Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #91: Weird Sneezes, Hot Dog Head, When Henry Met Henry, etc.

1. Have you ever noticed how some people have odd-sounding sneezes? Like most people typically have a sneeze that sounds like what you’re probably thinking of right now. Every now and then, though, you come across a sneeze that stands out as weird. I was in my car in a parking lot when I heard a man start sneezing outside his car. Well, either sneezing or coughing. Anyway, it sounded like a human/bird combination. I was able to get a good read on it since the guy stayed outside of his car, sneezing loudly for several minutes. It got to be pretty disturbing because of how loud it was. I couldn’t tell if he was sneezing or having some sort of fit. Other people were looking, but nobody said anything. The guy ended up driving away without incident, but left us all with a strange story to tell.


2. It’s interesting how life comes full circle sometimes. In 1999, I’d go to the beach and listen to new(ish) Toad the Wet Sprocket on CD. All the while being inspired to write poetry in a notebook. In 2025, I’m listening to new(ish) Toad the Wet Sprocket streaming on Spotify while being inspired to write poetry in a Word document. From Quarter-Life to Mid-Life, some things still remain.


3. This is a bit of the weird and random stuff that I caused myself. In New England, we got a massive Nor’easter for a good 3 days. In all, we ended up with something like 4 inches of rain in total. I was out for a drive surveying the damage when I got an idea. My car is white, therefore it is almost always dirty. With the rain still falling at a good clip, I got an idea. I decided to stop at the store and buy some cleaning wipes and paper towels. You see where this is going. Since there was nobody else on the roads, I stopped at a park. I then proceeded to ‘wash’ my car using the cleaning wipes, rain, and paper towels. I ended up with a pile of wet garbage that I had to throw away. It wasn’t as sparkly clean like a proper car wash would have given, but all in all, my car looked much better after that. Laugh if you want, I know I did as I realized how crazy I looked. I would have died if someone pulled up and saw this idiot using a roll of paper towels to ‘clean’ his car.


4. Some people are an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Some are just idiots. There is a guy at my gym, probably early 50s. He works out in jeans, whatever that says about him. Anyway, he comes into the gym and exclusively uses the elliptical machine. He makes sure to thoroughly clean the machine before using it, which is great. Then he sweats all over it and never cleans it afterward. What is up with that? To top it off, I passed him at the grocery store, and upon entering, he put hand sanitizer on. I was confused. So this guy cares about getting germs from others, but not about sharing his? Okay, buddy, oh, and your head looks like a boiled hot dog in shape and shininess.

Yup, pretty much like that

5. An update from last week. The cute girl came back into my work. I had a client scheduled while she’d be there. As luck would have it, my client rescheduled to an earlier time, meaning I’d be free when she showed up. She ended up arriving 10 minutes late and mentioned being really tired. So even though I was able to speak to her, I knew I needed to keep it shorter since her appointment was behind. It ended up being good, brief but good. I guess I just have to keep practicing patience and persistence. She’ll be back in a few weeks. That’ll give me plenty of time to have some witty lines and try to make sure my schedule is open.


6. In October, as the weather starts to get cooler, we more often see an invasion at my work. Crickets begin to get inside and set up shop in the baseboards and dark corners. Their chirps echo off the cement floors and can drive you crazy. I began stalking one this week and swore that it was a ventriloquist because whenever I got to where I thought it was, the sound started coming from somewhere else. At one point, it slipped out from a baseboard, and I tried to catch it, but it went right back in and chirped like a jerk in my face. The next morning, I came in and there was the cricket sitting in the middle of the bathroom floor. I caught it in a paper cup and put it outside. It didn’t even try to escape. I wonder if it felt bad for humiliating me the day before and gave itself up?


7. I don’t know if this is embarrassing or not, but I only this week discovered that there are two different cookies, macarons and macaroons. I thought there was just the coconut macaroons, and that people sometimes misspell it as macaron. Nope. A macaron is what looks like a fluffy, soft Oreo in different colors. How is this something I’m just realizing? Next, you’re gonna tell me Hellman’s and Best Foods mayo is the same thing. Or that Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s are the same restaurant.

8. While at the grocery store, I bumped into my Uncle Steve, whom I haven’t seen in months. He was my running mentor since he became a marathon runner in his 50s. Now he’s retired from running and work in general, so it has become harder to bump into him. I was caught off guard a little by just how much he looks like my Grampa, just with shorter hair. I mentioned it to him, and he said that he looked so much like his father that people were mistaking them. The only problem is my Grampa died 6 years ago. My uncle joked that people must have thought Grampa’s ghost was haunting the nursing home where he died, which is also where my uncle worked. I laughed loud enough that people started staring at us, but who cares? I always leave a conversation with my Uncle Steve feeling better about myself. I never take that for granted.


9. This week marked what would have been my Grampa’s 100th birthday. I was thinking of him a lot, and when visiting my mom, we shared stories of him. My sister Ashley arrived, and we all were chatting. I noticed the sunset as the pink sky continued to grow. It wasn’t until my mom called for us that we saw the incredible sunset rainbow from the backyard. It had been raining, but never did I think I’d see a sunset rainbow. As we all took photos, we realized how symbolic it was that the rainbow was on Grampa’s birthday. Maybe it was a gift to him, or for us from him, but it made the day even more special.

10. A good chunk of this week’s blog will be dedicated to the When Henry Met Henry short film project. I had put together a fundraiser to allow us to hire cast and crew. This weekend was the big filming day. Being that in total it will likely be somewhere between 6-8 minutes in length it took us about 4 hours to film it. There were 5 of us total at the shoot, and things went as well as we could have hoped. So there’s a little overview.


11. They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. I had promised to arrive at the filming location, a beach in Wellfleet, with a Box O’ Joe from Dunkin’. Yes, I did that part. As the crew trickled in, half of us walked the roughly 1/3 mile to where we’d be shooting. Only when we got there did one of the crew ask where the cups were for the coffee. Yup, I forgot the cups. Well, in all honesty, the people at Dunkin’ didn’t give them to me, as it was so busy, but I still should have waited and asked. That was my first impression. Hey, how about we all just chug scalding hot coffee from a box? Nah, I’ll pass.


12. Speaking of the location. It was perfect. A very secluded sand dune that went off the beach and into nearby woods. But as you just read, it was about 1/3 of a mile from the parking lot. Not too bad if you’re out for a leisurely stroll, but when you’re lugging equipment and making 3 trips each way, it can become a chore. I ended up walking well over 3 miles in the sand. All I can say is that it was a better workout than many I have had recently. After eating something small at 6am, and doing all of that walking, I was able to eat a big McDonald’s dinner and still was 400 calories below my allotment for the day.

13. They say the greatest accomplishments come when leaving your comfort zone. I definitely did that. I had no idea about directing, producing, or anything like that. I was dropped into the deep end on this film. Our sound person couldn’t make it, so I was tasked with that. I had to learn on the fly. I think I did all right, but it’ll be determined during the editing. While the actors and director were very loose and chatty with each other, I spent a lot of my time listening and learning all I could. My hope is that with each experience in film, I learn more and more until maybe one day I can lead my own project. We’ll see.


14. Oh, and by the way, just because it’s mid-October and summer is long gone doesn’t mean you can’t get sunburned. Take it from me and my red face. Well, except for the whiter areas around my eyes since I was wearing sunglasses. The only good thing about a sunburn in the fall is that the temperatures dropping into the 40s at night make sleeping easier than if it were 70 and humid at night.


15. Fun fact: we filmed When Henry Met Henry on the same weekend as the famed Wellfleet Oysterfest. It typically brings 10-20,000 people to the town over the weekend. Luckily, we all got to the beach way ahead of the crowds, so we didn’t worry about parking. Not too long after, several school buses showed up as they would be shuttling people over to the festival. When we headed out to the shooting location, there were maybe a dozen cars in the parking lot. When we returned at the end, not only was the lot full, but cars were lined down the street. On my drive home, going through Wellfleet, the vehicles were lining the streets in a lot of places. It just shows how luck was on our side with the film.

The cast and crew

16. To wrap it up, I plan on making a video where I go over more of the behind-the-scenes of the making of the film. I decided to get a jump on that this weekend. I was about 7 minutes into recording the video when my recording software froze up and I lost it all. Obviously, I was mad, but what made it worse was that this was the 2nd straight time I’d tried to record a video on that software only for it to glitch out mid-record. I was so blinded with rage that I nearly shattered my webcam slam dunking it on the floor. It took several rounds of embarrassing fail videos on YouTube for me to feel better.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog: #38 - Vanilla Ice, Cricket Whisperer, Northern Lights, etc.

1. It’s the time of year when people start pulling their boats out of the water. This past week one guy was pulling his 30-foot boat out at a ramp at a local beach. It was a weird dichotomy as it was definitely a cool boat, but he decided to blast Ice Ice Baby while hooking it up. I think within a few months of that song coming out in August 1990 I was embarrassed to play it and I was 13. Granted I didn’t see the guy super up close so maybe he was Vanilla Ice. That would be the only person on Earth I could see proudly blasting that song in 2024.

2. This week marked 15 years since my infamous Caught In A Rising Tide video. It was one of my first YouTube videos and was a funny experience of me walking out to Wing Island in Brewster to get some photos only to return an hour later with the tide coming in. I ended up walking through nearly 2’ of water, soaking my shoes and pants. People asked why I didn’t take my shoes/socks off and I figured I’d end up with splinters from the boards I was walking on which would lead to infections and then maybe losing a foot. Soaked shoes made more sense. I went back to Wing Island and shot a sequel video. No, I wasn’t stuck in a rising tide but it was a fun and fitting follow-up video.

3. I decided to treat myself to a pizza from Domino’s. Now I know that some people don’t like Domino’s but they do have over 20,000 locations worldwide so they’re doing something right. Anyway, I ordered a 3 topping medium pizza from them and went to pick it up. They were super busy inside so what happened next was understandable. They handed me my pizza and I immediately noticed it was a large. I checked the receipt and it said medium so I got an upgrade for free. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. In addition to the pizza being a large, it had additional toppings including mushrooms which I am not a fan of. I will say that picking mushrooms off a pizza was a fair trade for getting a free upgrade to a large.

4. I am approaching 47 years old and yet every year I am still amazed at how quickly the sunset times roll back in the fall. It’s like one minute you blink and the sunset is 8pm and then you blink again and you’re walking out of work at 6pm at dusk with an owl in the trees near you scaring all of the little creatures below. The way I found out it was an owl was not that I saw it, I didn’t stick around. No, my co-worker saw it do some swooping over the parking lot in search of dinner.

5. I was pretty zoned out at work trying to get caught up on some paperwork. I was so focused on my computer screen that I didn’t notice the encroaching intruder. A small spider was slowly descending from the ceiling on its web. I was so into my work that I didn’t see it until it was quite literally an inch from my face right between my eyes. Only then did I let out a yell in surprise. Don’t worry though the spider was not smashed. I grabbed its web up above and coasted it to the floor behind my desk.

6. In other insect news we have had a stowaway cricket inside my work for weeks. Sometimes it’s quiet, other times it chirps so loudly that it seems to echo off of the walls. Today its chirping was loud enough that I actually tracked it down. I grabbed a paper cup and a tissue and went to work trying to coax it into the cup. To my surprise, after I asked it nicely to get in, and promised I wasn’t going to just crush it, the cricket crawled into the cup. Then he got smashed. Just kidding, I brought it outside and let it go in the grass.

Am I the cricket whisperer? 

7. There are 2 days each week when I have to be at work early, typically around 6:40am. My body is now used to waking up around 4:45am. However, getting to bed the night before is still a harrowing task. The routine I have now that is working relatively well consists of popping 2 melatonin at 7:30pm followed by a 3^rd at 8:30. This usually results in me being knocked out by 9pm. It was easier in the summer to wake up so early. Now with sunrise being close to 7am when my eyes open at 4:45, it’s easy for my brain to try to trick me into thinking it can’t be time to wake up yet. Each time I get up on time is still a minor miracle.

8. Nothing better than being awakened from a deep sleep at 3:30am by thunder so loud that I could feel it shaking the house. I spent a half hour trying to go back to sleep for a little longer but the thunder and lightning were so severe I just gave up and got out of bed at 4:30. Despite being tired I would much rather deal with a few severe thunderstorms than the once a century Hurricane Milton that is wrecking Central Florida.

9. A fun memory that popped up on Facebook this week dates back to 2016. My sister Ashley and I were at Longnook Beach in Truro, MA which is very remote with little to no cell service. We spotted a middle-aged man with a bicycle walking up the 50-60’ sand pathway to the parking lot. Out of nowhere one of his bike tires popped. The weather was a bit misty and feeling bad we offered to pack him and the bike in my car and drive him home. Luckily he wasn’t far but it was another remote section of little Truro. Then things got weirder. We helped him get his bike inside his house and he offered us tea. We politely declined as it was a little odd. He was insistent on giving us something as a thank you. This ended up being in the form of a random CD. It looked like a mix of tracks by some unknown artist. Maybe it was him, but who knows since once we got back in the car I was already looking for a trash can to throw it in.

Longnook Beach in Truro, MA

10. A first for me happened this week as I got to see and photograph the Aurora Borealis, aka the Northern Lights. They are rarely visible this far south, typically being seen in Canada or maybe at best Northern New England. I took the long way home from my mother’s house and stopped at Gray’s Beach, aka Bass Hole, in Yarmouth Port. It was not even 7:30pm and I could see the pinks and greens in the sky. It was beyond words. I was mad that I didn’t have my regular camera, or my tripod for my phone, but still what I got ended up being some of my best photos ever. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. A chilly Thursday night at the beach on Cape Cod and there must have been 200 people there. The parking lot was overflowing. It was an experience I won’t soon forget.

Aurora Borealis at Bass Hole in Yarmouth Port, MA

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #31: Wall Crickets, Recycling Payouts, Voided Steaks, etc.

1. The other night I was trying to sleep when I heard the sound of a cricket outside my window. I figured it was close by but eventually, it got quiet so it had to have hopped away right? The next night I started hearing the cricket again but this time closer. At first, I thought it was in my wall. It turned out it was on my windowsill, but it was obscured by the towels I packed around my air conditioner so that no cool air leaked out. Once I figured that out it was game over, I peeled back one of the towels and sprayed a little Raid in there, and I haven’t heard the cricket since. Of course, the joke will likely be on me in a few weeks when I take the a/c out and a dead cricket lands on my foot.

2. I was listening to a favorite podcast of mine this week. The host was answering questions from his listeners. One question asked what the best way was to remember/honor a loved one who had passed away. The host’s answer has stuck with me ever since. He said to try to live the life that your loved one who had passed want for you. It made me step back and seriously reassess my current life.

3. I know I have mentioned it before in these blogs but I have to reiterate how much I love the downtempo music. It is like a shot of good vibes to my brain and also helps me relax, write, and think. It’s to the point that my Pandora station has at least a few dozen ‘thumbs up’ songs. I’ll put a favorite of mine at the end if you want to dip your toes in.

4. For the first time in 5 years I planned an overnight road trip. I am headed to Northern New Hampshire to stay at a place I stayed at in 2012. I can’t believe it’s been so long since I spent a night off of Cape Cod. My only hope is this return trip to Lincoln, NH goes better than the last. Oh don’t get me wrong the place I stayed was amazing, and the places I visited were as well. The only problem was that I drove all the way up there and forgot my memory card for my camera so I had to use my iPhone 3. Not exactly high quality.

Hoping to get lots of much higher-quality photos this time!

5. Being semi-smart I actually (re)signed up for AAA before my trip up to New Hampshire. I got the Plus package half-off, what a deal, $51!? Now I almost hope I blow a tire or lock my keys in my car. Almost.

6. I follow that last thought up with being semi-stupid. I scanned a steak at a supermarket and the sale price didn’t come up. I asked for help and the employee came by and voided the original scan. He then scanned the steak again and put in the sale price. I was only half paying attention and saw 2 steaks listed on the screen not realizing one had been voided. So when I asked ‘what about that steak?’ he calmly said ‘I just voided it you’re all set sir.’ I hung my head and apologized before leaving. The steak was good by the way, to end the story on a happy note.

7. When out for a run on the bike trail I was getting passed by, and then passing, a mother and her young daughter who was probably 7 on their bikes a few times. The daughter seemed really nervous when getting to road crossings and her mother had to coax her across. After seeing this once it was happening again at another crossing and instead of running past I slowed down and looked at the daughter and said ‘don’t worry I’ll walk across with you too.’ She slowly followed her mother across and I was on my way. It doesn’t take much effort to be a compassionate human.

8. I take my bottles to the supermarket to recycle them. I typically take a few weeks to fill a trash bag with plastic liter bottles. Each time I go I end up leaving with about $1.25 on a receipt. Rather than go right into the store and cash it I try to wait until I have a less embarrassing amount to get. This week I took roughly 4 months' worth of recycling receipts into the supermarket to cash in. My total? A whopping $14.10. What is my plan for it? This is the only time I will buy scratch tickets. I’ll likely lose on them all, but hey it’s basically free money so whatever.

9. With 3 full days of vacation coming up I am well aware of, and prepared for, needing to hit the gym hard upon my return to Cape Cod. I plan on driving a lot and taking tons of photos and videos. One thing I don’t plan on doing is any formal exercise. That coupled with ‘enjoying’ the restaurants of each area I visit means it’ll be running and weights aplenty starting next weekend.

10. A highlight of the week for me was recording a foolish video filled with inside jokes for my oldest friend while on a run on the bike trail. Part of it consisted of me angrily yelling at a butterfly for not staying still to allow me to get a photo. Too bad the people going by while I filmed didn’t get the memo that it was a joke, I looked like I needed to be sent to the nut house.

David Arkenstone - Falling Stars