There are so many variables to consider if you want to throw a successful pizza party.
12/30/22
Vacations for us almost always include trying the local pizza. We’re from New York, so we don’t expect any other pizza to taste as good, but we’d like to think we’re open minded. So when the opportunity came up to throw a pizza party here in Arizona, we jumped at the chance to sample some pie. We’ve had it before, but we remain eternal optimists. And thus Donna began running calculations.
Algorithms started running in her head. First came the decision where to get the pizza from. Donna interrogated her aunt and uncle and narrowed down the candidates. Next came the phone calls. Donna ran through every scenario with each establishment.
“So what if I ordered X number of pies? What time would I have to order them? Uh huh, uh huh. And do you deliver? Uh huh, uh huh. And how long have you been in business? Uh huh, uh huh.”
She settled on a pizza place with New York in its name. That’s no guarantee of quality, but it shows they’re up to the challenge of scrutinization. The rule isn’t universal, however. For example, I wouldn’t buy tacos from a place named New York Tacos.
Next came figuring out what toppings to get. Again, Donna took a quick survey of the partygoers, weighing the ratios of those preferring sausage or pepperoni or cheese. She jotted down notes, tossed them in the air, and determined the proper ratio.
But when determining how many pies to get, Donna equivocated.
“Four? No that won’t do. There will be about 15 of us. Six? Nuh-uh. But we’re getting closer. Eight? That might be cutting it close. How about 10? That sounds like a good number. I could feed all the starving children in Africa at the same time.”
Long story short: Donna ordered eight pizza pies, despite the protests of everyone around her. We ended up with four boxes of uneaten pizza. I suppose it could’ve been worse. Donna is petrified by the thought of someone going without. She could’ve ordered more than a dozen pies.
According to Giordano’s Pizza, here’s the proper way to calculate how much pizza to order for a party:
To prevent drastically under or overestimating, it’s typically best to follow the 3/8 rule. Since the average hungry person eats three slices of pizza, multiply the number of guests by 3/8. The resulting number will be the number of pizzas you need to order.
Of course, the equation can be changed as necessary depending on the number of children or teens in your group, who will likely not eat three slices of pizza apiece.
But, let’s be honest, Donna can’t be held responsible for decisions made while hungry. There are no algorithms to address that.
Two nights ago, on my first night back in Arizona since July, I woke up with a great thirst. Back home in Florida I’m used to waking up moist with sweat. But here, my lips are dry and my calf muscles are tight, as if I might cramp. I forgot to drink water before going to bed last night, and my body is quick to give me the “I told you so” for not properly hydrating while in Arizona.
The ground, however, has been getting a good soaking due to recent rains. Since we arrived, the clouds have been a persistent companion, and yesterday it even rained. I think I even heard slurping sounds coming from the native plants.
“We’re glad to have it,” the clerk at the post office told me this morning. “We were in a drought earlier this year, but the rains in the last three months have improved conditions. But Lake Mead is still bad.”
The reference to Lake Mead is about the water levels. As of December 8, 2022, the water level of the lake is 6018.11 feet above sea level, lower than the 6025.15 feet on the same date in 2021. Bordering Nevada and Arizona, Lake Mead is a vital source for drinking water, hydroelectricity, and recreation. Water in Lake Mead has to remain above a certain elevation to pass through Hoover Dam.
Lake Mead had also produced some interesting finds this year. The receding water levels have uncovered a myriad of water vessels, including a World-War-II-era armored landing craft. Guns have been found too. And where there are guns, there are bodies. The remains of one poor individual were discovered in a barrel. These dark discoveries have prompted speculation about long-unsolved missing person and murder cases dating back decades to organized crime and the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.
Overall, the National Drought Mitigation Center reports that Arizona will end the year a little less parched than it started. But long-term water challenges persist.
A year ago, about 9% of the state was in the U.S. Drought Monitor’s “extreme drought” category. Now, no part of Arizona is. Most of the state is now considered just “abnormally dry” (much like my sense of humor). The Phoenix area is still about an inch short of the annual average, but more rain is expected this week.
In the long-term though, it won’t do much to improve conditions on the Colorado River, another critical Arizona water source, which relies mostly on snowfall in the Rocky Mountains. So the Colorado River still faces unprecedented shrinkage in 2023.
If Jimmy Hoffa is discovered in either Lake Mead or the Colorado River, I’ll be here to report on it.
Our trip to Arizona has gotten off to a happy start. As friends and family gathered at an Italian restaurant last night, we raised a glass and gave thanks that we could be together. People shared photos and talked about what they’ve been up to since Colette and Brad’s wedding.
But at my table, a more serious conversation took place. Donna’s cousin Damon told me about a visit he had with his neurologist. His words really struck a nerve.
He’s been ailing from back pain for some time. (I’ll spare you a medical diagnosis.) Suffice to say that the nerves in his back are rubbing up against one of his discs. But on the day of his visit to the doctor, he was in a lot better shape than the woman sitting next to him in the waiting room. She jerked and she twitched every 30 seconds, emitting sounds of pain. Not knowing if she had some horrible contagious disease, he considered moving further away from her.
When it was his turn to see the doctor, he casually asked what the woman was suffering from. Bound by the doctor-patient confidentially rules, the doctor could only offer a generic explanation of the woman’s condition. She was suffering from severe nerve damage.
Basically, her sensitive nerves endings had lost their coverings and were contacting everything around them, producing pain. Our nerves are intertwined like the material in a shoelace. And just like shoelaces, the tip of the nerve bundles are held together by a covering. In the nervous system the covering is a fatty substance called myelin. The myelin coats the nerve fibers, adding protective insulation and enabling impulses between nerve cells to travel back and forth rapidly. The communication between cells allows our bodies to move smoothly.
Babies don’t have much myelin when they’re born, which is why they’re movements are so clumsy. As they grow they produce more myelin, peaking at about the age of three, although you can continue to grow myelin well into adulthood.
You can also lose myelin for a number of reasons. Sometimes diseases like diabetes, or physical trauma, or hereditary conditions are the culprit. I won’t pretend to know how doctors treat demyelination. But I will say this: Once you lose your myelin, it’s gone.
Damon talked about that twitching woman in the waiting room for a long time. “I don’t want to end up like that,” he said.
He mentioned back surgery as an option to keep his back pain from getting worse, and I’m sure he’s going to give all options a long, hard look. Since today is a Wednesday, and I don’t practice medicine on Wednesday, or any day that ends in a “y,” I can only offer him support from the sidelines.
For the rest of us though, I offer this piece of advice: Never take the gift of movement for granted. In this life a little pain must fall, but I just want to be able to tie my shoelaces without consulting a doctor.
The mountains of Arizona never fail to impress me.
12/27/22
It’s noisy when we hit the airline terminal, a mixture of frustration and feet shuffling on lines that advance an inch at a time. So many people have had their holiday plans disrupted. So many people have become stuck in the system due to the worst Christmas weather some states have ever seen.
But we’re hopeful that flight delays won’t be in our forecast. For now, our plane is departing on time. We print out our boarding passes and check in our luggage. Nearby, a scrappy comfort dog watches the movements of every passersby. He doesn’t want to be here either. He demonstrates that to anyone who ventures too close. Out come the nervous barks before the dog’s owner yanks him back. The dog is clearly not providing much comfort. Worse than that, his protests have created a chain reaction.
Invisible among the forelorn travelers and the crowded kiosks and the rolling luggage are other unhappy furry companions. After the first dog barks, they others join in. Their complaints all sound the same: Get me out of here.
We keep moving and pray that the TSA-Pre stamps on our boarding passes will be worth the money we paid to join the club. It’s painful to even look in the direction of the non-TSA-Pre lines, so I don’t.
But new sounds assail us once we are past security. It sounds like someone has brought an owl to the airport. Are there such things as comfort owls? I spy a cat carrier, the source of the cacophony, and see the cat who has taken to making bird calls. The low wails are incessant. Then the cat’s owner accidentally drops the carrier.
“Oh, my God,” she screams. And I think that she has murdered her cat.
“At least that got him quiet,” a noncat person snickers. Then the cat commences its wailing again.
As we board the plane, we are grateful to be away from the cat. We hadn’t anticipated the airport being so noisy. The only sound more irritating would be the sound of a baby crying. Donna and I stare at each other as two toddlers take their seats in front of us, perhaps ages two and one.
The father holds the youngest in his lap and tries to tie the seatbelt around he and the baby. But the flight attendant stops him, informing him that only he should be belted. That’s perfect, I fume. Let the baby become a projectile. That makes perfect sense. But we forget all about the child in the silence that ensues. For the first two hours of the flight, we actually get some sleep.
And then the crying starts, and the coughing, and the squirming. When we see the baby peek over his father’s shoulder, we’re not surprised to see a snotty, red face. Junior has a cold, or some other infectious disease, and he’s not shy about sharing his noisy misery with us.
But he doesn’t know who he’s sitting in front of. He doesn’t know Donna’s track record with kids. He doesn’t know how she can make a child’s blood run cold with a stare that says, “I’m in charge, not you.” Predictably, the two lock eyes. I see the toddler’s eyebrows shoot up. His silence speaks volumes. He’s befuddled. Then he spins back around in his dad’s lap, grumbling in defeat. I don’t even bother to look at Donna. She’s got a talent that I would never seek to question or imitate.
Over the next two hours, the child doesn’t quiet down completely, but I’m satisfied with the results. I like the universe best when it’s a predictable place. No barking dogs. No howling cats. No crying babies. When our flight lands in Phoenix early, I know our trip is off to a good start.
This time of year you need a helmet to walk around in South Florida.
12/26/22
In Jurassic Park The Lost World, which is the second movie in the series, and the best of the sequels (before the entire series started to go downhill), Jeff Goldblum says to Vince Vaughn, “What? What did you expect to document? What did you expect to see?” To which Vince Vaughn answers, “Animals, maybe…big iguanas.”
I don’t need iguanas falling on my head, but I do have a certain affinity for them ever since I was a kid. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, I was a huge fan of sci-fi movies growing up. One of my favorite sub-genres was dinosaur movies. Somehow or another, a team of scientists would always find themselves transported back to the dinosaur age. But filmmakers before the CGI era had a tough time creating believable-looking dinosaurs. They had one of two options: They could either use clay-figure animation or put horns on iguanas and splice them into scenes after magnifying them 10 times their normal size. As I watched those movies, I usually felt bad for the iguanas. People were always throwing torches at them or trying to poke them in the eye with spears, anything to eradicate them.
I sympathize with anyone who has to go without power, especially in freezing temperatures like these or during the sweltering summer. Donna and I have experienced quite a few non-hurricane related outages. The majority of the time the cause is a squirrel. The squirrels in my backyard are particularly ballsy. They think they’re indestructible just because they can fit so many acorns into their mouth. Then they do a few backflips and bang! Someone gets their fluffy tail a little too close to a transformer.
But iguanas are larger than squirrels. Their extended bodies make them a bigger threat to electrical equipment than birds or squirrels. Not to mention iguanas have long tails, which are perfect for making connections between two electrical components.
Iguana-caused power outages are just one of the reasons that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission gives for saying that iguanas can be humanely killed on private property. The Commission also says the lizards have a negative impact on native wildlife. But they’re not fooling anyone with their mitigation efforts. They just want to throw torches and poke spears at the iguanas because they watched the same movies I watched as a kid. They think it’s cool. Word to the wise, Commission: Not all the scientists in those movies survived until the final credits.
Thank you for being a part of our lives. Merry Christmas!
12/25/22
When I was a kid, Christmas was all about the gifts. Now it’s all about the people in our lives. The people have become the gifts. Enjoy this time to be with the ones you love. Reach out to the ones you can’t be with. God bless you one and all. Stay warm.
Unless you’re on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, you’re dressed very warmly today. Someone left a door open in the arctic and now more than half of the U.S. population and nearly every state is feeling the chill. Winter officially began on Wednesday, December 21. Since that day, power outages, flight cancellations, and car wrecks have plagued the nation, and Santa has already announced that all gifts this year will be delivered virtually.
But it’s given the weather stations an unexpected Christmas present. I’ve never seen people so happy to announce cold weather. I guess it’s because Aaron-Judge type records are going to be set this weekend.
It kind of makes me want to be a weather person. With all those cameras on me, I could launch into a comedy routine, maybe get discovered. At the very least, I could take people’s minds off this chilly weather.
My routine could go something like this:
“Hi, this is Mike Rivera reporting for Eye Witless News. Personally, I don’t rely on TV for my weather information. I just turn on my computer and check the Winternet. And what’s the deal with lake-effect snow? How does the lake affect the snow? Shouldn’t it be the reverse? I mean, if you’re a fish you worry about snow affecting your lake. But you never hear anyone talking about that. Well, that’s my time. You’ve been great. Can someone carry me to the news van? I think my feet are frozen in place.”
This locomotive was a cherished Christmas gift, until the day it was no more.
12/23/22
In yesterday’s post, I waxed poetic about the many friends I have and how grateful I am to have them. Among them are Jack and Shelley Recker. We were destined to be friends from the moment Donna sold them a home in Volusia County, Florida…and then a second home and then a third home. Jack’s been chronicling his adventures long before I started blogging, and I’m happy to be able to present below a very special holiday tale from Jack’s childhood. After all, tis the season.
Jack came from a family that really loved Christmas and celebrated it in delightful ways. Before Christmas, the house was full of talk about baby Jesus and Santa Claus. But Jack’s parents didn’t decorate the house or put out the tree until the kids were in bed (what a long night they must’ve had). When Jack and his siblings awoke, a tremendous surprise awaited them. It was like a miracle had transformed their home, placing a Christmas tree here, decorations there, and an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle over there… Wait. I may have their household mixed up with another.
One of Jack’s earliest Christmas memories occurred in 1948 when he received his first electric train set at about the age of 5. Jack’s dad helped assemble it and took care to show Jack every detail of the train, which was an American Flyer made by Gilbert. He taught Jack how to take care for the train, how to treat it with respect. That Christmas Jack played with it for hours, getting down on the floor with his face close to the tracks, imagining that he was inside one of the lighted cars. The handsome locomotive was fashioned after those old steam trains. It even came with a chemical you could drop down the smokestack that would send out puffs of smoke as the train traveled around the track, and the caboose was illuminated to give the appearance of inside activity (the lights even flicked for realism). The set also came with a billboard that featured a realistic-sounding train whistle. Jack and his dad even made an authentic-looking tunnel for the train.
Christmas lasted for eight days in the Recker household. When it was over, Jack’s dad showed him how to carefully clean and pack up each piece of the train set. Each piece of track had to be polished and cleaned and wrapped with the train cars in newspaper; the locomotive was carefully wrapped in flexible cardboard. Jack never saw the train again until the next Christmas, when Santa got him a cattle car complete with cows. The addition included a stockyard, where the cows would run around and up a ramp into a cattle car. The “S” gauge track had two rails per section, compared to Lionel’s tracks, which featured three rails. (In Jack’s mind, real trains traversed on a two-rail track.)
In 1951 Jack and his family moved from Northern Kentucky to Orlando, Florida into a home they’d built. But on a beautiful, sunny mid-October day in 1955 that home caught fire.
I’ll let Jack tell the rest of the tale in his own words:
My father was home from work early that day. I was home from school and was working on my assigned homework near the kitchen. My mother had a roast in the oven of our newly acquired but used kerosene stove. I saw her approach the oven and open the door to check on the roast. But when she opened the door, flames leaped out onto the floor where a pool of kerosene had leaked from the stove. We had no fire extinguishers, very little water, and no insurance. The walls were made out of 1/8-inch plywood, not sheet rock. As things very quickly things got out of hand, I was sent across the Orange Blossom Trail to ask a neighbor to call the volunteer fire department (we had no telephone). While I was gone, my parents made sure that my two sisters were outside and safely away from the house.
My house, and everything in it, burned to the ground that day. We owned nothing but the clothes on our backs…and a vacant lot. But Dad reminded us that we had our health and our faith.
In the devastation of the fire, my electric train set was, of course, destroyed.
Shortly thereafter, we moved to College Park, Florida, a suburb north of Orlando, which was 14 miles north of our former house. It was a small rental home that my Dad’s boss owned. He let my family live there until we could get back on our feet, which meant we were going to be spending Christmas in that small house.
In College Park there happened to be an appliance store (on the corner of Bryn Mawr and Edgewater), which was well known in the Orlando area. During the Christmas season, the management of that store ran promotions to attract business, one of which featured a live country band. So, I went there one night to hear the music and, while standing around, filled out an entry form for a drawing that was to take place on Christmas Eve. The grand prize was an American Flyer train set, much like the one that had been destroyed in the fire. I placed my entry into the box, went home, and forgot about it.
On Christmas Eve, I was alone in our borrowed home when I heard a knock on the door. At my doorstep was a representative of the appliance store. He’d come to deliver to me the grand prize from that Christmas Eve drawing.
Thanks to that miracle in 1955, I was able again to enjoy a train set that Christmas. The surprise of that gift will always be a cherished memory. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus! There is also in my conviction a firm belief that there is a creator who provides for our needs.
Amen to that, Jack. Thanks for sharing that story.
We weren’t meant to walk this path alone. In my daily travels, I’m constantly reminded of that message, how much we all need each other. In fact, I wrote a song about it:
Friends How many of us have them? Friends Ones we can depend on Friends How many of us have them? Friends Before we go any further, let’s be Friends
Well, maybe I didn’t write it. But as my friend, you won’t let a little thing like plagiarism get between us.
I had the pleasure of attending a Zoom call yesterday with a few of my friends. Believe me, Zoom calls outside of work are a lot more fun than work Zoom calls, probably because no one has to take notes and you don’t get in trouble if you fall asleep in the middle of the meeting. The guys on the call were buddies from my old softball team, the Outlaws. We text each other all the time, but last night the connection I had to them was palpable. I loved looking into that computer screen and seeing that handsome face, hearing that mischievous laugh, catching that witty remark. But enough about me. The other guys contributed to the call too.
Behind Ed, I could see his bike and his golf clubs, two of Ed’s favorite hobbies, which he can engage in year-round from his home in Arizona. John’s background featured a photographic collage of all the letters and numbers from the NYC subway spelling out the words “Brooklyn Bridge.” John’s the stereotypical tough New Yorker. He can make people disappear for you if you want. Jose’s background was dark. He couldn’t figure out how to turn his camera on, this from the guy who used to work in IT. Jose, it’s okay to let us see your face. You should’ve expected side effects when you bought those handsome pills from the internet.
But all kidding aside, I’m blessed to have those friends and all the other friends who are reading (and some who are not reading) this blog. My previously mentioned friend Ed surprised me with a book earlier this year. No occasion, he just purchased a bought for me titled, What Happened to You? by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. It talks about the trauma that can shape our lives, especially if it’s childhood trauma. What that means is that our fears, hopes, and dreams may be engraved in us by experiences that go further back than our memories go, which makes it hard for us to reverse harmful behavior. The kid in you will forever be in charge.
The poet William Wordsworth said it better: “The Child is Father of the Man.” And I can’t argue with that, mostly because it came from a guy named Wordsworth. What a great name for a poet. I suppose he knew what he wanted to do for a living from a very early age. On the downside, what if he had tendencies to be a carpenter? But I digress.
I don’t ever want to feel so isolated that I explode with such helplessness. I’d rather explode with happiness that I have so many friends. I’m blessed to have you, one and all. Thanks for being there for me. And thanks for keeping me busy writing blog posts about you.
Almost every year I will inevitably tell someone that I want socks for Christmas. In reality my sock draw is overflowing. But you can never have enough socks. That’s why I said, “Oh, fudge,” when the mailman delivered a gigantic box to my door yesterday. Had someone bought me a gross of socks?
The box was from my daughter Stephanie, and it indeed contained socks, but a reasonable number of them (a dozen). And not just any old socks. She got me themed socks from one of my favorite movies, “A Christmas Story.”
Here’s some of my other favorite trivia about the movie:
The movie is based on the semi-autobiographical tales of the man who narrated the movie, Jean Shepherd.
Jack Nicholson almost played the part of the father. (He was interested in the role, but his asking price would have doubled the movie’s budget. )
The actor who played Ralphie, Peter Billingsley, worked with director Jon Favreau and collaborated with him on “Iron Man,” the movie that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe (he had a small role in the movie, which he reprised in “Spiderman: Far From Home”).
The house that the movie was filmed in was supposedly purchased by a fan who replicated the interior look from the movie. It’s available for overnight stays, and the house across the street is now a museum dedicated to the movie.
I haven’t seen the sequel, but I’m in no rush. If it’s anything like the original movie, 24-hour marathons will soon be devoted to it. In the meantime, I have all these socks to coordinate outfits with. I hope I can pull it off. I triple-dog dare you to say I can’t.
