MeSoFun Blog

It's defiantly sunny in Boston today and temperatures in the 50s demand a run. I bounce out my front door and jog to Maverick Station on the Blue Line. It's a five-minute cruise. The three state troopers' cars that were there yesterday are gone now. A single trooper looks intent as he walks the platform. The only military presence is a couple of teens wearing Military Police uniforms. They are carrying Dunkin' Donuts iced drinks. Nobody is going to attack this part of Boston. One stop down the line, I hop out at Aquarium, located next to Quincy Market. No police, no military. I slog up the cold, shaded State Street, staring at the State House where the Boston Massacre (1700s era) happened. There are black police vans and cops in tactical gear carrying automatic rifles. Inside, a woman in Marine gear is checking Facebook on her iPhone. Priorities. I hang a left on Tremont and here come the memories. There is the Freedom Trail and the hotel The Wife and I stays at a coupl...

New England has a nickname for everything. If you have a cabin in the wilderness somewhere, that's your "camp." If you're an outsider visiting in the mountains of Vermont, you might be called a "flatlander." And while the rest of the world offhandedly refers to Boston as Beantown, old-school locals call it The Hub. For my Midwestern readers, of which there are many, this is a foreign concept. People from Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri and Illinois do not refer to Des Moines, Iowa, as The Hub. But this is New England, a composite of six small states, and the nickname doesn't have much to do with geography. Boston is the heart of sports' fans consciousness. The Celtics, Bruins, Patriots and Red Sox are the only major league teams in New England and they are all Boston teams. But this isn't just about what teams you root for and see on TV. If you live in New England, you're likely to go to Boston for something a few ti...

Hello, beautiful. The New/Old Job started Monday. I'm back in Portland, working at the newspaper I worked at part-time for two years. Only now I'm full-time. The key in that first paragraph is it is written in first-person singular sense. For you normal people out there, it's the obvious: It's just me up here. No Daisy Duke. No The Wife. No TV, cooking utensils nor any other comforts of home. That stuff will come, likely May 4 when we load up for to cover a specific 110-mile section of road between Boston and Portland for the third time in three years and one day. The moving truck arrived in Portland on May 3, 2010. TW and her mother had flown into town a few days earlier to procure housing. All I and a couple of friends had to do was drive across the country. The degree of difficulty in driving was slightly higher than you think; Dukakis, our first chocolate Lab, had a penchant for cutting some of the worst farts known to man and we were in tight quarters. Still, Maine...