MeSoFun Blog

This is essentially what TW looks like in every way. The Wife* doesn't know this blog exists. It's not like it's intentional; as this is being typed I have no idea what the web address for this blog is. Which just goes to say: It'e been a while. Welcome back readers. *This is The Wife's chosen and preferred blog nickname, in part because it signifies the opposite of our non-patriarchal relationship. This disclaimer is needed in 2018. This is not a mushy, gushy Valentine's Day blog. If you want the feels, head over here to hear about how we became a couple. We're past mushy and gushy, and honestly, that's kind of a problem. TW is pragmatic. So is her husband. And after years of being together in a marriage, you sort of forget how to give the other person a romantic treat. As a result, we are pretty boring. In fact, erase the "pretty boring" and make that VERY boring. We wake up. I drink coffee (shipped from Duluth). TW showers and...

This is about where the pain started Saturday. Why do you run if it sucks so much? This is a very valid question I was asked a month ago. Runners complain. Your hands go numb and you complain. You slip and fall and you complain. You get intestinal cramps during a run and you need a bathroom NOW. It's humbling. I complain a lot. Why bother? There isn't an easy answer to that. It was a question The Devil was asking over and over Saturday morning as I ran through a picturesque half-marathon on the Maine coast. Why bother with this? Like any large race, the Maine Coast Half Marathon started runners in a herd. About 350 of us took off from the Biddeford UNE campus at 8 a.m. Saturday. We headed across a busy road and shuffled ahead in the breakdown lane of a major road for a mile. It was horrendous. We were elbow-to-elbow in a pack of runners, and it was impossible to find a comfortable stride. Just don't fall over. I ran a 10 minute, 30 second starting mile; I had trained to run...

Rat and Packie, as they are known in the family.  Mom doesn't like Mother's Day. Scratch that. She hates Mother's Day. She's serious about this. "It's just a way to sell ya a bunch of junk," Ma will tell you. She told me in my teens, long after she stopped receiving hand-drawn cards from her kids: "I'd rather you tell me you love me every other day of the year than on Mother's Day." Here we are, the longest possible period of time to next year's Mother's Day. Other moms got their cards and flowers and moved on to work today. Mom would have thrown her card out by now, probably. Scanning the Florida coast for her youth and vitality, stolen from her at the tender age of 27. By me. She's a pragmatic lady. She came by it honestly. Grandma worked as a vice president in a Florida bank back when women didn't work as vice presidents at banks. And she had four kids at home, which probably explains why she parented in a certain way. ...

If you can blow up that sign over our sink, you're in for a little laugh. The Wife will celebrate the 10th anniversary of her 29th birthday tomorrow. As such, she requested no jokes be made in her birthday card. This is serious stuff. We're closer to retirement than high school graduation. And TW gets what she wants in general. On her birthday, there isn't a question. No jokes in the card. So we'll air it all out here. My handwriting, like my heart, is terrible. You might think, from reading this blog or just seeing us around town, that I am an adoring husband. You're so wrong. Take, for instance, when TW is looking for a hair tie. The unstoppable thought that runs through my head is "Just look at your feet. There's always a hair tie around." In the past two days, I've found hair ties hanging on our coat rack, buried in a shag rug and in my laundry. Over the course of our marriage, I've probably picked up 7,647 hair ties. I'm confident the...

Dial X to exit PA school. This happens every now and then. My phone dings with an alert. Somebody has commented on my blog! I click and read the comment. It's often our old neighbor or a former co-worker or two. We chat. We make jokes. Good times. But every now and then it's somebody making a comment on a blog about how to survive PA school as a spouse . It happened a while ago and I've still been processing the comment because it's so damn sad. Our anonymous reader/commenter sounds like he's at the end of his rope. " I've never been more alone in my life, as the past 6 years has been every day spent with her. She's changed. My hope is she will come back after PA school is done. She's just not there," he wrote. There was more. He tried to be funny, but mostly it was sad. He's worried their marriage won't last. Communication is impossible. They don't see each other much. It's familiar. Every PA school spouse is nodding their head...

Ah, the scenes of winter. This kind of thing happens every winter. There's alway a horror story. What else would we do the rest of the year in Maine if not complain about winter? I came out to move my car because there's a parking ban tonight. This is what downtown living is like in winter. No big deal. There's a huge city-owned parking area a block from the house. I'll just amble to the car and pull it down the hill. Today, my car was almost immobilized and unable to make that drive. You could see the flashing blue police lights before you could see anything wrong on Park Street, the road next to my house. There was one police SUV at the bottom of the hill because a woman's car had veered to the left, gone over the sidewalk and taken out a possibly-decorative fire call box. Portland: We're quaint. Higher up the hill, there was a second police cruiser behind my car. I could see a sedan had jumped about halfway across a sidewalk; I just wasn't sure if he'...

Quasi-resolution No. 1: Play more games with these guys at the Bear. The Wife does *not* understand me. Gratuitous Daisy picture. This is not breaking news. Do not hold the presses. We knew this. TW, and much of the Western Hemisphere, takes the new year as a time for self-reflection, to further shine and hone the diamond that is life. And to her credit, TW comes up with laudable improvement goals such as volunteering more time and further defining personal aspirations. For me, a new year represents two things: 1. The start of tax return preparation; 2. Orange purchasing season. The naval oranges at Hannaford are amazing. I'm eating two a night at work. They are a glorious break from apples, which I normally eat hand over fist at my desk. I am that guy. Beyond that, a new year doesn't mean much. However, this flies in the face of orthodoxy. How can you possibly want to improve if you don't re-evaluate? There are two styles of change. The first is dramatic. You shave off all...

I like this one better. I can't figure out how to post a GIF on Facebook. This became apparent Thursday night, when instead of posting a GIF, Facebook just took one picture from a sequence. Fortunately, it was one of the "good" ones. Unfortunately, it seems a little attention-seeking when your caption is "When you try to take the perfect picture." Let's clear this up. You've probably heard rumors to the contrary, but The Wife and I are definitely not perfect. We don't only say that about ourselves, there are countless others who will say so on our behalf. We took 25 photos Thursday night. Some were in front of the Christmas tree, others were sitting in front of a stocking my great grandmother made over 30 years ago. We were happy with exactly one of those 25 photos. That's the one that got over 100 likes on Facebook. It's always nice to be "liked," but that wasn't my intention. I was trying to poke fun at ourselves. TW's blo...

It looks something like this. The call went out at work a few weeks ago, as it occasionally does, for stories. Tell us the stories behind your Thanksgiving recipes, our food editor implored. My first response: Pick a food item and I'll give you the story. Mom's stuffing goes back to when she lived in Pennsylvania and her home-cookin' neighbor shared a recipe, likely off a box of Saltines, that is equal parts delicious and terrible for your health. The stuffing has a stick and a half of butter in it. It's a miracle I'm not on medications. Turkeys? How about the time I bought five of them in Utah because they were $5 apiece. We ate turkey dinner once a month until May. The Wife introduced me to cooking turkey in a plastic bag. I am forever grateful. But the gravy story is the best because gravy is sentimental to me. Yes, I'm a male blogger who gets sentimental about gravy. Now you've seen it all. Grandma was a pragmatic woman. She was quick to laugh at a good ...

*trod, trod, trod, plod, trod* I have an obsession. Not the good kind, and certainly not the cologne®. Like many good Americans, I have some form of fitness tracker. Put bluntly, my phone tells me how many steps I've taken in a day. What good is this? Plenty, if you are obsessive. You'd think I'm not obsessive. Laid-back is a term that has been used to describe me since I was in my mother's womb, taking over a week longer than predicted to be born (woo hoo! Geminis rule!). If only I'd had a smartphone. That's a whole week I could have been getting extra steps. For the past two years, I've been using a Samsung® app that tells me how many steps I've taken. This app also tells me how many steps I've taken in a month. What would be a reasonable number? People often hear they should take 10,000 steps per day (t hough there is evidence that number should be much higher ), but the average American takes something like 5,000 steps per day. How many should yo...

If I'd gotten to this car a little sooner, you would see the no-parking sign clearly. Living in a tourist town has its perks. In part because of its swollen population, Portland draws big musical acts in the summer that would skip us in the winter. Greg Allman and Death Cab for Cutie are still on the schedule. (Get your tickets now!) Mumford and Sons did a show for 25,000 fans a few summers ago. But it's time to go. Roll up the sidewalks. We want to grumble about winter again. Well, we don't want to bemoan winter, but the other option is pinching a nerve in our necks from shaking them at the tourists. Take that car ^ up there ^ spotted on my evening walk. It's nowhere near the curb. It's nowhere near being parked legally. The sign pointing at the car says NO PARKING; the sign in front says 15 MINUTE PARKING. *Slow clap* Or take the intersection near my house. It's a little screwy, because a 20-foot section of the road is one-way. There is a big DO NOT ENTER sign...

My "At least I tried and here I am outside of Madison Square Garden" face. God is funny. Sometimes you get exactly what you need, even though you didn't know you needed it. Nor does it come the way you thought you wanted. So it was last week. I was hopped up after seeing U2 with The Wife in Boston .  "I can't explain why, exactly, but I think I need to go to New York to try to see U2," I told her.  "Great! Go!" was TW's response.  Awesome. We have clearance from TW.  Grand Central Terminal Getting to New York from Portland isn't a huge undertaking. You drive 3.5 hours to New Haven, Connecticut, and hop on a train. Five and a half hours later you walk into Grand Central Terminal. The trip is one of solitude. I know all the NPR stations between here and Hartford. When that gets old, you flip on the classic rock. As someone who walks to work (and everywhere else), I put about 2,000 miles on my car last year. Roadtrips are a rarity. It didn...

The advantage of sitting in the cheap seats is you can take in the whole scene. In June of 2001, I took a day off to go see U2 play a concert in Albany. I had been a professional journalist making $10 an hour at a newspaper in New Hampshire that didn't have an active website until about 2009. The little town I lived in was surrounded by rolling mountains. A stream cut through town. It was beautiful. I also had no friends and no family. I had every channel on Dish Network. It is not an era I look back on particularly fondly. But there was that concert. In the line to sit in the GA section, I met a couple of girls from a Christian college in Arkansas and we waited together for six hours before they let us into the arena. Bono was sick that night. He lost his voice and, basically, could not sing. He asked the crowd to lift him up and carry the show. About 18,000 of us belted songs out for him at the top of our lungs. He prayed. He sang Bible verses. The show ended with Bono mustering ...

Police lights are not great for catching a flying disc. Construction, generally speaking, is awesome. If you look closely, you'll see Pennywise in the bushes. It is Maine, after all. Last night I came home from work and took in the scene about 40 yards from our driveway. A giant backhoe was digging out the middle of the street. The city is replacing our stormwater system after it blew out last year (taking a half-block of sidewalk with it). For drivers, this is a trainwreck. For people walking home from work, it is a Godsend. It was earlyish, by newspaper standards, to get home from work. At 10:15 p.m., the neighbors were out in the street throwing a Frisbee around. I was tired and wanted to go to bed. But at a point, instincts kick in. Especially when you realize you know the guys chucking the Frisbee around. "Hit me," I said, "I'm open." The neighbor chucked the Frisbee. I might have caught it. I might not. There was no scoring system, so who cares? So we ...

We are the Maine-iest couple. That's the Portland Lobster Co. in the background. The Wife and I were talking about marriage the other day. Our marriage, specifically. As of this writing, it has been nine years, 363 days for us together. And it has been nine years, 362 days of surprises. The love of our lives seems to know she basically owns our house. I would love to have an appropriate story from that second day of marriage. That was the day we flew to Salt Lake City on a 7 a.m. Northwest Airlines flight. We went to our somewhat-ghetto apartment in somewhat-ghetto South Salt Lake. We napped. We might have watched a movie. I bought a digital camera for our honeymoon in Cabo San Lucas the next day. Yawn. There are plenty of days in a marriage like that. Not only is life not always a thrill ride, it usually isn't thrilling. Yet, somehow, after not-quite 10 years together, we look back and shake our heads. "If I could show you everything that's happened over the past ten ...

I admit, this is pretty funny. Somebody in Pendleton, Oregon, died a little bit over the weekend. It's important to remember that. Don't get me wrong. The newspaper headline about an "amphibious" pitcher is hilarious on at least a couple of levels. But the person that wrote that headline isn't laughing. I should know. I've been that person. There are a couple of reasons that headline might have happened. For years, small newspapers like the one in Pendleton skewed toward hiring young editors and designers because they work cheap. The problem with young editors is they make young editor mistakes. I should know. My war story is, thankfully, from college and, also thankfully, isn't that bad. The University of Minnesota men's basketball team played an 8 p.m. Monday night game against Rutgers, which meant I had to dummy in a story. Like a dummy, I wrote actual words in the headline field. I was the sports editor and it was my job to stay late, chuck in the ...

Locally raised, organic, handfed beef is once again for sale! Full disclosure: I bought four pounds for $22. Portlandia is real. You only have to watch a few minutes of the TV show "Portlandia" to get the recurring joke. Overwrought do-gooders want to drive to the local farm to check out the conditions before they order chicken at a local restaurant. Another sign of spring. My parents are visiting from Florida.  Though it's based on Portland, Oregon, Portlandia is alive and wall on the East Coast. A co-worker came in to work Saturday and said Portlandia is once again alive and well. "Oh, did you see the L.L. Bean Bootmobile (Slogan: Rated Highest Smiles Per Gallon) outside? They were playing cornhole next to the truck. Or was it the people rappelling off the building we work in? They're raising money for charity," I inquired. "No, it was the people in Monument Square roleplaying Lord of the Rings," he said. "They had actual swords. They were ...