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“Joseph, how’ve you been?”

“Good.”

“Where are you?”

“In my room”?

“Seems like everyone’s always in their room. Goose is always in his. Been in any fights lately?”

“No fights, but one wrestling match.”

“In your dorm?”

“Yeah, some punk kid who wrestled in high school found out I was a wrestler and challenged me to a match.”

“Found out? All he’d have to do is look at your neck. And you cleared your floor…”

“We went down to the common room and moved all the furniture. There were like thirty guys watching.”

“What about the floor? No mat?”

“Just tiles. I won, but I must have squeezed him too hard.”

“Do I want to know why?”

“He pooped in his pants. Smelled awful.”

BirdBrain

Perhaps for the blog — or just you guys…

We had a great Parents Day visit with Chris. Because of all the rain, our focus was on talking and eating. But of all the many things one expects to hear from our son, this was one was a surprise… in the midst of talking about his dorm, the kids, his friends, he says mentions that he’s worried about Halloween. Why? “Oh, didn’t I tell you? My room is haunted”….

Check the list of “haunted places in Massachusetts”and here’s the story:

Springfield – Western New England College – Berkshire Hall – Room 401, the students feel that when they are getting up they cannot, like some force is holding them down. Supposedly a former student had hung himself in the room upon hearing that his girlfriend had broken up with him. The students also wake up with sound of broken glass.

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I’m tagging along on BirdBrain’s post. From this weekend:

“Matt, check out my new shirt. It only cost four dollars.”

“Dad, It’s ugly. And it doesn’t have one ugly color, it has six.”

***

Got my teeth cleaned today. Andrea, the hygienist, on her way to the tooth she wanted to x-ray, was diverted by the molar I’d broken.

“Eeew, when did you do that?”

“A few months ago.”

“Was it sharp?”

“It was.”

“It was?”

“I filed it down.”

“You filed it down? What did you use.”

“Somethin’ from my shop.”

“Like you use on wood?”

“Or maybe it was the file that comes with nail clippers. I can’t remember which.”

Diane and Matt heading back to our hotel.

Through the window of the Draught Horse.

Did you get my two email responses to your X11 and Firefox problems?

From my ringside seat, I planned to snap close-up photos as the guys from Olympic Tree carefully delimbed, and finally dropped this thirty-five foot tall pine tree. I turned my back for a moment, sensed movement behind me, and then realized how old school my logging paradigm is.

Photo Sequence

Once they’d wrestled the tree to the asphalt, they cut-off and hoisted entire limbs into the chipper, and in twenty minutes there was nothing left but bare pavement. Contrast this to the worker bees who descend on Mark Queijo’s property every year. Well intentioned, and a larger work force, but soooo slow.

John McSweeny and Goose.

John McSweeny and Goose.

On one of our earliest canoeing trips together, Adam and I beached ourselves on a rocky ledge in the middle of the Moose River. What to do? Adam narrates his generous version of the story.

As most everyone who reads this blog knows, I tell two types of stories which might be broadly classified as 1. Death, and 2. Why I don’t deserve opposable thumbs. I’m leading off with another how-can-I-still-be-alive tale because I did the death thing last week with that dog story.

Every Sunday I make a week’s worth of breakfast drink for Diane. I pile a combination of fruit, bran, soy milk, orange juice and maybe a cup or two of whatever Odwalla’s on sale into a blender and create a home-fashioned smoothie. Some weeks it tastes better than others, it just depends on how “healthful” I make it. Too much bran, too many seedy blueberries and too much flax seed and you have something that slides down like lumpy mashed potatoes.

Because our blender is broken, I’ve been using Flo’s antique. It’s a spiffy metal and glass machine, and you can imagine smartly turned-out, red-dressed Betty Crocker using it to whip up a milk shake, or Flo preparing her patented raw egg, egg nogs to fortify her daughters brains for those midday exams. What you can’t imagine is any kind of updated electrical safety design.

This past Sunday I’ve got my concoction so tightly packed into the glass container that the blades are barely turning. Until, that is, I lift off the lid and instantly turn myself and the kitchen into a mad scientist’s experiment gone awry.

Flustered and frantic about the mess, I remove the jar and plunk the still-gleaming chrome base covered in red glop into the kitchen sink and begin spraying off the sides. It’s all working quite well until I realize I’ve failed to unplug the thing. I hesitate a moment fearing electrocution. I think about unplugging it, but then I decide instead to touch the thing. I wish I hadn’t done that.