last year’s card, which was classy and tasteful and all sorts of tired and dull adjectives. It was shot in the Boston condo, and that’s a real Negroni in the gold-rimmed cocktail glass. I took about fifty photos to get this one – and when I got back to Albany to go over the goods, my fly was down in every single photo. I was going for the profile anyway, and I can finally say that I got my cock out for a Holiday Card. Meant to be.

{Come back here tomorrow for the reveal of this year’s Holiday Card…}

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