MeSoFun Blog

The Beernut and his TW, Messica. Despite my gregarious nature, I do not make friends particularly easily. People in their mid-30s tend to have little kids running around and little spare time. And I don't much care for people. That's kind of a joke, but really, I can count on one hand the number of friends I made in Utah who I call "middle of the night" friends. When your car breaks down in the middle of the night or your dog is missing in your neighborhood, which friend would you call? I haven't made many of those since high school. This is my hairy leg, not helping load the UPod. That's been due in part to my nomadic lifestyle. I've moved 17 times since I turned 18 years old. It is  hard to build bonds when you leave town every 12 months. Making friends revolves around a little bit of happenstance. And so it was in January of 2011, when The Wife was helping out at her PA school's interviews for the incoming class of students. She met Messica, a blond...

The bugs aren't so bad, so Daisy Duke is allowed to look out our "Juliet" balcony onto the back patio and yard. It's not a balcony at all, for the record. It is a door to nowhere. That wasn't fun. Two months ago, I set off to Seattle to visit Rossmosis. Since then, I have: A. Started a new/old job in Maine; B. Slept on friends' couches and spare beds; C. Bought a house; D. Moved; E. Attended a game at Fenway Park, watching from atop the Green Monster; F. Not slept much. It's tough to blog about all of these happenings when you don't have a computer and are basically holding on to the will to live. I get a little persnickitty when I'm getting 5.5 hours of sleep a night. But things are settling into a routine. We have our new house. It's a three-story townhouse with piles of boxes in it at the moment. We have a 12-foot ceiling in our master closet, so we're thinking about adding some shelving because, well, we don't have any storage. Prac...

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...

Our new-old front yard. I hate moving. Since the age of 18, I've moved 17 times. I've owned two homes and had a driver's license in five states. The Wife and I don't have a clothes dresser because they are too much of a hassle to move. There will be an 18th move. On Tuesday, I was offered and accepted a full-time job as a copy editor at the Portland Press Herald (on the condition I pass a drug test -- do they test for caffeine?). I worked there part-time for two years while TW was in graduate school. So what's changed in the last year? Only pretty much everything. If you've only ever visited Boston as a tourist, this move makes no sense. Boston's a great town. We love Boston. We also don't love living here. This is a confluence of three factors: LOGISTICS Our landlords have us in an iron-clad lease. If you sign up for a year, you owe a year of rent. Our lease runs out at the end of June and the landlords want a full-year lease. So we want to go. We consi...

We are easily entertained. Man-cations. Man-dates. Man-night. Those Manly things are all tired plays on the word Man. What does it mean to be a man? Surely not enjoying Mancations with your Man friends while doing Manly things. And yet, cliches are cliches for a reason. It is with regret that I report on the goings-on of Monday evening. I walked to the Boston airport and hopped a bus to Portland to visit The Bearded Beernut and Nacho, Nacho Man (and Nacho Man's brother, Dandy). We were going to play pegs and aces, drink beer and eat bacon. It drives me batty to bend to stereotypes. Truly. You should know that. But when you see bacon-dusted french fries on the menu at Nosh, you order them. Then, at LFK, when you see bacon-covered macaroni and cheese, you order that. At Taco Escobar, our third restaurant of the evening, Nacho Man decided it would be awesome to order nachos. And it was. At The Great Lost Bear, the fourth dining establishment of our evening, Nacho Man order nachos agai...