MeSoFun Blog

My cousin Ryan is a freshman at the University of Mississippi. Unlike most 18-year-olds, he doesn't think I'm clueless. Unlike most 34-year-olds, I'm willing to edit his essays that he has to write for English Composition. It's a real mountaintop moment for me as an editor. Some essays are more interesting to work on than others. I almost got excited yesterday when Ryan sent a text: "Have you ever seen Shawshank Redemption? I have to write an essay about it." Um, yes. I watched it twice in December. I read the original short story by Stephen King last summer. It's my favorite movie of all-time and I still think it got screwed in the Oscars. So when Ryan said his essay was about the theme of hope in the movie, the only challenge for me was to avoid writing the essay for him. I certainly have the time on my hands to do so. There's always hope, I just don't have an abundance of it of late. It's not that I'm jobless. That'd be too easy. ...

Ski construction involves careful attention to detail. And sawdust. Lots and lots of sawdust. This will be the last time I pimp out Cathedral Skis on Facebook.   There are a hundred different ways to start this post. It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book in my head. As always, I like to boil it down to the bottom line: I'm partnering with some friends who live 3,000 miles away to start a ski company. This is Zach doing pretty much the first thing we did, cutting out a template for our first line of skis. You haven't heard much about it because I haven't been sure what to say. The whole venture is so out of left field and so perfectly imperfect that I've scarcely been able to believe it. The following phrase is true and simultaneously sounds kind of batshit crazy: I'm starting a ski manufacturing company. Like anything, it's a wonderful confluence of factors. Since sort of quitting journalism two years ago, I've been wondering what's next. I hav...

What have I been doing for the past two weeks? Well ... By James Patrick Special to the Valley News DURHAM, N.H. — The scene before a game in the University of New Hampshire field hockey team's locker room is a familiar one to the Upper Valley. Instigated by Kyle Lyons and Whitney Frates, a duo from Kimball Union Academy, the college players have a ritual to get psyched up for a game. They turn on the song, “Hey Baby,” by D.J. Otzi. If you've ever been to a high school football game, you've probably heard the school band belt out its version of the original, “Hey! Baby.” Otzi's version has a faster pace. “Hey, hey baby. I want to know, if you'll be my girl,” the women in the locker room belt out. A circle forms. Somebody dances a little jig in the middle while teammates clap. Whatever works. The Wildcats are 17-4 and won last weekend's America East tournament to earn their first spot in the NCAA tournament since 2000. New Hampshire plays Michigan at 2 p.m. tod...

There are a few threads that run through our lives that, if you think about it, you realize how thin those threads are. My marriage is a well-covered example of that. But the second-most important aspect of my life goes back to a pretty random moment. Writing has never come easily to me. I'm not a wordsmith in the 75-words-per-sentence sense. I can't weave a complicated series of thoughts into one line. Keep it simple. State your facts. Move on to the next item. I'm not a Hemmingway fan so don't even start talking about newspapermen and their writing habits. Until the middle of high school, I was pretty convinced I was going to be a chemical engineer. That's from an era when I thought it was mostly mixing stuff in beakers and causing fires. There's still an element of that , but chemical engineering is mostly math 'n' stuff. I'm good at math, but not that good. I realized that about the time I was dragging down the class average in pre-calculous. I w...

No kidding, I run through this field, through the little gap in the middle there, and up into the woods. It's time to get back in the regular habit of ... everything. The thing about having guests come to visit is it throws everything off. It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. In that vein, I'm kicking the dog's ass again. Not literally. We're both being punished, in fact, with a daily run of 1.5 to 2 hours. We're exploring the massive and marvelous snowmobile system of Maine. The best part of it: There aren't many snowmobiles on it this time of year. You'd think this is an error, except it's spelled the same way on both sides of the sign. That brought us to the field above. It's actually from the middle of our run in Gray, on our way Northeast to New Gloucester. We come out of the woods, run through somebody's front yard, then duck into the field you see pictured above. The grass is about a foot deep in most places, deeper in others. ...

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...

Pineland Farms in New Gloucester is a nonprofit farm/office/outdoors space. There are even horses. Not much to say here. You've been warned this was coming. Amy is back in Maine, so we're doing typical Jim and Amy things. That includes walking through grassy fields and being dorks. Monsterous, Monsterous dorks. Dorks who, when driving a car across railroad tracks, lift their hands over their hands as if on a roller-coaster and say, "wheeeeee." We're kind of sickening. I know. Low tide isn't exactly magical. Still, Mackworth Island in Falmouth is pretty awesome. We've been running around Maine in the last 36 hours. Amy got a massage while Daisy and I went for a walk in Falmouth. Tuesday, Daisy went to doggy daycare because I. Need. A. Break. And it's much more socially acceptable to send your dog off for the night than a kid. Also, you're not supposed to keep kids in crates and feed them dog food. Seriously, turkeys are *everywhere* up here. It'...