Once again with feeling, the Golden Family Christmas diorama!
Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a few recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!
Halloween joy on Friday night!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: each Halloween night my wife Anne and I are among the few holiday observers still handing out candy to trick-or-treaters in our suburban neighborhood. However, this year marks the first time since 2006 that we shirked the tradition, but it was for a very special, one-time reason: we were invited to a Halloween wedding.
DISCLAIMER: No surgeries or hair dyes were used in the making of this amazing lovely woman.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we’re getting old! And it happened again!
Last weekend Anne turned the big 5-5. At least it’s our understanding that 55 is “big”. She’ll now be eligible for discounts at select businesses even though she looks half my age under most lighting conditions. I’m a mere babe at 53 but sometimes have to tell cashiers that, no, I am not retired yet. Most days we don’t feel this old and have to remind each other that we are indeed this old and the actuarial math works out against us.
Welcome to the Finer Things Club! If it helps, there won’t be a pop quiz about Angela’s Ashes.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: sometimes my wife Anne and I find excuses to leave the house for fun besides comic-cons, road trips, movies or extra groceries! It isn’t often, but we’re open to the concept. It beats doomscrolling in our comfy chairs. We’d venture out more often if we were invited, but we aren’t into sports or alcohol, which tend to be the only incentives that 98% of Americans offer or respond to in laboratory tests. Sure, we could invite other folks out on our own terms, which Anne has been known to do on selective occasions, but as a lifelong introvert, I’m not one for taking the initiative, not even if you pass me some on a serving tray and insist, “Here, please enjoy some initiative, on the house.” It doesn’t help that our offline friends here in Indianapolis tend to lead busier lives than we do, and our internet friends don’t cross state lines too often and don’t consider Indiana a tempting vacation destination, despite all our sports and alcohol.
Once upon a time four months ago, two of our friends were preparing to move far away from here to another country — one with its own storied forms of sports and alcohol, often combined with disastrous results — and our li’l circle wanted to get together one last time before we never see them again in person and come to appreciate their future social media posts all the more. After extensive text negotiations our circle’s female half informed the male half our occasion would be something called “high tea”. I thought this was just one of their frequent Anglophile in-jokes, like when they used to bring up Harry Potter a lot. But no, “high tea” is a thing that Americans can do, even when it isn’t “tea time” on the grandfather clocks in any of the British Empire’s few remaining time zones.
So we agreed to try a new thing, even though Anne has hated tea ever since she was traumatized by a childhood prank. But we understand compromise is a thing friends do, even though compromises are against the 2025 Terminally Online Code of Conduct.
Just the seafood we were looking for: lunch at Fleet Landing — crispy whole fried Southern flounder with pasta salad and Charleston red rice.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Every year since 1999 Anne and I have taken one road trip to a different part of the United States and seen attractions, wonders, and events we didn’t have back home. From 1999 to 2003 we did so as best friends; from 2004 to the present, as husband and wife. After years of contenting ourselves with everyday life in Indianapolis and any nearby places that also had comics and toy shops, we overcame some of our self-imposed limitations and resolved as a team to leave the comforts of home for annual chances to see creative, exciting, breathtaking, outlandish, historical, and/or bewildering new sights in states beyond our own. We’re the Goldens. This is who we are and what we do.
For 2023 it was time at last to venture to the Carolinas, the only southern states we hadn’t yet visited, with a focus on the city of Charleston, South Carolina. Considering how many battlefields we’d toured over the preceding years, the home of Fort Sumter was an inevitable addition to our experiential collection…
Historical sites and summertime scenery notwithstanding, one of my favorite parts of the Charleston experience was the food. We’d made sure to budget accordingly in case of impeccable restaurants. Our first full day in town was a feast of delights.
Strange visitors from another planet.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
Two geeks met in 1987 in high school German class, somewhat out of sync with the ordinary folks around us. Divine timing would keep our unplanned parallel paths intertwining over the years. Everything led up to our determinedly simple wedding in 2004, by which time we best friends had already started traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, chuckles and tears, aches and pains, and mountains and valleys both figurative and literal.
We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.
When I posted about our 20th anniversary last year — a milestone, mind you! — almost no one cared. Despite the apathy of You, The Viewers at Home, it’s an MCC tradition, so here we go again anyway! Briefly, even! By my standards, I mean!
The pinnacle of our home’s 2024 Christmas diorama, which is something Anne does every year with our various pop culture Christmas ornaments and figurines.
Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a few recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!
Old friends Milo, Opus, and Portnoy from back in the day.
New generations aren’t learning about Berke Breathed’s Bloom County from their schools, peers, or influencers. Comic strips in general seem a forgotten artform among The Kids These Days. Recently a young coworker looked at the Linus Van Pelt standing in the li’l Funko Pop collection on my desk and called him “Lionel”. I wept more than a little inside. But some of us olds will never forget the wisdom we picked up from the newspaper funnies.
Nearly 40 years since its original publication a couple weekends before I turned 13, I’ve never forgotten that simple quote from P. Opus, the world’s largest-nosed penguin. I’ve thought about it a lot ever since — offline and here. The voices in my head have found no reason to retire it yet, not when society keeps proving him true.
A giant top hat welcomes road-trippers to the Illinois State Capitol Complex Visitors Center. We do love being seen.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
In addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together on some new experience. On past trips we’d visited the graves, tombs, mausoleums and virtual posthumous palaces of 24 American Presidents in varying accommodations and budgets. One of the biggest names ever to grace the White House kept eluding us: Abraham Lincoln, planted a mere three hours away in Springfield, Illinois. In May 2023 I figured: let’s make his tomb a trip headliner of its very own, not a warm-up act on the road to Branson or whatever. History is technically more Anne’s fervent interest than mine, but we found plenty to do beyond reading wordy educational placards…
After our scenic tour inside the Illinois State Capitol, we returned to the car, drove over to the Capitol Complex behind the building, and drove a few laps around their visitor parking lots until a space finally opened up closer to our next attraction. Some spaces were cordoned off for a construction project; others were taken up by a few buses whose passengers we never encountered. The complex was apparently a popular place on Friday mornings.
Fun times at George Washington’s Mount Vernon on our 2024 road trip.
It’s that time again! Another year of blessed bliss married to the amazing Anne, another “Happy Anniversary to Us!” entry, another dinner to celebrate, and another nearly unrelated lead image. This year’s milestone is also a multiple of 5, so society says it’s worth extra skill points!
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: two geeks met in 1987 in high school German class, somewhat out of sync with the ordinary folks around us. Divine timing would keep our unplanned parallel paths intertwining over the years. Everything led up to our determinedly simple wedding in 2004, by which time we best friends had already started traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, chuckles and tears, aches and pains, and mountains and valleys both figurative and literal.
We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.
Welcome to animatronic Africa with mood lighting!
I ask you, what better time than right now for a shiny happy feel-good gallery of an alternate Earth in which everyone sets aside their differences, concedes they were all cranked out by the same animatronic manufacturer, celebrates mutual captivity on the same indoor canal, welcomes outsiders without fear of mass shootings or assassinations, and drowns out any concerns by singing the same catchy jingle over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN?
…sorry, what were we talking about?
Our Friday night dessert, one for each of us: Chocolate Terrine on graham cracker crust with ganache, blackberry cheesecake ice cream, blackberry sauce, and a real blackberry on top.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: last Friday was my birthday, which I usually note here with gratitude for another year of survival. For years I assumed when I turned 52 I’d celebrate with some geektastic solipsism involving that very number’s use as a recurring DC Comics motif. I had at least one whole anecdote lined up and everything. So far the closest we’ve come to living out any DC homage is the cosmic irony of having the entire lead-up week disrupted by, to put it horridly, a major character death.
The week was instead overshadowed by the unexpected passing of my cousin Shawn on Mother’s Day at age 50, two years younger than me. I never throw parties anyway, but I begged off some of our traditions with hopes of resuming them next year — no evening spent entirely on Facebook (the only social media system remotely nice about birthdays), no one-day road trip with my wife Anne away from Indianapolis, and no ice cream cake. I never post about the ice cream cake, but it’s usually my thing.
Nevertheless we tried to find and/or create some bright spots where we could throughout the week. Mostly I mean food.
Flashback to 2004 with our Best Man.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: in addition to our annual road trips, my wife Anne and I have a twice-yearly tradition of spending our birthdays together, usually traveling to some new place or attraction as a short-term road trip — partly as an excuse to spend time together on those most wondrous days, partly to explore areas we’ve never experienced before. It’s who we are and what we do. Well, usually. Preferably.
This year I struggled to pick someplace, anywhere, to hit up for my occasion. Nothing lit a light bulb over my head. Should we explore one of the few Indiana small towns we haven’t already combed over for roadside attractions? Revisit one of the large cities in our neighboring states? Break tradition, stay home and binge-watch? Abandon Anne at home, go out alone, attend the Bad Religion/Social Distortion concert happening that very night in downtown Indy, and unwittingly get my teeth kicked out in an impromptu mosh pit? I hemmed and hawed for weeks.
On Mother’s Day the entire brainstorming list fell down the garbage disposal when unconscionably horrible news struck our family: my cousin Shawn had passed away. I was about to turn 52. He’d just turned 50.
One of many outtakes from my recent visit to the annual Festival of Trees exhibit at the Indiana Historical Society. This one was brought to them by Circle Centre Mall.
Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a few recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!
Incredibly, Anne ate this entire head-sized sandwich herself and did not win a free T-shirt.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:
It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order…
Much as other convention-goers have their traditions, so do we here at MCC. One such tradition is waiting till our site traffic dies down — and other aspects of our lives are caught up — before we share some of the bonus ephemera that can bore wider audiences. Sometimes that includes food photos, in cases where we’ve found sustenance that left an impression on us within reasonable distance of a given show. We don’t indulge in all the classic blogging tropes here, but on occasion we still brake for food photos. They’re a fun memory, a quick excuse for posting something during busy or preoccupied times, and an even quicker scroll-through for You, The Viewers at Home. If you read all 6300+ words of our Fan Expo Chicago actor-meetup recap, this is the opposite of that.
Teaser image from our 2023 road trip miniseries. Photo by a slightly younger traveler/stranger.
It’s that time again! Another year of blessed bliss married to the amazing Anne, another “Happy Anniversary to Us!” entry, another dinner to celebrate, and another completely unrelated lead image.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: two geeks met in 1987 in high school German class, somewhat out of sync with the ordinary folks around us. Divine timing would keep our unplanned parallel paths intertwining over the years. Everything led up to our determinedly simple wedding in 2004, by which time we best friends had already started traveling together after growing up in families and lifestyles that didn’t lend themselves to much of it. All these years later, our story continues together through ups and downs, highs and lows, chuckles and tears, aches and pains, and mountains and valleys both figurative and literal.
We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.
Jazz hands made the I.V. hole in my arm hurt, but you understand they had to be done.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crosssover: I’m 50 now, which means it’s time to do post-youth stuff from time to time, such as throwing away AARP invitations or discussing health and/or medicine with fellow olds who coasted over the proverbial hill before you did. If you have a regular doctor, the next appointment after reaching that milestone age will inevitably lead to them recommending you have your first colonoscopy. Apparently at 50 the odds of digestive issues increase ludicrously and your colon becomes a breeding ground for monsters.
Another Christmas ornament selfie, an outtake from our Festival of Trees two-part gallery.
Hey, kids! It’s that beloved holiday tradition where we just post a couple of recent Christmas-themed photos with some short yet sincere seasons’ greetings, and we give readers a break from my usual self-indulgent verbosity. It’s the most wonderful time of the MCC year! Click, scroll, ooh, ahh, and keep on frolicking down the internet superhighway!
Pies nearly outnumbered people at Anne’s Thanksgiving this year.
It’s the holiday season! Yes, again! The past two weeks have been far from boring as Thanksgiving came and went, events kept sliding into our schedules, opportunities for both travel and sedentary diversions fought to take up our head space, and Christmas kept trying to assert its dominance too soon. Some of the busyness lent itself to pictures.
Some of the things I did:
* Thanksgiving at home! My side of the family has more or less forfeited turkey-time now that most of us live far from each other — states away, in some cases. In lieu of that, on Thanksgiving Day itself the last few years we’ve been inviting my mom over so she doesn’t have to spend the day alone. Anne makes a feast for the four of us that would feed a full-size gathering. I watch a movie with Mom, I spend a few seconds reminiscing in my head about how I used to spend Thanksgiving night studying the Black Friday ads in the newspaper, and then we dine on the leftovers for days. That’s baseline Thanksgiving of late. I finished the sweet potatoes Wednesday morning for breakfast, and thus were our leftover duration standards met.
Not pictured: the second of two boneless Butterball turkeys Anne made, our household’s event-dinner poultry of choice.
* Thanksgiving way from home! After Anne’s grandma passed away in 2018, her side’s turkey time went on hiatus as everyone suddenly began focusing on gatherings in their other circles that they’d been missing over the years, or they indulged other non-holiday activities while Mamaw was no longer around to guilt-trip them sweetly into coming over. This year two key relatives moved up to Indiana after a decades-long stay in Kentucky and offered to host a Thanksgiving comeback special. One catch: it was Friday at noon, which meant no one could spend the entire day shopping. As most folks rely more heavily on online shopping nowadays and are okay with driving local proprietors into the poorhouse, nobody complained about schedule conflict.
As seen in our lead photo, we had too much pie, a phrase that sounds like heresy, and yet there it is. I limited myself to sliver-sized slices from three different pies and pretended that was a mature choice. Even before the Friday shindig, we’d already had pumpkin and pecan pies at home…and a chocolate pudding pie the weekend before, as a pre-Thanksgiving teaser dessert, kind of like how some families let kids open one gift on Christmas Eve. All told, the pie collection featured were pistachio, squash, pumpkin, Oreo, different Oreo, chocolate non-Oreo, Tollhouse Cookie, custard, cherry, and my favorite, pecan chocolate chip. For anyone demanding a change of pace, there was a store-bought pumpkin roll, and the last faction to arrive brought a cake I never got to see.
A few of our preferred groceries have become scarce or nonexistent during the temporary recessional inflationary supply-chain crisis-esque inconvenience meltdown trifle catastrophe that’s been status quo for like two years straight, but at long as we can find pie, or pie can find us, we believe America will stand tall and brave any other challenges ahead. Hopefully.
Our relatives were pretty happy to see each other again. Right on time, my social awkwardness kicked in as all the most interesting and ebullient talkers decided the best place for mingling in varying groupings would be in the room where I wasn’t. Three of us guys who weren’t much on initiating chitchat (all of us being plus-ones to blood kin) were left in the living room with the TV off and no one volunteering to do anything about it. Instead we agreed to find separate directions in which to stare off into space, avoid eye contact, and fall back on the hoary excuse that we were “digesting”. I kept my phone pocketed for as long as I could, but eventually caved. I got in a good forty minutes’ silent, boring doomscrolling before anyone checked on me.
In a few ways I’d missed that. Sort of.
Their doggie kept me company through some of that. I didn’t get her name.
* Black Friday shopping anyway! On my old blog I used to have an annual tradition of keeping a “Black Friday War Journal”, a complete rundown of times, stops, and purchasing results written throughout the hours I’d spend on Black Friday out there in the predawn pandemonium and the maddened crowds, all written in the terse, paranoiac style of Frank Castle. I walked away from all that as Black Friday metamorphosed into a very different thing over time, but I do miss keeping those War Journals.
Despite our noon engagement, I got out for a few hours in the morning beforehand to grab a couple of minor sales. I saw no customer feeding frenzies, no fistfights, and no police springing into action to quell riots. At 8 a.m. Barnes & Noble was teeming with dozens of teens. At 9 a.m. Target was already sold out of a popular Nintendo Switch game in their ad (or they hadn’t bothered to order any — I checked two different Targets, mind you). By 10 a.m. Best Buy had almost no line at the registers. I was home by 11.
* Family Game Night! That was Saturday evening. I’ve posted in the past about some of our experiences with new board games. The ones that catch our attention are too expensive for us to make this a regular habit, although after seeing how many Likes my Instagram posts get whenever I share them, it’s really tempting to reinvent myself as a Board Game Guy. Our latest acquisition is Terraforming Mars, a 2016 release in which each player is a future corporation doing its part to turn Mars into Earth Junior, ostensibly in the name of solving a humanitarian crisis and advancing humankind’s frontiers and scientific achievements, but also you’re competing to see who can take the most credit. Corporations gonna corporate.
The setup and teaching phases took us far too long, but eventually we picked up speed as we got used to the rules, slowly realized which of the zillions of scores ‘n’ stats mattered most, and figured out how to sabotage other’s plans in the grand corporate tradition. My son won this initial skirmish, but I expect different results next time. Hopefully.
Anne and I hope to start on season 3 of Apple+’s For All Mankind in the next few weeks or so. This game feels like an apropos prologue.
* Solo Game Nights! Or, “how I spend every night after 9:00 when I’m not sleepy and not writing, which is most of them lately.” Fallout 3 has been keeping me company. I’ll write more about it in the next annual “Old Guy with a PS3” entry, but for now let me say that, considering the number of years I spent playing nothing but Skyrim, luring me into a game whose mechanics and sandbox sprawl are virtually identical to Skyrim‘s was like handing a Jack Daniels gift-box to your alcoholic dad. Thankfully there aren’t nearly as many locations, and the Capital Wasteland is far smaller than Tamriel, so maybe I’ll “finish” it sometime early in 2023. The less I write here, the more time I have for covering ground there.
The fence around Fallout 3‘s crater where the White House used to be. Lately this image could also double as Twitter’s home page.
* Xfinity Watchathon! A few times per year, our old-fashioned cable TV provider will treat their customers to several free days of premium services they refuse to subscribe to normally. That’s when I catch up on my HBO stories. My last Watchathon was devoted entirely to season 3 of Barry, which remains amazing; this time in between all the other activities I just wrote about above, I managed to fit in ten episodes of Succession (I ended with season 3’s riotous shareholders’ meeting, and hope the next episode doesn’t begin with poor Frank still trapped at the podium vamping for time), the HBO Max original film See How They Run (a frivolous whodunit with some historical facts blended in, and I cheered when I recognized Lucian Msamati from the awesome Gangs of London as Agatha Christie’s husband), and, for Mom’s Thanksgiving afternoon entertainment as a lifelong fan of disaster films, Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall, the worst 2022 film I’ve seen so far. Thanks, Comcast, mostly!
* A funeral. Anne’s great-uncle, her Mamaw’s youngest brother, passed away Thanksgiving Eve after three years of compounding illnesses and conditions. He was an Air Force veteran who went on to work for the FAA, he served on the local township school board for sixteen years, he spent over five decades in the Lions Club and assorted charity works, he used to take the family out for Christmas dinner every year at Gray Bros. Cafeteria in Mooresville, and he was always kind to me and my son whenever he saw us, same as he was to pretty much anyone who intersected with his path. His numerous accomplishments added up to the sort of obituary that makes you hope your own obit won’t end up a two-line slug that just says, “Mostly harmless.”
* Things that will get their own MCC entries in the week ahead! Stick with us as I’m on staycation all next week and should have plenty of time to write about:
…and maybe even more, more, more, right here on MCC! If you don’t read about all these by next Wednesday, please tell Anne to go drag me out of Fallout 3 kicking and screaming.
Any resemblance between my Daredevil T-shirt and the Doomsday Clock, or any significance of placing my free “I Voted!” sticker at five minutes till, are largely incidental.
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I do the democracy thing twice a year (yes, even primaries) because I believe I ought to and because they keep letting me. I don’t recall why I didn’t post about it last year. Maybe society was to blame? Or maybe the reason was so dumb that I was counting on my aging brain to forget the reason why, just so I couldn’t blame myself for not writing about it I can’t recall, so maybe Past-Me’s plan worked. Politicians prefer long-term memory loss in their constituents anyway, so really this is just my brain getting into the spirit of the occasion.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 