MeSoFun Blog

It looks something like this. The call went out at work a few weeks ago, as it occasionally does, for stories. Tell us the stories behind your Thanksgiving recipes, our food editor implored. My first response: Pick a food item and I'll give you the story. Mom's stuffing goes back to when she lived in Pennsylvania and her home-cookin' neighbor shared a recipe, likely off a box of Saltines, that is equal parts delicious and terrible for your health. The stuffing has a stick and a half of butter in it. It's a miracle I'm not on medications. Turkeys? How about the time I bought five of them in Utah because they were $5 apiece. We ate turkey dinner once a month until May. The Wife introduced me to cooking turkey in a plastic bag. I am forever grateful. But the gravy story is the best because gravy is sentimental to me. Yes, I'm a male blogger who gets sentimental about gravy. Now you've seen it all. Grandma was a pragmatic woman. She was quick to laugh at a good ...

*trod, trod, trod, plod, trod* I have an obsession. Not the good kind, and certainly not the cologne®. Like many good Americans, I have some form of fitness tracker. Put bluntly, my phone tells me how many steps I've taken in a day. What good is this? Plenty, if you are obsessive. You'd think I'm not obsessive. Laid-back is a term that has been used to describe me since I was in my mother's womb, taking over a week longer than predicted to be born (woo hoo! Geminis rule!). If only I'd had a smartphone. That's a whole week I could have been getting extra steps. For the past two years, I've been using a Samsung® app that tells me how many steps I've taken. This app also tells me how many steps I've taken in a month. What would be a reasonable number? People often hear they should take 10,000 steps per day (t hough there is evidence that number should be much higher ), but the average American takes something like 5,000 steps per day. How many should yo...

If I'd gotten to this car a little sooner, you would see the no-parking sign clearly. Living in a tourist town has its perks. In part because of its swollen population, Portland draws big musical acts in the summer that would skip us in the winter. Greg Allman and Death Cab for Cutie are still on the schedule. (Get your tickets now!) Mumford and Sons did a show for 25,000 fans a few summers ago. But it's time to go. Roll up the sidewalks. We want to grumble about winter again. Well, we don't want to bemoan winter, but the other option is pinching a nerve in our necks from shaking them at the tourists. Take that car ^ up there ^ spotted on my evening walk. It's nowhere near the curb. It's nowhere near being parked legally. The sign pointing at the car says NO PARKING; the sign in front says 15 MINUTE PARKING. *Slow clap* Or take the intersection near my house. It's a little screwy, because a 20-foot section of the road is one-way. There is a big DO NOT ENTER sign...

My "At least I tried and here I am outside of Madison Square Garden" face. God is funny. Sometimes you get exactly what you need, even though you didn't know you needed it. Nor does it come the way you thought you wanted. So it was last week. I was hopped up after seeing U2 with The Wife in Boston .  "I can't explain why, exactly, but I think I need to go to New York to try to see U2," I told her.  "Great! Go!" was TW's response.  Awesome. We have clearance from TW.  Grand Central Terminal Getting to New York from Portland isn't a huge undertaking. You drive 3.5 hours to New Haven, Connecticut, and hop on a train. Five and a half hours later you walk into Grand Central Terminal. The trip is one of solitude. I know all the NPR stations between here and Hartford. When that gets old, you flip on the classic rock. As someone who walks to work (and everywhere else), I put about 2,000 miles on my car last year. Roadtrips are a rarity. It didn...

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 ...