MeSoFun Blog

I couldn't find any images for Jimmie Howser, PA-C. Nobody asked, but since a blog with advice to the PA Class of 2012 is so well received, I thought I'd follow up with a word to the spouses, significant others and families of future PA students. You have no idea what you're getting into. You nod. Yeah, right. It's going to be tough. You get that. But it won't be that bad. It can't be. Oh, it can. There's a reason nobody ever tells you specifically why PA school is going to suck. For the students, school is like the baby alien from Aliens. It's going to find your weak point and it's going to come popping out. How are you at eating and exercising well while under stress? Pretty good? How about getting enough sleep when you have a billion pages of reading to do? OK at that? How about calling your family and friends when you're 100 percent busy? BAM. Weak spot. Every student's soft spot is different. I won't get into TW's, other than to...

We're all very excited here at MeSoFun/Good Morning From Maine. It's a big day. Some sixth months after our inception, it's our 100th blog post. Yeah, it should have happened sooner, but I had leg surgery and got looped on drugs for a month. You know how it is. In any case, turn the lights down low and put on a little music . We'll do this right. And by right, I mean I will point out a few blogs you might have missed along the way, as well as a few thoughts about blogging in general. You're thrilled. I sense that. THE BLOGS Probably the coolest part of this blog, as a writer, is the blogs I feel are worthwhile (i.e. they have a point to them and I take more than 10 minutes writing them), are the most popular blog posts. They're over there on the right of the screen. How I met my wife. Remembering a character. Why I quit my dream job. Of course, a couple all-time favorites have been overshadowed. Well worth the time reads: How NOT to eat a Maine lobster A cookie ...

I swear she's not on drugs ... as far as I know. Let's just lay down the groundwork for what's to come. I am not my dog's parent. I am not daddy. I own the dog and I take good care of it, but I am not its parent. I understand that and you understand that. Now that we've cleared that up, let me tell you how owning a dog is like having a kid. As a former live-in nanny for a newborn and a 2-year-old, I speak with some authority on the subject . The day she learned to swim. Owning a dog, a puppy in particular, is tough. I need some dog owners out there to back me up on this statement: It's a little like an accelerated version of watching a kid grow up. For example, when we picked up Daisy from a shelter in Tennessee in February, she didn't like being in her crate. Just like your 2-year-old, right? She would bark in the crate at 5 a.m., ready to go out and play or, preferably, she would lay down in bed next to you for a while and get her breakfast. That was Febru...

That's a big boaaaaaaat (Minnesota accent). The one negative, the only drawback, when we have out-of-town guests is this blog suffers. That's why there were four or five straight days with no posts. The parents were in town. Our first guests came just over a year ago, my uncle and my cousin. I had no idea what to do with them. We didn't have TV service, though we had Netflix. I didn't know the good restaurants and I didn't know what they might want to do on their visit. Fast forward a year and we've got this thing down pat. The parents and I spent one day running up into the mountains, checking out the hill country. Another, we climbed the Portland Observatory (that's where the picture at the top of this blog is from) and hung out downtown. We ate out at least once a day. We took the dog on hikes. And everywhere, really. Daisy was a constant companion, for fear she will destroy the house if left alone. And then they're gone and you're back trying to ...

I like food. It's possible you've noticed . I could easily weigh 300 pounds. Those that know me over the last 10 years might scoff at the notion. I'm skinny. I exercise religiously and bring fruit to work to snack on. There's no way I could ever be seriously overweight. Except. Being overweight is the defining characteristic of my life. We could bring in a psychologist to point out that I'm letting my weight, and food, define my life. Let's not argue semantics right now. I'm coming out of the fat closet. I think about food, and my weight, constantly. That alone doesn't make me fat, but it's a symptom. Going into 10th grade, I weighed 235 pounds. I was maybe 5-foot-2. By any definition, I was morbidly obese. I could have lost 100 pounds and not been considered frail or gaunt. Fed up (ha!), I lost weight the unhealthy way. I stopped eating. I didn't cut down on my meals. I walked out the door for the 7 a..m. schoolbus without eating breakfast. I w...

I'm easily suggestible. A cousin needed some help on an English project. The assignment wasn't straightforward, which is great. Torture kids with arcane projects whenever possible. That's my motto. Her topic: Write about a food that brings back memories. Cousin chose to wrote about our Grandpa's daily ice cream sundaes. To help her out, I wrote a few sentences about Grandpa's habit and thought I'd throw them out there for you to devour. Journalists never tire of puns. This isn't to be confused with a memorial posted last week. This is just a writing project. I'm not constantly mourning. Promise. Here goes: Grandpa was a man of habit. Almost every morning, there would be waffles. Sometimes he would mix in a fresh Florida grapefruit. But the waffles were a given. Lunch was a fudge sundae. There were no fancy caramel toppings, candy nor fruit added to the ice cream. Just ice cream and Hershey's syrup. If dinner was at a restaurant, it had to be a burger...

It's a little frivolous to follow the last post with this post, but if I am anything, it is frivolous. The Danimal always liked that, I think, so we'll trudge onward in the spirit of finding some levity in the world. Well hello there. My world, of course, is not very big. It extends about two blocks to the east of our house, where there's a small wooded, rocky tract of land that has somehow remained undeveloped despite its prime location near downtown. My guess is the giant rocky cliff in the back of the property has something to do with it. It's undevelopable. Petunia and I go there often. This is great news for the neighborhood dogs. It takes about 10 minutes to walk the entirety of the trail system, using both words loosely. But it's a nice little scamper area on a rainy day. The neighborhood kids seem to have taken a shining to the place as well. Or adults with a serious Bear Grylls obsession. Improvised housing is everywhere in the woods. No, not like these p...

Journalists aren't normal. You could say it takes a certain kind of person to be a journalist, but you'd be wrong. There's lots of different kinds of people who are journalists. It's just that they sometimes have more extreme personalities than you see in, say, the movie Office Space. That brings us to Dan Dickson, one of the few larger-than-life characters I have ever known. If you were to write a book about Dan, or perhaps a movie, his character would inevitably watered down by editors because nobody would ever find a character like him believable. Though I'm sure I'm mostly writing for an audience of a hundred or so Salt Lake Tribune employees who already know "The Danimal," it's important to pause here to talk about one of his most important personal characteristics, his voice. Dan's voice is a strange blend of cowboy Western accent and surfer-dude guy accent. Take The Dude from The Big Lebowski, make his voice a little more nasal, and add...

Thank you, Bear Gryhls. A few weeks ago, I brought my 2001 Corolla to the repair shop on a Sunday afternoon. It was due for an annual inspection and a couple of minor repairs. The repair shop is a few miles away and, with T-Dubs living with my Aunt Florence in Ft. Lauderdale, nobody was around to give me a ride home. We were somewhere off to the left of the big green spot, definitely not on a red-dashed trail. No matter. There's a stretch of woods that Daisy, my infectiously athletic 16-month old Lab, likes to patrol. I'd seen a Portland Trails sign on the road near the repair shop. The repair shop is in the middle of nowhere, just over Interstate 95 and sitting in an open field. It would be picturesque if it weren't for the 15 or so junkers sitting out in the yard at all times. Daisy excitedly jumped in the car and excitedly jumped out at the repair shop. We walked back to the previously unexplored trailhead and dove into the woods. Any time we faced a fork in the road, we...

My favorite back alley in Portland, complete with a Prius at the end. I've been a little busy contemplating my place in life and fearing for it the last couple of weeks. And then it started raining. Sidenote: Rain drives my dog nuts. She wants to go outside and spaz out (meaning, she wants to pee on shrubs and chase squirrels, possibly at the same time. During rain storms, she flops dramatically onto our floor. How does a dog flop dramatically? The legs basically fall out from under her and she sighs loudly as she hits the floor. Then, 5 minutes later, she walks a few circles and repeats the flop. Such a drama queen. And now it's mid-September. I kind of can't believe it. T-Dubs is in Ft. Lauderdale for the next couple of weeks. She misses me and ME (the state). Mostly, she misses her dog. Yes, Daisy is all we talk about. The phone conversations are as obnoxious as you would expect. The reason mid-September is significant: It really isn't. However, the countdown clock...