Mugs of Memories

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of one or more interesting coffee mugs you might have. Because it's my experience that people have coffee mugs with interesting stories behind them. At least, I do.

Okay, then. Here are six of them, each one representing a particular time and place.

That brown mug on the left above was from a pottery sale at Syracuse University, when I was in college the first time. I've drunk a lot of tea from it over the years, sometimes in connection with a diet, sometimes doing my best to pretend I was in Mâvarin, where a mug like that would not look out of place. Some of you have seen a picture of this mug with my character Fayubi's face reflected in its contents.

The mug on the right above is from Disneyland, almost certainly the Emporium. It's the second one John has had - we broke the first one. circa 2005 or 2006, this one is, I forget which.


Hooray for the BBC! This one is a souvenir of a trip to London circa 1995, when John, his business partner and I went to Wood Lane to select photos for the next series of Doctor Who trading cards. We also went to a Doctor Who exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI), had dinner with Gary Russell (who was editing Doctor Who Magazine at the time), and went to a signing by Alan Moore (who had nothing to do with Doctor Who; just thought I'd mention him).

The EPCOT Center mug dates all the way back to 1986, when John and I were driving around the country, looking for someplace it wasn't winter. What John really wanted was a really magnificent statue of Maleficent, but he settled for a mug, a cap and a gray Hawaiian shirt.

The KUAT mug came from the KUAT prize closet during one of the many pledge break shifts for which the United Whovians of Tucson manned the phones, usually during Lawrence Welk, some special or other (I remember Deepak Chopra, Dr. Laura, the Eagles and some polar bears, but not all the same night) and, of course, Doctor Who. When KUAT stopped airing the latter show, we stopped doing the pledge breaks. The club itself fell apart a few years later.

The Diamondbacks mug is a souvenir of the team's World Series win, the one and only shining baseball season that mattered to me after the dismantling of my beloved Tucson Toros. The mug itself came from the Tucson Sidewinders dugout store before spring training 2002.


Okay, there are no mugs in this last shot, but check out that rainbow! This is from today's drive home from work.

Karen