MeSoFun Blog

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 ...

This is cheating, I know, using a photo from a nursery to demonstrate Maine's colors. Shut it. Five years ago today, I can tell you exactly where we were. Or where I was, at least. I was riding shotgun in a 24-foot Budget moving truck around sunset as we pulled into Scranton, Pennsylvania. We were towing our Corolla on a trailer and we were pulling off the interstate into downtown Scranton. Matty was driving and Duke, my 85-pound doofus of a chocolate Lab, was wedged between us in the cockpit of the truck. Jimmy, my other friend helping us move, was right behind us driving our other car. This guy will drive your moving truck so long as you pay for gas and Buffalo wings. For our last night on the road, I'd purchased a room in the Hilton in downtown Scranton. You know, as a treat on the last night of a 3,000-mile trip. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me to think of one tiny detail: Where, exactly, did we plan on parking this 24-foot moving truck with a trailer attached to it? F...

I don't have a great picture of just the couple, so here's the couple plus grandma Toni. How does one officiate a wedding for the first time? Certainly not with a bunch of notecards. That would be sooooooooo 20th century. I decided to use Google Docs to write the ceremony, meaning I could just open it on an iPad during Monday's big ceremony. I downloaded the ceremony, checked and rechecked that it was fully loaded. Then, happy it was all there, I closed the iPad cover and took it to the Portland Observatory for the ceremony. Things were going fine during the ceremony. I was talking to fast but didn't really lose my place in the speech. I hadn't practiced enough to really have it nailed down but I'm confident nobody cared. There was only about 17 people there. We got to the vows. I was home free! But as I was scrolling through the bride's vows, I saw an ominous black page coming up. And an exclamation point. "Sorry! This page could not load. Please reloa...