Kool-Aid Day

Posted on August 15, 2025 by arwenbicknell

It’s probably an exaggeration to say I never had this stuff growing up, but not by much. I am reasonably sure that my mother literally never bought that stuff; any flavored sugar drink money was reserved for something that would mix better with rum. (It is probably just as well she didn’t buy it. Knowing her, she would have skimped on sugar to save money and I wouldn’t have drank it anyway.)

We also didn’t have a TV for about 8 years when I was growing up, so I was not haunted by nightmares of a giant glass pitcher come to life and busting down my bedroom wall.

Unlike many things tied to growing up semi-poor, this was one product I didn’t covet or whine for. If I was going to beg for something in a foil packet, I would angle for Pop Rocks. I don’t even remember drinking this stuff much at friends’ houses. What was I drinking? Milk, I guess. I drank a ton of that stuff growing up. Still love it.

My strongest tie to Kool-Aid was probably an admonition not to drink it, thanks to Jonestown happening when I was in second grade—although, as the marketers will rush to tell you, they didn’t even drink Kool-Aid there; it was Flavor Aid. (Testimony conflicts on the veracity of this.)

Later in life, I’d associate the drink with Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and the Merry Pranksters. In college, I dropped my fair share of acid, but Kool Aid was never a delivery system.

My husband did grow up in a household with Kool-Aid, but he was not impressed either. “It’s what you drank when there was no Pepsi,” was his assessment. So when we had a kid, he didn’t get much Kool-Aid either. He mostly grew up on juice boxes and bottled water, but he insists that he had Kool-Aid in pouches on an infrequent basis. Way bigger trash footprint.

Some other details I found for this post: The brand came into being in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1927, where they still have a party every year. It is Nebraska’s official soft drink. The brand was sold to General Foods in 1953.  

The powder stains, so it can be used as a dye. (This might have been another deterrent to me getting any as a kid, although now I kinda want to see what it does to my hair…)

There’s a collector’s market for vintage Kool-Aid packets; eBay was a fun rabbit hole to go down: sellers of packets from the 1970s are asking $15-20 for some envelopes. Once upon a time, there wouldn’t have been much to collect: Only six flavors were sold originally. That number is above 20 today.

Did you grow up drinking this stuff? Tell me your memories!

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Navajo Code Talkers Day

Posted on August 14, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Let’s face it, codes are fun. It’s fun to have a secret language, it’s fun (up to a point) to try to decipher someone else’s secret language. One of my favorite stories along these lines involves some good family friends—my dad gave a book about hieroglyphs to one of the kids when she was 9 or 10, and she ran with it—used it to pass notes in class, and then was more than happy to hand over the paper when she got caught and the teacher announced she would read whatever it said to the whole class. Obviously, that did not happen.

But codes aren’t all fun and games, obviously. There’s Samuel Morse. Alan Turing.

And then there are the Navajo Code Talkers.

Surely anyone who has stumbled over here already knows these guys were United States service members during both World Wars who used Native American languages to transmit secret messages.

Some details: Approximately 400 to 500 Native American Marines transmitted messages over military telephone or radio using codes built from their indigenous languages. The code talkers and are credited with some decisive victories, and their code was never broken. Several tribes were involved, but the Navajo (Diné) were probably the most famous group, working in the Pacific theater during World War II, taking part in every assault the US Marines conducted there from 1942 to 1945..

Two code types involving Native American languages were used during World War II. One was a formal, structured thing using Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, and Navajo words for each letter of the English alphabet. The other code was informal and just flipped English into the indigenous language. Wikipedia notes that short, descriptive phrases sometimes had to be subbed in for military words and gives the example of “iron fish” for “submarine.”

Sorta like the Buffalo Soldiers before them, a lot of these guys joined the military—in World War I, particularly, to gain respect or improve circumstances for themselves and their families. I’m not sure how great they thought the Argonne Forest was when they got there, and I couldn’t find any record of whether their lives changed dramatically if they made it home and got discharged.

If you’re looking for a movie about these guys, you’re pretty much out of luck unless you stick with documentaries. There is a Nic Cage movie set in World War II that’s about them, but you have to squint to see them. It’s more about guys assigned to protect the code talkers. I recommend avoiding this mess, unless you’re looking for something to make fun of and be annoyed by—it’s also a real downer and pretty badly executed. That’s too bad, because—again, like the Buffalo Soldiers—there are some great stories that could be told here. C’mon Hollywood. Let’s get on these things!

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Filet Mignon Day

Posted on August 13, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Translated literally, this phrase means “delicate fillet” or “cute fillet.” I can’t say I’ve ever thought of a steak as cute, but I guess if you’re gonna use that label, this is the cut that deserves it.

(I have a vague memory of a literary character or maybe a literary character’s pet being named Mignon, but the details are escaping me. It wasn’t Goethe, which seems to be all that Google will dredge up.)

Back to food. If you order this in France, you won’t get beef; you’ll get pork, though it will still be the tenderloin portion. (To get the beef version there you’d ask for “tournedo,” which you have likely seen on some fancy menu here in the backwoods. How did this disconnect occur? It’s unclear, but it seems that the generally accepted answer was that beef was simply more prevalent in the U.S., and chefs were trying to move product so they started using the label for the wrong animal.

Sort of like the Royale with Cheese, the name is incidental. This stuff rocks.

That said, I don’t know the first thing about making it taste good, so I consulted the expert, and here’s what he had to say:

When my lovely bride asked me to write a 250-word treatise on how to grill a good filet mignon, I told her I could do it in three.

Buy good steak.

But I couldn’t get away with that. It’s necessary, but not sufficient, I was told.

So here’s what I can tell you.

Buy good steak.

If you can avoid it, don’t freeze it. But if you have to freeze it, it’s not a huge deal. Just thaw it in the fridge then get it close to room temperature before you grill.

Some people don’t season their steaks. That’s OK. I don’t like sauces. I argue that a good steak doesn’t need a sauce. It’s just as valid to argue that a good steak doesn’t need seasoning.

But if you do season …

Season the steak a few hours before you’re ready to grill. That will enhance the flavor.

Seasoning, like pizza, is largely a matter of personal taste. I use Lawry’s seasoned salt, pepper, and onion powder. Your mileage may vary.

Use charcoal. It’s better than gas. And don’t spread the charcoal all the way across. Leave at least a third of the grill plate uncovered.

Let the charcoal get white hot. Put the steaks directly above the charcoal. Close the lid.

How long to cook depends on how you like your steak and how thick it is.

So, figure that timing out, and allow for about half that time to be spent off the direct heat.

I’m a medium-well guy, so I’ll cook a fairly thick filet for about seven minutes on one side, turn it, another seven minutes, then I’ll move it off the direct heat and turn it one more time. This can take anywhere from 6-10 minutes, again depending on how you like your steak and the thickness. If you like ‘em rare, it might not need any indirect heat at all.

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Baseball Fans Day

Posted on August 12, 2025 by arwenbicknell

As someone who got married at a baseball game, I feel like I can stake a small claim to this label.

Only a small one, though. When I was a kid, the only sport anyone in my family watched was college football, and even that was sporadic since we didn’t have a TV for a long time. Nobody ever took me to ball games, and the only reason my family saw to listen to them on the radio was for Vin Scully’s voice and expertise—and then we moved to Illinois. I played softball there, but still didn’t watch other people play. My dad was a baseball duffer; I think maybe he liked the Cubs as a kid and got disillusioned. Florida didn’t have a ball team when we lived there, so it wasn’t until I got to college and back into Dodger territory that I picked up on it as a spectator sport. I went to a lot of games in my 20s but I confess the main attraction was to see who could win our Beer an Inning contests. (Paradoxically, the winner generally felt lousy the next day and the loser drove everyone home—hey, I never said I was a role model.) When my parents also moved back to California, my dad would take me to the occasional Angels game, so they became my team. Then I had a roommate for a while who worked in the sports department at the same paper as I did and was pretty into the game, so I got a lot more knowledgeable really fast.

This worked out well for me when I moved back to Florida. The (then Devil) Rays were in their first season, and I dragged a friend of mine with me to a game before I’d even moved into my house. It was the first indoor game I’d ever been to, and I was delighted by the air conditioning until I realized that I needed a sweatshirt in the third inning.

I didn’t realize that night that I would be going to a LOT more games at Tropicana Field. See, I met this guy with season tickets … and the rest is history.

So yes, the real fan is my husband. His loyalties are to the Red Sox. I joined that cult in exchange for him joining the USC football cult. But his love of the sport goes deeper. He watches any game that’s on. He sees things I can’t. He can rattle off stats like a mad man and trace the history of bad umpiring from Higham to Hernandez.

When we took the kid to see the first Captain America movie in 2011, there’s a scene at the end (c’mon, it was almost 15 years ago, I’m not spoiling anything) where Cap realizes the seemingly safe hospital he’s in is a sham because he recognizes the ballgame airing “live” on the radio is one he’d attended in 1941. It is a testament to my husband that our 8-year-old son didn’t bat an eye at that. Of course this man would remember every play of a game he’d attended several years ago; doesn’t everyone’s dad do that? No? Omigod, Dad is Captain America! (Captain America is, in fact, Dad’s favorite superhero, but the baseball thing is not why. It’s the squeaky clean patriot aspect.)

In Diner, another of my husband’s favorite movies, one character is a rabid football fan who refuses to get married if his bride-to-be doesn’t pass a rigorous test about the Baltimore Colts. I am fortunate that my husband did not subject me to this (for any sport, including USC football); I would have failed miserably. The only bit of bar bet trivia he ever made me remember was that Warren Spahn was the winningest left-handed pitcher (and still is, so it’s nice that he gave me one that holds up) with 363, which was also the number of his career hits.

But we did get married at an Angels-Yankees game. We (usually) celebrate our anniversary at a game. Opening Day is our version of a religious holiday, although we have decided that the Midwest is not a good place for this and now these observances also require pilgrimages to places where it is warm or domed or both.

I don’t know if you can be a real fan without that instant recall of both lineups in the 1967 World Series (a truly problematic year for my husband, who grew up in a house full of Cards fans).  I’m getting better at it, but I don’t think I’ll ever really qualify. I’ll just keep celebrating.

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Kinetic Sand Day

Posted on August 11, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I did not know until I began working on this post that Kinetic Sand is a brand name. Apparently it was developed by a Swedish arts and crafts company and has a proprietary formula. Other companies have developed knockoffs; I’m pretty sure the stuff my kid played with came from Canada.

If you have never had the joy of messing with this compound, it’s basically sand that feels wet and never dries out. It’s like futuristic PlayDoh; it comes in brilliant colors and you can mush it into all kinds of shapes and it doesn’t fall apart. For better or worse, it does not have that distinct PlayDoh smell, but you can get it in fruity scents to match the colors.

Kinetic Sand is a big hit with the preschool crowd and caretakers. It’s versatile, it’s not messy, and it lasts forever. All that squishing and squeezing strengthens hand muscles and improves fine motor skills. It has also been pressed into use (haha, get it?) as a therapy device; apparently its tactile nature and versatility have a soothing nature that helps manage anxiety.

In essence, kinetic sand is the opposite of polymeric sand, which is supposed to harden and form a weed resistant barrier in the cracks between pavement or other landscaping stones. I spent all last summer pouring and pounding that stuff all over my patio and firepit. (I failed, apparently. There are still weeds galore out there.) Polymeric sand is not half as much fun as Kinetic. Maybe next summer I’ll see how that stuff works instead; at least playing with it will be more entertaining!

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Lazy Day

Posted on August 10, 2025 by arwenbicknell

What a lovely excuse to sit around and do nothing! As if I needed an excuse these days. I spend a lot of time sitting around thinking about what I should be doing and then not doing it. That’s, what, half-lazy, at least, right?

Sundays, however, are usually not those days. I am usually at my mom’s on Sundays, and she is the antithesis to lazy. Sitting at the table and not eating? Here, fold some towels or read this article aloud. You’re awake and alert? Time to change the sheets, wash some dishes, vacuum up some dog hair, dust some furniture, rearrange some shelves, pull some weeds, mow the yard. No sitting down til all that is done.

Then, of course, it is happy hour and nobody gets up for hours except to refill a glass.

However long your Lazy Day might last, I hope you enjoy it!

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Book Lover’s Day

Posted on August 9, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I say this a lot, but so many of these days I’ve written about feel to me like they are just “Saturday” (or whatever day it is).  This is another one. One day to celebrate books and book lovers? Ridiculous!

Honestly, I think what we really need is a Book Conversion Day, where nonreaders are required to plonk down and absorb some pages of their choice. Who knows what kind of magic might arise from the confluence of literature and the nonliterary-minded? Society could benefit!

One of the funnier moments on my last book publication pimping effort was when I was sitting in a local bookstore and a guy came up and asked me what the book was about. After I told him and he got very engaged in my story, he goes, “But I dunno. I’m not much of a reader,” and after another few exchanges where I suggested short chapters or reading in the bathroom, he wandered off. All I could think was, Sir, why are you even in a bookstore? 

So maybe Book Conversion Day would be too much like forced labor and have a detrimental effect. Book Lovers it is, then.

One of the ways the experts suggest celebrating this day is to visit your local library. I endorse this. Another way is to “record a video of you reading a story for a child in your life.” I don’t know why we need a video of that. It feels like that is defeating the purpose. Just FaceTime them, or go to their house, or whatever.

The final suggestion is to randomly give a book to someone. I will do that one. Y’all better watch out! Incoming!

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Wear Your Mother’s Jewelry Day

Posted on August 8, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I’ve already written the saga of my mother’s emerald ring (https://arwenbicknell.com/2025/03/14/write-down-your-story-day/), but I could never wear her rings. She has lovely, long, thin fingers, and her rings did not fit on my sausages even when I was in high school.

That did not stop me from coveting everything else, though. She had amazing turquoise earrings. She had tons and tons of malachite—necklaces, bracelets, whole sets. She had cheap stuff I bought her for birthdays and Christmas because I thought it was pretty; she had expensive stuff my dad bought her for the same occasions.

And she NEVER WORE ANY OF IT.

OK, “never” is an exaggeration, but my mom was (and is) very much a T-shirt and jeans type. She’d wear ornaments to parties and fancy restaurants, but that was about it. Earrings were just a good way to get your ear ripped off. Bracelets tended to get in the way. She’s like me and sweats a lot, and necklaces “just get gross too fast on the back of my neck.”

On the one hand, this made me mad. All that lovely stuff, and the thing she wore most (again, mostly out to dinner) was a necklace with a dog pendant my dad found somewhere.

On the other hand, I saw her point (or maybe I just developed the same lazy habits) as I got older. My fingers started to puff up and deflate, changing size from day to day, so rings were not the constant they had been in college. Earrings left when I had a baby, and their return was an intermittent afterthought. Necklaces never landed right with any neckline I wore. It was too much effort.

So it was a pointless victory when last summer my mom and I were putting clean sheets on her bed and she started poking through her jewelry boxes and gave me everything I’d ever wanted.

Those turquoise earrings? They are HEAVY. The bracelets catch on sweaters. All the junk I bought her will turn you green, and not with envy.

But oh, I do still love her malachite!

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Lighthouse Day

Posted on August 7, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I absolutely love these structures. When we drove from Virginia to Maine, I took photos of every one that I saw. Every time we went to Chincoteague, part of the Assateague party always involved a visit to that lighthouse. When we went to the Outer Banks, I made my family climb all five of them.

Some people my age apparently first encountered lighthouses via Helen Reddy in Pete’s Dragon. I don’t think I ever saw the movie, but I had the soundtrack, and Candle on the Water was a favorite—not because it was about lighthouses but because my mother absolutely detested Helen Reddy and would howl in agony from any room in the house when I would play it on my tiny and tinny record player in my bedroom. 

I guess maybe a new generation learned about lighthouses from the 2016 remake of this movie, which I know absolutely nothing about aside from its existence. I assume the dragon is CGI instead of a cartoon—and I think it is not a musical, maybe? But it has my celluloid boyfriend Karl Urban in it, so maybe I should give it a shot.

There weren’t any lighthouses along the particular shorelines of Malibu where I was taken as a kid. I would guess the first lighthouse I ever saw was on a trip to Catalina, and since we were only there to have lunch, I only saw it from a distance. Then we moved to Illinois, where there were no lighthouses along the Mississippi River, and to Florida, where there were no lighthouses dotting any of the bay beaches I frequented.

So the first lighthouse that really penetrated my consciousness wasn’t a real lighthouse at all. It was Lions Lighthouse in Long Beach, where my USC friend Sharidan took me one time when we were probably supposed to be in class. Lions Lighthouse is a decorative thing put up by the Lions Club to advertise their services to blind people. The memorable part of this is that Sharidan had the presence of mind to play the Clockwork Orange soundtrack on this jaunt, specifically for the song “I Wanna Marry a Lighthouse Keeper.” The song stuck with me—to such a degree it was one that my kid learned to sing as a wee sprout (and was horrified to learn its movie association decades later).

It wasn’t really until that trip to Maine that I saw enough of them to get interested. Then I read Brilliant Beacons and a couple other books and learned about braziers and Fresnel lenses and how the romantic lighthouse keeper of old has largely been replaced by automation and specialized contractors. (The last lighthouse keeper, Sally Snowman, retired in 2023.) It’s nice to know that even in a world with GPS and LEDs, lighthouses are still useful and serving a purpose.

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Engineer Day

Posted on August 6, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Today celebrates licensed professional engineers, commemorating the anniversary of the first professional engineering license issued in the United States to Charles Bellamy on August 8, 1907.

I don’t actually know how many licensed PEs I’ve known. I’m not even sure I understand fully what this license means, except that it’s needed for civil and structural engineering and for working on public projects like roads and buildings, presumably so that you don’t (intentionally or otherwise) design a bridge to collapse after the millionth car goes over it.

I have a soft spot for engineers in general. I also stereotype the hell out of them because in my experience, they are an odd bunch. They’re not all odd in the same way, but every one I’ve ever met definitely looked at the world in a way totally foreign to the way my brain works. Not that I hobnob with gazillions of engineers, mind you. Maybe ten. So this is a very small sample, not to be trusted any more than anything else I say.

Anyway. Yes. All the engineers I’ve known: odd. And that’s an absolutely delightful thing. So much better than my own boring and bovine conventional acceptance of things.

My grandfather was a mechanical engineer and his view of life was almost maddeningly practical. If the math was there, the thing was doable. Didn’t matter if the flesh was weak. He softened a bit on this as he (or maybe as I) got older, but it never went away entirely.

He was also of an ilk that I came to classify as “wordy engineers.” These guys read a lot and have interests beyond their particular corner of the world and are happy to engage with you on pretty much any topic, although they might tell you in blunt terms all the ways that you’re wrong. A lot of history buffs. A few mystery or political thriller aficionados. Big sports fans, by and large.

When I was in college, I dated a chemical engineering major for about five minutes. He was a “nonwordy engineer.” He didn’t watch TV, he didn’t listen to music. Most of what he read was mathy in nature—but to be fair, he was carrying a math-heavy class load. We went to a couple movies and usually he’d have checked out from the story by the time the title card had faded from the screen. I asked him a couple times what he was thinking about instead, and the answers were variations on the theme of “they showed the steam blowing off that locomotive  and I was wondering how much a titanium train would cost to develop.”

You see? Odd. Sometimes fun, 100-percent interesting, but generally odd.

The other defining characteristic (stereotype) is something my mom used to call “engineer brain,” which was a sort of euphemism for “socially inept.” Again, the root is similar, but the symptoms vary. Most of the engineers I’ve known were either wildly impatient and brusque or incredibly tranquil and courteous, but there was always a moment of disconnect somewhere along the way. One friend of mine would be rolling along in a conversation and then say something so incomprehensible that I’d wonder if he’d had a stroke, but no, it was just some 27-chess-move leap of logic that I hadn’t followed. Another guy I knew was incredibly kind and solicitous but had zero idea that his friendly overtures led more than one woman to think he was madly in love with them rather than just achingly polite—and he was even more oblivious when they were clearly going ga-ga for him in return. A friend of my grandfather’s was notorious for sitting in on conversations and delivering blistering ripostes—20 minutes later, and after the conversation had changed topic at least three times. My grandfather never figured out if the rest of the world was too fast for him and he couldn’t keep up or if the world was too slow so he’d think of his answer and then wander off on his own and process about 20 other things before circling around and the words left his mouth.

But, see, without these guys, you wouldn’t have trains, titanium or otherwise. Or bridges that don’t collapse. Or sewer systems or rocket ships or pretty much anything you can think of. An odd way of looking at the world leads to creative solutions and new approaches. Hug an engineer! They might freak out, but something new and exciting might come of it!

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