MeSoFun Blog

If you can blow up that sign over our sink, you're in for a little laugh. The Wife will celebrate the 10th anniversary of her 29th birthday tomorrow. As such, she requested no jokes be made in her birthday card. This is serious stuff. We're closer to retirement than high school graduation. And TW gets what she wants in general. On her birthday, there isn't a question. No jokes in the card. So we'll air it all out here. My handwriting, like my heart, is terrible. You might think, from reading this blog or just seeing us around town, that I am an adoring husband. You're so wrong. Take, for instance, when TW is looking for a hair tie. The unstoppable thought that runs through my head is "Just look at your feet. There's always a hair tie around." In the past two days, I've found hair ties hanging on our coat rack, buried in a shag rug and in my laundry. Over the course of our marriage, I've probably picked up 7,647 hair ties. I'm confident the...

Dial X to exit PA school. This happens every now and then. My phone dings with an alert. Somebody has commented on my blog! I click and read the comment. It's often our old neighbor or a former co-worker or two. We chat. We make jokes. Good times. But every now and then it's somebody making a comment on a blog about how to survive PA school as a spouse . It happened a while ago and I've still been processing the comment because it's so damn sad. Our anonymous reader/commenter sounds like he's at the end of his rope. " I've never been more alone in my life, as the past 6 years has been every day spent with her. She's changed. My hope is she will come back after PA school is done. She's just not there," he wrote. There was more. He tried to be funny, but mostly it was sad. He's worried their marriage won't last. Communication is impossible. They don't see each other much. It's familiar. Every PA school spouse is nodding their head...

Ah, the scenes of winter. This kind of thing happens every winter. There's alway a horror story. What else would we do the rest of the year in Maine if not complain about winter? I came out to move my car because there's a parking ban tonight. This is what downtown living is like in winter. No big deal. There's a huge city-owned parking area a block from the house. I'll just amble to the car and pull it down the hill. Today, my car was almost immobilized and unable to make that drive. You could see the flashing blue police lights before you could see anything wrong on Park Street, the road next to my house. There was one police SUV at the bottom of the hill because a woman's car had veered to the left, gone over the sidewalk and taken out a possibly-decorative fire call box. Portland: We're quaint. Higher up the hill, there was a second police cruiser behind my car. I could see a sedan had jumped about halfway across a sidewalk; I just wasn't sure if he'...

Quasi-resolution No. 1: Play more games with these guys at the Bear. The Wife does *not* understand me. Gratuitous Daisy picture. This is not breaking news. Do not hold the presses. We knew this. TW, and much of the Western Hemisphere, takes the new year as a time for self-reflection, to further shine and hone the diamond that is life. And to her credit, TW comes up with laudable improvement goals such as volunteering more time and further defining personal aspirations. For me, a new year represents two things: 1. The start of tax return preparation; 2. Orange purchasing season. The naval oranges at Hannaford are amazing. I'm eating two a night at work. They are a glorious break from apples, which I normally eat hand over fist at my desk. I am that guy. Beyond that, a new year doesn't mean much. However, this flies in the face of orthodoxy. How can you possibly want to improve if you don't re-evaluate? There are two styles of change. The first is dramatic. You shave off all...

I like this one better. I can't figure out how to post a GIF on Facebook. This became apparent Thursday night, when instead of posting a GIF, Facebook just took one picture from a sequence. Fortunately, it was one of the "good" ones. Unfortunately, it seems a little attention-seeking when your caption is "When you try to take the perfect picture." Let's clear this up. You've probably heard rumors to the contrary, but The Wife and I are definitely not perfect. We don't only say that about ourselves, there are countless others who will say so on our behalf. We took 25 photos Thursday night. Some were in front of the Christmas tree, others were sitting in front of a stocking my great grandmother made over 30 years ago. We were happy with exactly one of those 25 photos. That's the one that got over 100 likes on Facebook. It's always nice to be "liked," but that wasn't my intention. I was trying to poke fun at ourselves. TW's blo...

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...