MeSoFun Blog

Hopefully this isn't an annual rite of passage into fall. Cold fronts are usually windy. Minnesota farmers know that. Sailers know that. People with giant umbrellas attached to their patio furniture should know that. I saw the thing wiggling around. But really, what's the worst that could happen? It turns out patio umbrellas can lift up into the air above the glass and then crash back down on the table when the wind dies. That can happen. We won't be playing pegs on the porch or doing any more dump dinners this year. That's OK. The wind from the cold front was bringing chilly air. It was 58 degrees and windy on my walk to work. Oh well. That's a revelatory statement for me. I'm that guy. I'm the guy with Rayndaud's Syndrome, which means cold hands and feet for six months a year. I'm the guy that doesn't like Christmas so I spend a couple of months being annoyed by decorations and sales and hubub. But life's too short to get wrapped up in the ...

I am incapable of a normal smile. I did my dishes today. "Whoop-de-doo," you're thinking. Weird that my Dad never poses when it's picture time. Clearly my mother hasn't been visiting your place if you don't understand the novelty of doing your own dishes. Mom is a cleaner. It's her zen. She might even admit to that. Dishes don't hit the bottom of the sink with mom around. It's an adorable bonus to her visits. Mom likes to be useful. If all our guests did that, we'd be golden. I've lost the official count of how many visitors we've had since we moved into our house a year and a half ago. I'm confident we're in the 20s; we had 17 overnight groups in the first  year alone. This is the best possible time of year in Maine. The temperatures are in the 60s every day. The skies are blinding blue on a regular basis. And the tourists are mostly gone, except for the occasional gigantic cruise ship. There's parking on the street next to...

I used to have long blonde hair too. *sniffle* A little over 21 years ago, I was at the hospital the day Blondie was born. Her Dad – my uncle – and I went to dinner at Miami Subs to celebrate. I share her athletic prowess, obvi. A little over 19 years ago, I moved to Florida. An early practitioner of the gap year, I took a year off between high school and college. I moved in with Blondie's parents and worked as a live-in nanny. Blondie was 2; her sister, Dolleen, was born while I lived with them. There's a reason I don't have kids. That 10 months I spent in Florida, between 1995 and 1996, represented a high point for my relationship with family members. My family is all over South Florida. There's something like three sets of aunts and uncles and 10 or more cousins. My parents live down there now. For the last 12 years, I have lived thousands of miles from any family member. Most of the time, it's the thing you ignore about living somewhere other than Minnesota or F...

The happy couple. Three years ago, amid The Wife's graduate school days, there was some financial uncertainty. It was decided that we should get a roommate. An ad went up on Craigslist and TW found what she hoped would be her new bestie. Our new roommate was also a graduate student. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and was looking for a fresh start.  She was also pregnant, she found out a couple of weeks later. And that's how we met Nacho Man.  There have been better photos of both of us. He was actually our second roommate. He paid his rent in cash and he worked at the bakery around the corner from our house. It turned out to be my new bestie. And then the landlord's daughter, Sweet Molly Lu, came home from college. You've heard their story before. It's a classic tale of a boy who meets a girl but doesn't want to date the landlord's daughter because it will make things awkward; then they make out one night, fall in laaaaahve and TW and I had a de f...

Yes, I would leave this for the right job. I could be driving a AAA truck for a living. Of all the random job situations I've encountered over the last four years, the AAA job offer was by far the most random. But it makes sense, if you have the context. I was unemployed. You don't get rich driving a AAA truck but I would have made between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, depending on how much overtime I was willing to pick up. It's a stable job. There's no chance people are going to stop driving cars and needing help. If you just want a job, you could do a lot worse than working for a nonprofit, member-owned company. I've turned down a lot of jobs and potential jobs over the last four years. There was the night news editor job I turned down because it was a 60-mile commute. With stars in my eyes upon leaving Utah, I thought I wasn't going to work nights ever again. When I was interviewing for a part-time job in Portland, the editor in chief asked me if I was interes...

Summer's almost here! The Wife and I had no idea what we were doing when we got married. Not necessarily in regard to marriage, but certainly in many other respects. I was a journalist and I worked out a lot. Those were my defining characteristics. I hoped to someday, maybe, live closer to my family in Florida and maybe work at a big paper. These are the dreams of 28-year-olds who live 2,500 miles away from their families. The Wife didn't have a job when she moved to Utah. She worked at a naturopathic doctor's office in Duluth, but they were hesitant to open an office in Salt Lake City. She was going to take some time to figure that out. If you're miserably busy with jobs and kids and commitments, taking a few months to watch Netflix probably sounds delightful. TW was fairly miserable after about two weeks of that. Marriage, it turns out, does not make your life better. Your life is not a RomCom starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. It turns out, even after an amaz...

Every day is a beach day for TW now that she's married! The Wife abhors a pure happy ending. You know the kind. It's the movies where everything ties up nicely with a little bow on it at the end of a love story (preferably starring Hugh Grant). "Life isn't like that," she grumbles. "They make it seem like life is just perfect after they get together. I bet the first time they have sex is terrible!" I have strong feelings about restaurants and beers; The Wife has strong feelings about movie endings. We are a petty bunch. As a result of a blog series I wrote a few years ago, perhaps you remember , she has prodded me to write a second series about what happened after the romance died when we had dirty toilets. Well, we have a dirty toilet, so this seems like an appropriate time for an update. We were married on a fantastic day in June of 2005. The sun alone was spectacular because there were almost no clouds. It wasn't humid. Temperatures were in the up...