Rural Transit Day

Posted on July 16, 2025 by arwenbicknell

There’s a scene in Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan that I always found delightful:

Person A: You never take cabs?

Person B: No, I either walk or take public transportation.

Person A: So you’re one of those public transportation snobs. You look down on people who take taxis.

It’s funny, the things you take for granted depending on where you live. Taxis. GrubHub. More than one dermatologist within 20 miles of your house.

If anything, I’ve spent my life as a private transportation snob. I love my car. I love driving. I love freedom. I hate people who make plans to meet up at urban hot spots with no damn parking in a mile’s radius.

Living where I do now, this has been a good thing. We do a lot of driving. The closest McDonalds is 16 miles away. At least once a week, I drive 86 miles one way to go see my mom. I love my car more than ever.

But also because of my current circumstances, the word “rural” tends to get my attention more than it used to. When I saw that today was Rural Transit Day, it occurred to me that I don’t actually see a lot of public transit options where I live. It’s not really needed in my village, specifically; if you can’t walk, there’s pretty much always someone around willing to pitch in, pick you up, and take you where you need to go.

But there’s a lot of stuff that can’t be done in the village, and I’ve never really noticed shuttle buses or taxis or anything like that around here. So I looked it up, and there is, indeed, a low-cost transit service that covers our county. It looks like there are also churches that provide this service, which is nice because based on my cursory scan, it looked like some of the county services don’t cross county lines.

I was gratified to see this. I don’t anticipate anyone in my family becoming incapacitated and needing this service any time soon, but it’s nice to know the options exist. Much as I love Metropolitan, I really don’t want to move to Manhattan for my days of decrepitude, no matter how efficient their deliveries or how close the subway stop is.

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Stamp Out Spiking Day

Posted on July 15, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Back in high school, my BFF and I would occasionally get through a day by sharing a bottle of diet Minute Maid spiked with vodka. I feel like that’s the only acceptable form of spiking: when you do it to yourself or get agreement from another party ahead of time. Which I suppose has some other word, like “doctoring.”

Why we need a day to remind people not to be dicks—or, worse, that dicks like this exist—is sort of depressing. I guess this means it still happens with some regularity. Google informed me that Boston police said last New Year’s Eve that they had received 71 reports of drinks being drugged in 2024 compared to 107 in 2023. That’s a smallish number when you consider the size of the bar-going population of Boston, and it’s nice the number is going down.

But that’s also the number of reported cases. I suspect the number of unreported cases is probably a bit higher, if only because I number among them.

Back in the mid-90s when roofies were new on the scene, I routinely went to a swing dance club in Los Feliz called the Derby. At the time of this story, I lived in San Bernardino, which was an hour’s drive, give or take and depending on traffic. On this night, I ate at Del Taco on the way there, parked on the street, went in, and let a nice-looking guy buy me a beer. I drank half of it and felt … giddy. Way too giddy for a full stomach and a half a beer.

And then the guy started acting really weird, telling me we should get out of there and he’d take me home. No, you are not taking me home, sir. I live an hour away and I am not leaving my car here. But I am definitely leaving, and it will not be with you.

I’m not proud to say it, but in those days it was not exactly unheard of for me to drive myself home when I absolutely should not have. So I had an undeserved amount of confidence I could do it again this night. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I knew I wanted whatever was about to happen to be in my own bathroom and bed. So I ran away from him and got in my car and headed east.

I had been on the road about 15 minutes when I realized I was absolutely not going to make it. I knew I was about 10 minutes from my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in San Gabriel, so I pulled off the freeway and on to the boulevard where he lived. I remember I stopped at the light at the bottom of the offramp.

And honestly, that is all I remember. Next morning, I woke up in my ex’s bed, and he came in from the living room when he heard me groan. He was laughing. “Man, you were seriously gone last night. How the hell much did you have?”

“Half a beer.”

“Shut up. You don’t need to lie to me. How long have I known you? I KNOW that was at least four vodkas.”

“No, seriously, half a beer.” And I told him the story. And then had to ask, “uh, so … this is embarrassing. Where IS my car?”

He had stopped laughing and looked pretty angry when he realized what had happened to me, shaking his head and balling up his fists. But when I asked him to fill in the blanks, he grinned. “You did a good job,” he said. “I was sitting out there on the couch watching TV when you basically blew down my front door, announced you were going to pass out, and then did right where you were standing. So I dragged you to bed and then went to check if you’d hit a fire hydrant or anything—but you’d only parked a little bit crooked and taken up two spaces. I fixed it.”

So that’s my story of having my drink spiked. I was super freaking lucky. I didn’t stop going to the Derby, but I did stop letting guys buy me drinks. And I always finished a drink before I went to dance. The only down side to this story is that I never saw that guy again, either, so I never got to face that problem head on or solve it for anyone else. I reckon that was a lucky thing for both of us in the short run.

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Mac and Cheese Day

Posted on July 14, 2025 by arwenbicknell

When I started blogging about Days, I said I was going to try to minimize the Food Days that I wrote about.  I’m starting to think I should have gone the other way and blogged exclusively about food days.

Anyway, the choice for today was to write about Nude Day or Mac and Cheese Day, and my generally reserved nature steered me toward the latter.  You’re welcome!

I did not like this dish growing up. My parents were struggling 20-somethings who had trouble making the rent on occasion, and my mom worked hard to make Poor Food stretch. So for years, my experience of macaroni and cheese was elbow pasta drowned in half a block of Velveeta and just enough milk to make it stirrable. It was … OK. It definitely made you full for pennies. My uncle taught me that you could make it a little more interesting by performing a second drowning in ketchup. (Come to think of it, that discovery is probably where my love of cheeseburgers began—the ketchup/fake cheese combo is very similar, but you have an actual burger and bread in there as well, which makes it Much Better.)

As I got older, the family income improved and so did our dinners. My mom took most of those Poor Food beginnings and added better and more interesting ingredients. Enchiladas got made with shredded chuck roast instead of hamburger. Spaghetti got real parmesan cheese, not the stuff in the green can. Macaroni and cheese, apparently, was upgraded to fettucine alfredo with a generous addition of romano cheese in there for sourness.

So when people talked fondly of childhood memories eating stuff out of a blue box, I was perplexed. Cheese in powder form? Made with butter AND milk? And the whole box only feeds two people? Sounds like someone grew up in a castle!

In my 20s, I was a single girl with no kid to raise, so my grocery budget could handle this strain. I bought some. I loved it. I snarfed that stuff through my 20s. In fact, that was my last meal before I went into labor with my son, and since the doctor had told me he was SURE that nothing was going to happen for at least three more days, I actually assumed for an hour or so that I had just overeaten, not that I was about to make my husband drive me to the hospital in a February Snowmageddon. (Poor husband. He had a harrowing drive home from work on the newspaper desk at 11 p.m. and then had to get right back in the car to drive me to the hospital—which fortunately, was only about 5 miles away.)

For whatever reason, nobody else in my household likes this dish in any form. The kid ate it for a while when he was small, but now turns his nose up at it. My husband never liked melted cheese on anything except pizza. He has no idea what he’s missing.

I, on the other hand, keep looking for the holy grail of mac and cheese. Kraft is good and all, but it’s definitely kiddie food and I keep looking for something more grownup. I read recipes that seem promising, but they all end with “serves 36.” That’s too big a risk for something I might not like that much and have to eat all by myself—and my long division is not good enough to split recipes like that, especially if something like a single egg is involved.

I bought Stouffer’s; it was OK. I bought Costco’s; too garlicky. So now I just keep looking at restaurants, and I keep being disappointed. Too much white sauce, not enough cheese. Too bland. Too wet. Too dry.

To date, the best I’ve had is Popeye’s. Those guys know how to do it. The pasta is fine, the sauce is good, but the true achievement is the obscene amount of actual cheddar they layer in there and then bake til there’s a brown, crispy top. Like everything at Popeye’s, there’s enough grease in there to make you regret it, but man, I say it’s worth it.

Anyone out there got a good copycat recipe I could make at home that won’t require me eating it for the next five years?

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Beef Tallow Day

Posted on July 13, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Beef tallow is one of those things I thought about for maybe a half an hour as a little kid and then promptly forgot about—I learned from the Laura Ingalls books that tallow was used to make soap and candles. My mom explained that it was pretty good for straight-up cooking, too, and then all I could think about was how hungry I’d be if my entire candle-lit life smelled like beef fat. (I didn’t know then that tallow had no smell. Not gonna lie, I was a little disappointed to learn that.)

I didn’t really think about tallow much after that until McDonald’s made a big fuss about getting rid of it in the 1990s. I don’t know for a fact whether that is also when everyone on earth started undercooking French fries, but it makes sense to me: I can easily see some corporate bozo concluding that making fries in hotter oil with shorter cooking time was a brilliant strategy, so I’m willing to spread this theory even if it’s a big lie. My mom and husband sang the praises of tallow, but I didn’t remember the taste being all that different.

Earlier this year, Steak ‘n’ Shake brought back beef tallow fries. We bought some. They tasted good, but unfortunately our local S&S has jumped on the same bandwagon of leaving fries just a shade underdone, so apparently tallow doesn’t cure all ills. So we bought some for ourselves.

I’d never cooked with it before. I didn’t this time, either—the hubs did. He melted some down, threw in a handful of fries, and let ‘er rip for about 5 minutes.

The result? Probably confirmation bias, but I did notice a slight difference. Not in the taste, like I would have expected—the fries don’t come out tasting like steak or anything. But the grease residue is slightly different from that of canola oil; there’s less of it. You don’t feel a need to wipe your mouth with every bite and your fingers don’t feel quite as gross. I’d have to make 2 batches of fries side by side to see if the taste is different AT ALL, and maybe someday we’ll get around to that. But for now, I will say it was worth the purchase and we’ll keep playing with it.

Who knows, maybe we’ll try duck fat fries next time!

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New Conversation Day

Posted on July 12, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I’m not the flutteriest social butterfly. I smile, I try to make the right amount of eye contact to look friendly and sane, but I’m generally sort of awkward with new people and just struggle to fake it til I make it. But I’m not at ease, which means I’m not great at putting other people at ease, either, though I wish I were.

And I’m going to a party this afternoon with a mix of family and strangers—excuse me, “friends I haven’t met yet”—so this is even more on my mind than my usual blog posts.(It’ll be fine, I’m sure. Right?)

There are the standards: mention the weather, ask how they know the party host, whatever. I try to channel my grandmother and find something that seems to interest the other party so I can ask them about it and make them do the talking. “What lovely earrings, where did you get them?” “Is that a good book sticking out of your purse?” “How did you come to begin collecting hand grenades?” Sometimes this tactic works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Apparently New Conversations Day is supposed to make us bust out of this and have more meaningful conversations: welcome an outsider, learn more about a group you disagree with. That’s fine, I guess. The problem with the webpage I found describing the purpose of this day is that no helpful examples were offered. I get why you’d welcome an outsider, but I don’t really feel like I would do well breezing into a community room and going, “So hey, why do y’all leave dog biscuit offerings for Cerberus? How do you avoid getting ants?”

Honestly, I’m not sure that we should go poking below the surface. Social media is an amazing tool, but anyone who has spent ten minutes scrolling any platform has probably learned that virtually every human being has some extremely unattractive aspects that can’t be unseen. Why go looking for them? Isn’t it easier to be friends with that guy up the street when you only suspect that his closet has several hundred compartments full of various skeletons? I know I don’t want to stand in line at the grocery store and be asked by the woman behind me about what has oozed from my various orifices over the years. I don’t want to pick at controversial topics with people I know well, much less people I’ve just met. I don’t know if that makes me too confrontational, not confrontational enough, or just lazy and tired.

I dunno, man. I say we celebrate this day by talking to new people, but maybe limit the topic to the astonishingly forward behavior of bystanders who approach them for conversation.

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Swimming Pool Day

Posted on July 11, 2025 by arwenbicknell

When I was little, the only way to swim was if my mom took me somewhere. In California, she took me to her childhood stomping grounds in Simi Valley for play swimming—the Tapo Country Club pool, which isn’t nearly as chi-chi as it sounds and doesn’t exist anymore. It was a nice place; a big outdoor pool with a small wading pool, but it wasn’t like there were cabana boys or a catered lunches; it was pretty remote, surrounded by eucalyptus trees and brush, and it had a small oil well out in the sand parking lot. For lessons, I was taken to another defunct venue and another of my mom’s old haunts: Rita Curtis Swim School in Reseda (according to my mom—I was 3 and just know it was not at my house). It didn’t really take. My mom swam competitively for years; I swam just well enough to convince her I wouldn’t drown if I somehow fell out of a boat wearing a life vest in a very still and small pond.

When we moved to Illinois, I fell into the good luck of being friends with a gal who lived in an apartment complex with a pool (the apartments are still there, but I’m pretty sure that pool is gone now, too), and it was always a joyous day when she would call and tell me, “They’re filling it up!” In hindsight, I don’t think we took nearly enough advantage of that pool, but my mom didn’t want me wearing out my welcome and since it was a small town, there were plenty of parks and other places I could go to be feral.

From sixth to tenth grade, I did most of my swimming in Tampa Bay on the weekends. And then, my parents bought a house with a pool.

It was not the life-changer I thought it would be. It was great, don’t get me wrong—but I was hitting the age where the last place I wanted to be was home, our house was never one of those places where kids congregated, and I was never one of those girls who traveled in a pack anyway. I’m honestly not sure if more than two of my friends even knew there was a pool at my house. (In further hindsight, maybe I played that card wrong and should have capitalized on it more.)

Fast forward several years—college; assorted houses in assorted areas of California; one rental unit in Sarasota with a pool that I didn’t know know to maintain, plus the screening around it was ripped so the bugs were unbearable; and two places in Virginia—and I once again live in a house with a pool. It’s indoor, which makes it pretty humid year-round, but also means no bugs and nice weather in winter. We probably don’t take enough advantage of it, either, but I’ve made more of an effort.

Help me out with that! Come visit! I’ve got extra towels.

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Kitten Day

Posted on July 10, 2025 by arwenbicknell

As with most of my dogs, most of the cats in my life arrived as adults. I’ve had two experiences with kittens.

The first was when a stray that hung around our neighborhood out in the sticks when I was a teen-ager had a mess of babies under our lawnmower shed. Mama Kitty was sorta smart; she made sure she did it where our dogs couldn’t get at them, only bark with furious impotence—although I maintain that if she’d been really smart she’d have done it under some other shed with no dogs.

I was entranced with the baby kitties. There were five of them and they came in all colors. My mother was (and is) a very hands-off person when it comes to stray animals; she wants them to move along, not hang around forever. But even she felt bad for Mama Kitty, and bought a small bag of food that I was instructed to take out and leave for her for a couple weeks. As soon as my mom saw that Mama was up and exploring, though, the handouts stopped. This explains why my first memory of seeing those teeny kittens up and active was watching them lap up blood from a bunny Mama had killed and dragged home for them. After a few days under the shed looked like a charnel house of assorted ears and tails—and the fleas, oh, my lord. I wore a white shirt one day when I flopped down to watch them, and it came away black when I got up—not from dirt.

I would love to tell you that we did the Hallmark thing and took them all to get scrubbed and spayed and found them homes, but that is not the case. As soon as the kittens got big enough to venture out from under the shed, my mom intervened before the dogs could eat them and packed them and Mama all off somewhere—not sure if it was a shelter or a rescue. I argued that we should keep a couple to keep the rodents down, but she said more strays would be along soon. She was right.

My next experience with kittens was much more benign. A friend of mine when I was in my 20s had a mess of cats on her property and one of them got knocked up. When the kittens were born, my friend ran off to the feed store and recruited me to help with home vaccines. Then she unloaded two of them on me “because they need each other!” I named them Whiskey and Shays after rebellions because I had never been a cat owner and (obviously) did not come from a cat-owning family.

Whiskey was a long-haired black and white lazy boy. He was gorgeous and friendly and dumb as a sack of hammers. As a result, he didn’t last long; he got poisoned when he busted out and got into the neighbor’s rat poison. His sister, a mighty huntress, was much smarter and cautious. She lived to be 9 or 10, when she got diabetes and then we got a bad batch of insulin and didn’t realize until it was too late.

Our next cats showed up as young adults. They are geriatric now, and I suspect that when they go, my cat days will be over.

But I won’t discount the chances for any strays that show up in under my shed.

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Durian Day

Posted on July 9, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Honestly, the only thing I know about durians is that my best friend from college, Duryan-with-a-y, had a photo of one on her dorm room door freshman year with a note: “This is NOT me!”

Growing up with that name, obviously, led her to have an at least passing familiarity with the produce. She assured me that they smell “godawful” and taste “OK.”

Duryan died in 2021. We had a lot of keep-it-light conversations while she was sick, and one of them was about her disappointment that in a world of kale and quinoa, her misspelled namesake would never get any love and take off as a fad food.

She’d still be disappointed today. I asked four of my friends if they’d ever had it and got a unanimous “nope” response. She might be a little mollified that dragon fruit appears to be a thing now; I’ve even seen it in local groceries in my hidebound neck of the woods. (I bought one. I was not impressed. It was very pretty, but just tasted like plant matter to me.) Then again, dragonberry juice was getting some attention on General Hospital a couple weeks back, which probably indicates that the trend is dying if not already dead.

Does anyone know anything more about durian? Have you ever had it? Tell me about it and I’ll send you a durian-free book or baked good!

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Video Game Day

Posted on July 8, 2025 by arwenbicknell

My own video game history is pretty short—I started with Space Invaders and Pac Man like most people my age, but I was neither wealthy nor coordinated, so my exposure to video games usually came in 10-minute stints on a good day. Then we got a Trash 80 for home use and I moved on to Mega Bug and Poltergeist, and then I started using computers for work and that was pretty much the end of my game-playing days until Candy Crush came on the scene.

My son, on the other hand… well, here’s what he has to say:

My introduction to video gaming, as far as I can remember, was a bootleg copy of Atari Centipede on some website I’m sure doesn’t exist anymore. My mother plopped me in front of the family computer to keep me occupied, so I must’ve been around four or five years old at the time. I remember being somewhat alarmed by the strange and very loud beeping sounds coming from the speakers. But once I figured out the controls (moving the mouse made the dot on the bottom of the screen move, what magic!), I was hooked. I’m not sure I did very well, but I loved the feeling of using the computer for something other than the A is for Alligator and 1 + 1 homework she usually made me do.

In elementary school, I noticed other kids carrying around devices that looked like tiny laptops. They only had a few buttons, a strange-looking set of arrow keys, and two screens, one on the top, one on the bottom. Everyone called them a “DS,” and once I saw what they could do (3D graphics! Full music! Lifelike animation!) I simply had to have one. I begged my parents incessantly for this wondrous device, and that Christmas, it finally happened: I got my hands on my first real gaming system; a light blue Nintendo DSi along with a handful of games. The first cartridge I slid in was LEGO Batman, and over the next few years, that DS was my only window into the world of video games.

In 2015, I received my first home console, an Xbox 360, just as the next generation was beginning to take over. I had missed out on nearly a decade of gaming media, and my system was becoming more obsolete with each passing day. But it didn’t matter. I had a controller in my hand and a whole backlog of stories like Mass Effect, Red Dead Redemption, and Skyrim to discover.

Since those days, gaming has evolved substantially. From massive online arenas like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch, where hundreds of players compete in real time, to single-player experiences that explore narrative in ways unique to the medium, like Fallout or Uncharted, the possibilities have expanded in every direction. Personally, I’ve always preferred the latter, probably because I value good storytelling over gameplay loops or complex mechanics. In my opinion, the best games are the ones that blend technical craft with a rich, resonant plot. Studios like VALVe were masters of this; titles like Portal and Half-Life (and their superb sequels) bridge that gap flawlessly. Portal in particular was a formative experience. I still don’t think I’ve laughed harder at a game than when the main villain of Portal 2 is defeated by firing a portal onto the moon.

Looking back, it’s strange to think that it all started with a sketchy website and a beeping centipede. But that sense of wonder never left me. Whether I’m replaying a favorite classic or exploring something new, I’m still chasing that same feeling: the thrill of a story I can shape with my own hands.

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Dive Bar Day

Posted on July 7, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Dive bars are my favorites. I like the idea of a bar having regulars. I like dark, cozy spaces. I don’t mind if the floor is sticky; I prefer to not know why it is sticky.

The first dive bar I frequented was the Gold Rail in Glendale, California. My first newspaper editor boss loved it there, so when work was over, that was where people went. In my early 20s, I didn’t have a big frame of reference for the different classes of bar, but I learned quickly that I loved the Gold Rail’s prices over those of other bars, and that I was much more at home there than at the trendy Moose McGillycuddy’s in Old Town Pasadena, where I felt obligated to dress up and smile.

As I began, so I continued. My next haunt (also discovered by my old boss after he changed jobs and I followed him a year or so later) was the Brass Elephant, a few towns over in Monrovia and sticking with the metals theme. (Fun fact: The Brass Elephant is featured in Bad Santa as the Brass Monkey, so you can get a glimpse of my old stomping grounds.)

At that point, though, I got into swing dancing, so all my bar money went to the Derby in Los Feliz (and for gas money to get there and back). And then I moved to Florida, where I met my teetotaller husband, and bars were no longer front and center. When we moved to DC, we lived in a suburb and then an exurb, so bar attendance dropped even further, although even my husband was a fan of a pub in Falls Church called Ireland’s Four Provinces (or 4 Ps, for those in the know). We also went to the Brickskellar a few times. When our company moved, my new boss was big on happy hour, but he was also a man of practicality, so those outings were mostly to the hotel bar next door—definitely not a dive bar.

Where I live now, there are probably dive bars I could find, but the booze in town is best at a restaurant with lots of fried food, so that’s where I go for girls nights. But honestly, I’m of an age now where going to any bar on a regular basis just sounds like a lot of work. I’d rather drink at home in my play clothes!

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