MeSoFun Blog

Snappy, the wonder lobster. I have too much to write about. This is what happens when Matt and Amy Whaley come for a visit. If you didn't go to a high school in Minnesota and don't know Matt, just imagine a hungry lumberjack of a man who pretty much everybody knows. Kudos to our wives for putting up with their man-children. Check out my guns. We have so much fun with people when they come to visit. It reminds us of why Maine is a wonderful place to be. You can skip the rest of this blog and just look at a photo gallery of the visit. This gallery only covers about 24 hours of the four nights they were here. In that time we brewed a bourbon porter in our kitchen. We went to a fancy dinner. We loitered. We went to The Great Lost Bear. We took a boat to an island and walked around. We ate lobster. We ate bacon-dusted french fries and tempura-fried bacon. Bacon. Catching a theme here? That's right, my second chin was starting to make an appearance at the tail end of the visit f...

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 ...

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...

The name, for the record, is the Big 20 Bowling Center, not the Big Bowling Center. That'd be dumb. One thing I am not is charitable. It isn't often that I take part in charitable events, anyway. I don't like crowds and pomp doesn't work for me. Candlepin bowling, however, I cannot resist. So, when Hal, a friend and co-worker (I accidentally typed cow-worker first. That would have been embarrassing) invited me to bowl with the Sea Dogs, I accepted. The Sea Dogs are our local Double-A baseball team. They are a Red Sox affiliate and play in a fun litltle ballpark, complete with a replica of Fenway's Green Monster in left field. They were doing an hour-and-a-half charity fundraiser at the local bowling alley today. Hal asked me if I wanted to join him. Who am I to resist the siren call of candlepin bowling? First, a primer on candlepin bowling, for you non-Yankees. The lanes are about the same length, width and wood composition as in a regular bowling alley. Key dif...

That isn't me, but this is the cliff I jumped off today. You almost didn't get to read this. That's not a cute way of saying I almost leaped off a cliff to my death today. I didn't, though I did leap off a cliff. How else to entertain a pair of teenagers? No, you almost didn't get to read this because it has been an exhausting vacation. Not for me. My cousins are in town. Yes, those cousins . They're 13 and almost 16 (which is freaky, as I was living in Florida with my aunt when the 16-year-old was born). But that's another story. The great part, as always, about visitors is I get to be a tourist in my own town. We do the favorites, like bacon fries and buffalo wings. We try a few new things, like giant sky swings, water parks and aquariums. You won't be bored with the day-by-day ins and outs here. Nobody cares, I figure. Let's skip straight to the good stuff: Cliff diving. The spot was off a rock in Sebago Lake, known as Frye's Leap. It's so...

Isn't it a little odd for an area with average summer highs of 80 degrees to have a big water park? I have a one-track mind. When I extol the virtues of Portland, I pretty much limit myself to beer and bacon-dusted french fries. Wouldn't you? It has become clear to me today that my vision might be a little too narrow. For the 92 percent of you who would not limit themselves to beer and bacon-dusted fries (and by the way, you're wrong for not limiting yourself), I present independent verification of our status as a cool place to be. JRuss, who is not a tall black man, pointed out to me that GQ magazine – I am, of course, a devoted reader and subscriber of that fine publication – has ranked Portland one of the top eight small-city destinations for a vacation. You bet your sweet Aunt Sally I'll be doing this. It's only $15! With around 60,000 people in the metro area, about the size of Winona, MN, this is not a big place. But, I venture to say, Portland offers signifi...

My Dad is a little obsessed. This is normal. He's an engineer and I've noticed that engineer of a certain age tend to be idiosyncratic. Ted Huntley hid gummy bears in beer steins and surfed the Internet, though it's unclear if he actually does anything on the Internet. It's possible you could see my house from the top. Then there's my Dad. He likes lighthouses. More than a little. He likes to visit them, and when the opportunity arises, he likes to buy a small keepsake model of the lighthouse. I'm not sure why, as I've never seen them on display in my parents' house in Florida, but I'm also not on the lookout for the trinkets. You can guess where we went last spring when my parents came to visit for the first time in late May. There are about a dozen lighthouses within a half-hour drive of our house, but we went to the touristy spot, the one with bus parking, a donations box and fancy displays explaining how the park around the lighthouse used to be ...