And you know, it’s funny.

Nothing has really changed yet, and our new president won’t even take office for a few more months. And when he does, he’ll inherit a mountain of problems that even he has said may not be fixable in a year, or four.

But internally, I feel a big change already. Today, somehow, I feel more like this country belongs to me. Like the people of the United States have actually taken back our country and are starting to steer it in the right direction.

Like the ideals of the nation’s founders have not gone extinct after all. The flame never died all the way. Somehow, the ones who seized power and used the resources of many to carry out the will of a few have let that power slip away, and now we have it back.

I feel more free, I really do. More hopeful. More interested and courageous about doing whatever we can to build a better life for our kids, and their kids.

As the stock market tanks and the wars rage on and the ice caps melt, I still see much to look forward to. To strive for.

Injustices seem more defeatable. Our will seems stronger. More possibilities seem to be within our reach, and our creativity in seeing what else we can try seems renewed. Truly, I feel this, even though I’m starting to sound like a speechwriter.

I’m proud of my country.

That’s a big, big change.

And even though I know that all these current problems are a big part of why this change came about in yesterday’s election, they don’t feel so overwhelming this morning. I feel like whatever we got ourselves into, we can get ourselves out.

And I’m excited because my daughter, when she gets here in February, will get to grow up in a place like the one I envisioned for her — one filled with possibility, and unity, and democracy.

Things are scary in America right now, but today I don’t feel fear.

Just hope.

That’s not one of the things I’m most proud of as an American. In Western Europe it’s more like 75%, and in Australia it’s said to be 95%, although there it’s compulsory, so I don’t feel too bad.

It just seems like the most damning evidence that we’re a complacent society of overprivileged dipsticks, which I hear is what the rest of the world thinks of us anyway. All these hard-won freedoms and we don’t even bother to exercise them. Phooey.

It’s particularly embarrassing since I personally was in the bad half of that bunch of apples during the first election for which I was eligible. Gore lost to Bush (sort of) and set our country on a collision course with disaster and it was all my fault. (Sort of.) I believe I was helping Lope move out of her apartment or something.

But this year was different. Penny and I went and voted last week, just to get things out of the way and make sure we didn’t miss it.

And I’ll tell you, it felt good. I put up my little yard sign and irked my neighbors, and I fired back an indignant response or two at my family members’ mudslinging email forwards, but other than that I didn’t do much to participate in this historic election. No knocking on doors, no working the phones, not even a strenuous objection when Penny’s little sister Brittany shrugged and said she probably wouldn’t vote. “Oh, well,” I figured. “Can’t be helped.”

Note: This was before I found out that Indiana would be a battleground state, of course. We’ve been as red as Reagan’s tie since 1964, when we decided against McCain’s predecessor as Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater. I just figured we’d swing Republican again this year, like we have my whole life. But maybe not. (!)

So in light of my minimal efforts this year, it was a relief to at least say I cast my vote. Punched the buttons on the ballot. Struck a blow for the minority here in the Hoosier State.

The only thing I had a problem with (well, the only significant* thing) was the last half of the ballot. All the little local elections. How do I know who ought to be Kosciusko County Coroner? The public information is pretty slim, sure, but even if these guys were standing right in front of me I’d have a hard time saying which one ought to be trusted with dead people.

Should our sheriff stay in office? Only if he promises to let them Duke boys go most of the time.

Treasurer? Pick a wealthy-sounding dude, so he’s less likely to swipe all our dough. He’s already got plenty himself. Somebody with “III” on his name. Is Richie Rich on the ballot? Can his dog Dollar be his running mate?

Should we keep our County Council members, Republicans in all four districts? Apparently so, since no Democrat or anybody else is even running against them.

Circuit Court Judges? County Council Trustees? Sure, whatever. I shrug repeatedly, synchronized with Brittany.

I did my best to guess at these things, while Lope just virtuously left them blank. (It’s more in my nature to just be agreeable, and play along as best I can, but Lope evidently studied under Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”)

And while I do feel bad that I’m not more informed on the people and policies that shape life in my little corner of the world, it still reminded me of something funny.

It was a joke by Kathleen Madigan, who I think is just a riot. I’m probably not supposed to be posting this material on here because it’s copyrighted and all, so if anybody asks me to take it down, I will. But I thought you might enjoy a bit of humorous observation this afternoon as you head off to the polls.

* The other, insignificant thing I had a problem with at the voting booth was the animal mascots for each party. I thought Democrats were donkeys and Republicans were elephants, which I like because each is about equally flattering/unflattering depending on your context and perspective. But next to each one on this ballot was an unfamiliar representative from the bird kingdom: An eagle for the Republicans and a rooster for the Democrats. Apparently that was common a hundred years ago, and we here in this state, along with Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia, have hung on to it. Weird. The Libertarians got it worst of all, though. On their little pixelated corner of the screen, it would appear they’re represented by a flaming book.)

It’s a silly date, I suppose, but four and a half is my favorite number, so it only seems natural to get excited over the day on which it’s been four years and six months since our wedding day.

Today.

Today was fairly unremarkable, which pleases me to say. We woke up, I made her decaf coffee and English muffins with sliced cheese on top, remembered her prenatal vitamin and reheated her coffee when she was halfway through.

We got to work, and caught up on all the Monday morning emails and admin tasks and whathaveyou. By about 11 we were both nipping at the leftover Halloween candy, so we decided we should have lunch. About an hour and a half later, we actually acted on these plans. Pretty typical for us.

And by then, it was very close to the time when the furnace tune-up man was scheduled to come by, and we (I) only realized this after we’d left to grab lunch. So instead, we visited a furniture store and plopped into big recliners to see which one was comfiest, then headed back home to reheat leftovers.

During the trip I think we talked about Tom and the Marine Corps Ball he had to go to this weekend, which must have sucked. We probably also discussed which car we’d like to get when our lease runs out this month.

She worked upstairs for part of the afternoon, and I worked down here, heading over to the unfinished side of the basement to peek at what the furnace man was doing. Trying to see if there’s anything I ought to know how to poke or prod or maintain.

And as the workday wrapped up, she was upset because she had no good ideas for the illustration she’s got due tomorrow. So I suggested we go for a walk and talk about it, and we did. The weather is ridiculously nice these days, and a 70-degree walk in firework woods, all lit up with changing colors and streaking sunlight, worked magically to get her ideas flowing again.

Back at home I wrapped up some work and email from the workday, and she got dressed to go try out the yoga classes over at the YMCA. We’re hoping they’re at least an eighth as peaceful and invigorating (they really can go together) as the ones at our friend Diane’s house, back in Columbia.

While she went to yoga I figured out how to attach the headboard to the bed frame, even though they weren’t made to go together. It’s all set now, and looks fine.

And now I’m sitting here.

Typing this. Waiting for her to come home.

*****

An ordinary day, that makes me feel extraordinarily lucky to be used to. Four and a half years has changed things between us, in so many ways. When I reach to hold her hand now, there’s no heart-pounding thrill of wondering whether she’ll let me, like there used to be. When I introduce her to a friend now, there’s no beaming of pride that this beautiful, talented person would actually want me around.

Of course she would. She’s my other half; how could she be there without me? How could I be here without her? The shock and uncertainty have faded, and in their place have grown familiarity and understanding. I’ll take it.

It’s what I always wanted from the beginning, anyway — to be close to her. For us to know each other.

And even though I know there are many, many couples out there who would think of four and a half years as “just getting started,” it doesn’t feel that way to me.

Feels like we’ve always been together.

One thing is the same, though, as it was in April of 2005, when we hadn’t even been married a year, and I waited in our little house on Maxwell Road for Penny to come back from South Carolina — long before we ever had an idea that we might move there.

I was waiting. Waiting for her to come back. Putting my life on hold, and looking forward to having her there with me so life could finally begin again.

*****

Today I still wait, and still look forward to everything finally “starting,” even though life is so obviously still happening, and wonderfully at that.

The difference now is that it’s February I’m waiting for, when our daughter will arrive. When Lope will miraculously introduce us all. Everything now seems like preparation, or research for stories to tell her. Things to remember. Things to explain.

We look forward, and toss our minds into the future, which Diane said was a misuse of energy, and she was right. We should live in the present.

But it’s so difficult when there is a moment coming that shines so brightly in your imagining.

Waiting, still. The difference now, four and a half years since the day we stood in a freezing park pagoda and promised to love one another always, is this:

Now, we wait together.

The Stich in question is more properly termed a ‘Stich, as in Aerostich Roadcrafter One Piece Motorcycle Suit, an amazing piece of textile engineering wrought by one Andy Goldfine, an avid motorcyclist who decided two decades ago that there ought to be a riding suit available that wasn’t made of leather or waxed cotton.

Andy’s suit is fantastic — waterproof, windproof and darn near pavement-proof 500 Denier Cordura® GORE-TEX® Fabric, 3M Scotchlite™ reflective strips to make sure cars and trucks can see you, zippered vents under the arms and across the back to keep you comfy in most all temperatures, umpteen pockets to hold maps and gloves and the like, and, perhaps most important of all, TF2 impact pads at the shoulders, elbows and knees.

I’ve had mine for a couple of years now, and enjoyed the weather protection, visibility and astronaut/fireman vibe I get to exude wherever I go. And sure enough, when my pal Tom got into motorcycling earlier this year, I hinted strongly that he ought to get himself one too. (I stopped just short of insisting, since the suit cost more than half what he’d paid for the bike itself. In fact, for certain long trips I recommended that Tom ride my bike instead of his own, even though his is really cool.)

So Tom ordered himself an Aerostich. A gray one, like mine, but without the fluorescent yellow accents. (I guess he just felt he couldn’t quite pull it off.) It took awhile to get here, since Tom’s a sizable fellow, and the nice folks in Duluth can only turn out about 150 of these things per month, total. Tom’s had to be made special.

*****

Five weeks later, it arrived. A few weeks after that, I got The Call. Calls don’t come much worse than this one, right around nightfall:

“Colin?”

“Hey, Tom, what’s up?”

“Uh, I think I just wrecked your bike.”

Now, this is bad across the board. I liked that bike a lot, of course, but much more urgent is Tom’s uncertainty. He *thinks* he wrecked it? What happened? He sounds groggy and confused. What’s broken? What hurts?

“I hit a deer. I think I was going about 50 or 60. Nothing seems to be broken that I can tell. I’m kind of dizzy.”

So he’s done the roadside body-parts inventory. All the fingers and toes still wiggle, and nothing’s shooting out the telltale pain of a break or dislocation. And he’s talking to me, so he can’t have cracked his head open or anything. I tell him I’m coming to get him.

“Okay man.”

He hangs up for a moment to use his phone’s GPS to determine where he is. All he knows is that he’s near a field and some woods. With deer in them.

When he calls back with his location, I ask about the bike.

“I, uh, can’t find it.”

Whoa. Maybe I shouldn’t be the first responder on the scene after all. If Tom hit a deer hard enough to *misplace* 400 lbs of bright blue metal, he must have been zooming. And it’s getting dark.

Penny’s yelling in the background. “Tell him to call an ambulance!” I do.

And so, clutching cell phone in hand, I head over to Kosciusko County Hospital with Penny, her Mom, sister and little brother Mason to wait for the ambulance to arrive.

In the meantime I get calls from my insurance company and the sheriff’s department, who wants to make sure I knew Tom was riding my motorcycle. I did, and without a shred of concern. He’s an excellent rider, and there was nothing he could have done to avoid that deer. I was just hoping that the extra size of the V-Strom (roughly 100-150 lbs more than his DR350, plus a reinforced fairing) had been able to lessen his injuries somewhat.

At this point I should acknowledge what many people would be thinking about this story, including perhaps you yourself: “STOP riding motorcycles, you lunatics! This is exactly what I’m talking about! *Donor*cycles is more like it, and these sorts of accidents are always happening to idiots like you who insist on—”

Hold up. There’s more than one way to ride a bike, and Tom’s approach—both in general and the day of the accident—is about the safest one currently available.

In addition to taking the Experienced Riders Course sponsored by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, we both ride fairly conservatively, make sure our machines are in good running condition and (this is the most important part, in my book) avoid cars at all cost. That’s a big part of why Tom was on a tiny two-lane road at that point in the evening instead of a bigger highway.

(”I just didn’t see him” is the agonizingly common refrain of the SUV-pilot who has just mown down a motorcyclist, and it’s always true. People don’t see you on a bike. You’re invisible. They’ll swerve into your lane, pull out in front of you and slam into the back of you. You learn to watch their heads instead of their blinkers, and expect that when somebody cranes his head toward the restaurant on the left, he’s likely to veer over, whether you’re in his way or not. The signal becomes an afterthought. That’s why you might often see motorcyclists—at least if they’re me—rapidly accelerating away from you. It’s not showing off; we’re trying to put as much distance between us and you as possible. Especially if we see you’re on a cell phone.)

And we practice ATGATT: All The Gear, All The Time. Tom’s a little better at this than me even, perhaps from his military training. It means you throw on the suit *and* the helmet *and* the boots *and* the gloves *every* time you grab the bike key. That’s partially why I got the one-piece Aerostich suit: it rules out riding with only the jacket. ATGATT.

It bears mentioning that motorcycling is still an inherently unsafe activity. High velocities, no seatbelts and the aforementioned invisibility create a risk that cannot be reduced to zero, no matter how you go about it. But so does walking your doggy.

There are those, though, who feel it’s worth the risk, especially in consideration of the benefits. Fuel economy and parking efficiency are some obvious ones, but I’ll let Andy Goldfine expound on the intangibles: “It energizes people. It socializes people. It stimulates that primal part of our brain that’s isolated when we just drive from place to place in our cars.” He’s absolutely right, as anyone who’s ever ridden along an open stretch of two-lane could tell you. Driving a car is like looking at the landscape in a picture frame. On a bike, you’re *in* the picture.

Mr. Goldfine even talks some about “episodic transcendence” which are short intervals in which we can rise above our everyday lives and briefly grasp the wonder of existence. That’s a nice bonus too.

Still, as heartily as I believe in motorcycling as a Force for Good, I was prepared to radically recalculate the trade-offs when the EMTs wheeled Tom in from the ambulance. If he was permanently injured, then I was permanently done riding.

I rounded the corner coming into his hospital room and there it was: the oversized stretcher leaned against the wall, large chunks of grass still sticking to its edges. A battered Shoei helmet on the supply table, streaked with scratches and scars from pavement and dirt. And an XXL Aerostich suit, filthy and crumpled on the floor.

But there was Tom, lying in the bed, smiling.

“My foot hurts” he said, just as the doctor came in with his X-rays, showing no damage to his foot or his neck. Even his hand, which hurt too, checked out.

Tom drilled a woodland mammal at a mile a minute and didn’t even break his pinky finger.

He felt dizzy when he sat up, so we asked for CT Scans, and those came back fine too. So we took him home, somewhat after midnight.

The doctor commented on the helmet, which performed admirably, and on the suit, the likes of which he’d never seen before. The two together certainly saved Tom a hospital stay, probably even his life.

And this is exactly what it was designed for. In the catalog, Aerostich prints estimates on the cost to repair their suits after crashes at various speeds. A parking-lot skid could require only another $50 in nylon, cordura and labor to take care of, while higher-speed wipeouts (they’ve worked on suits crashed at 150 mph+) tend to run into the hundreds of dollars. If you crash badly enough to damage the suit so that it would cost as much to fix as half the price of a new one, you’ve totaled it. But still, you’re out less than the price of one skin graft, as I see it.

In Tom’s case, it worked perfectly. So take a bow, Andy Goldfine. Join him, whoever sewed the extra-long fabric pieces to construct the Suit That Saved Tom’s Ass.

And you too, 2004 Suzuki V-Strom. You did alright too. Tom wrecked you hard enough to lose track of you, and it looks like you absorbed some of the impact so his lower body didn’t have to. And afterward in the salvage yard’s garage, you still fired right up and idled smoothly. Amazingly.


The insurance company still declared you totaled, but that’s another story.

Martha (though no one ever called her that) June Dullaghan came to Indianapolis from her family home in remote Montana because my grandpa looked good in his Navy uniform. His regiment was passing through, probably on the way to Seattle, and she saw him in the train station.

Thus, us: nine kids, seventeen grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren, with a fifth on the way. All raised in Indianapolis, a place Grandma probably couldn’t even place on a map when she was growing up on her reservation.

Usually in an obituary I guess you discuss career and achievements, outline how many years so-and-so spent at such-and-such insurance company or whatever. Grandma had babies. Decades and decades of dedicated service to a job with no paid time off, no pension, no gold watch at the end. The older kids scarcely remember a time when Grandma wasn’t pregnant. Aunt Joan, the youngest, came some 30 years after Uncle Dick.

She was a funny lady, and a Scrabble powerhouse. She spoke softly, and I wonder if they listened to her when my aunts and uncles were growing up, a half-dozen rambunctious kids in a little white one-story on the near eastside. I certainly did.

She was wise, and possessed a serenity that I eventually came to realize wasn’t just the product of age. I think she was always like that. Always patience, always gentleness, always a little smile that seemed to say, “I didn’t know it would turn out exactly this way… but I was pretty close.” She seemed amazingly steady, and content to flow over and around whatever bends might arise.

She lost my grandpa nine years ago, and got herself an apartment. She traveled the world with some of her kids; Uncle Dick and Aunt Nettie showed her Europe and Alaska, I believe. She had a ball.

Her knees wore out first, and Grandma got some new ones a few years back — a painful surgery, but she was happy to be able to get around again. It actually made her seem suddenly a few years younger, which we all appreciated because it got easier to kid ourselves about how close the end probably would be.

She was 87 when she died, and she was 87 earlier this year when she headed off on another of her adventures, and we all thought maybe we’d just get even luckier and have her around another decade or so. She had an aunt who lived to 99, you know.

Maybe, we thought. There didn’t seem to be much wrong with her, at any rate.

When she went to the hospital, I realized finally that she’d been taking pills for a heart condition for the past few years, and that she even had a regular doctor who she loved: Doctor McPhail. There must have been more going on in that 87-year-old body than we thought, if her doctor was around enough to be a friend and all.

There was a stroke, or a series of small ones, and the last time I saw her she could almost move her left arm again. She hurt, though, and when she got too weak to eat they put in a feeding tube, which is when they found the esophageal cancer. Before that, my Aunt Mary had suggested that maybe her chest pains were just heartburn, to which my Grandma reportedly said, “Maybe. But, *something’s* got to kill you, right?”

She knew. Ten days or ten years; her days were numbered.

When the call finally came that it was time to say goodbye, I didn’t get it. I was out camping, my cell phone totally out of battery power. It was a beautiful weekend, and in the 80s here in Indiana. Record highs for October, actually. The leaves were already changing as Tom and Sharon and Mason and I paddled our kayaks across the perfect lakes of a state park not far from my new house.

Brilliant yellow treetops gleamed — no, exploded in brilliance — as the sun rose against the clear blue sky. We couldn’t believe our luck.

And this morning, after checking the voicemail that said she’d finally passed, I tried to put the weekend behind me and think about what needed to get done this week. Now “write obituary” was added to the list. It’s an honor, but not a welcome one.

I checked the weather, out of reflex. It’s supposed to be 80 and sunny today, but then that’s it. It’ll be in the 50s and cloudy — more appropriate weather for an Indiana autumn — by the end of the week. That stinks, but it’s okay.

It’s only human nature to enjoy your good fortune, and to hope for even more. I’m sure a Mediterranean cruise is just as good as an afternoon of kayaking for enjoying what you’ve got.

There were moments when the water seemed to go on forever — we’d been out there for hours, and one lake just seemed to lead to another. There were narrow channels that connected them, so we threaded through the arching trees and falling leaves and marveled at it all and waited to see what was around the next bend. Our arms ached, and we had to stop every once in a while.

Around 1:30 we pulled into a dock to make a bathroom stop, and suddenly noticed: there was the car. We’d already reached the end. Mason may not have realized it, since he’s only 14, but the rest of us have seen enough summers to know that this was the last of it.

Still, as we walked up to the car, dragging our kayaks and hoping there would be drinks in the cooler, there was relief. A little sad and surprising to see our lake run out so suddenly, but our arms were tired anyway. And we all knew, even more now that it was over, what a wonderful ride it had been.

She’s beautiful.

“You can’t unring a bell,” goes the saying, nor can you unscramble an egg. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. But today the arrow of time points toward knowledge, not chaos. Today we find out if our baby is a boy or a girl.

The doctor’s appointment starts at 10:30. The ultrasound, our second, should follow shortly after. This means that in all likelihood, Penny and I had breakfast this morning (cereal and hot chocolate/oatmeal and coffee, incidentally) not knowing the gender — or name — of the person who will change our lives forever, and by the time we have lunch we *will* know.

And soon after, you will too.

How amazing.

So far the people watching is almost as good as the car ogling. And that’s all the -ings for today, since it’s 11 here but 3 a.m. our time, and we’ve been up since 5.
~

We decided it was a good time to hone his skills, since he’s only been back riding again for a few months, and high time I finally got my, um, Motorcycle License. I’ve been riding with a “Beginner’s Permit” since I got my first bike, faithfully renewing it every year with another written test at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, which means that I’ve technically been a Beginner for about thirteen years now.

(Now that I’ve taken the course, I’ll be able to go back to the BMV and get the official endorsement on my driver’s license and be cool. Same with Tom.)

And it was a really helpful course. There were twelve of us up at the elementary school in Kokomo, mostly older guys with big, big Harley Davidsons, then us with weird-lookin’ Japanese contraptions, and two instructors who went by “Ogre” and “Skipper.” (Ogre was big, burly and bald, with denim overalls, a cutoff t-shirt and no inside voice. Skipper was wiry and squinty, with dark prescription sunglasses and filterless cigarettes.)

The teaching went about as logically as I could imagine: One of the two instructors would round us up on the parking lot, showing us the cones they wanted us to navigate between and how fast. Then the other one would hop on a bike and do the exercise while we watched. Then everybody got back on our own bikes and tried it for ourselves. If you got it right, they waved you back to the staging area. Mess it up, or expose a bad habit you’d developed in decades of self-taught riding, and they’d flag you down for some pointers. Then it was on to the next exercise.

I tried to give good feedback on the comment sheet at the end, but I really can’t see any good way to improve on the structure of the class or how it’s administered. Which is actually a big compliment, even though it doesn’t sound like one.

It took about six hours, all told, and at the end they tested us on our ability to swerve without crashing, stop suddenly and safely navigate sharp as well as sweeping curves. All of us passed, and one guy even aced everything. (Sadly, it wasn’t me.)

My favorite part was probably The Rectangle. There was a bedroom-sized outline of paint on one section of the lot, and each of us had to ride in and do two u-turns, one to the left and one to the right, without crossing any lines. You have to ride very slowly to change direction in a space that confined, and they take points off if you put a foot down at any point, so it’s a delicate balance. Tom and I had an unfair advantage, just as we did with every other aspect of the course, because we weren’t riding 800-lb dreadnought Harleys, but it was still a little tricky. For the Road King dudes, it was almost impossible.

And since it was pretty hot yesterday, and Harley dudes rarely wear full-face helmets, the rest of us got to enjoy each guy’s expressions as they crept by, trying to complete the turn without scraping a thousand-dollar exhaust pipe on the asphalt or, worse, stalling the engine and dumping the whole behemoth right in front of Ogre and everybody.

We all have these faces we make when doing something difficult, I think, especially men. It was really a privilege to see these ten — well worth the registration fee all by itself.

One stoic-looking fellow from Noblesville had drooping jowls that somehow seemed to crease more deeply as he approached the paint lines. Once or twice you’d see the tongue-sticking-out-the-side, eyes narrowed approach, and one silver-haired, smooth-faced guy who looked like a JC Penney model had an extraordinarily pleasant open-mouthed grimace involving his bright white teeth and tanned, taut skin. He kind of looked like a superhero, even though I don’t recall him having especially good control of the bike.

Nobody had that great, Michael Jordan dropped jaw thing going, or if so I wasn’t looking. Tom pretty much just looked more, well, Tomlike, if I remember correctly.

I squinted, of course, because I always do when I’m outside and in this case I had my sunglasses off so that the instructors could make sure I was looking where I should. (They can tell either way, though, just by where your head is pointed. Ogre threatened that if I didn’t stop looking at the ground right in front of my wheels and start looking up ahead at the next turn, thus guiding the bike there automatically, he’d tie a strap from the back of my helmet to the waistband on my underwear, and every time I looked down I’d give myself a wedgie. I shaped up.)

And since I uncharacteristically neglected to get any photographs of the event, except one terrible video clip from my cell phone which you’ll see in a second, this morning while the movers load our stuff onto two 26-ft trucks and prepare to haul it all up to the new place in Winona Lake I am sitting in the temporary office room of Simply Self Storage and re-enacting some of the faces I recalled seeing yesterday afternoon. I’m hoping none of the mover guys is seeing this through the window. One just carried a mattress past, and I don’t think he could have noticed me.

I’ll admit that my expressions aren’t as expressive as some of the ones I saw yesterday. But I hope you enjoy anyway. Just picture each one as being inside a helmet, instead of inside a cinder-block room, and aged about ten or twenty years. For some of the guys, picture me about a hundred pounds heavier, with a chubby baby face, bald head and goatee. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

I wish I’d had Penny there. She makes the best faces, as I’ve been saying for years.

And here’s the video clip I told you about. I don’t think Tom appears in it, since he was probably off wheelie-ing across the parking lot unintentionally and getting yelled at. Crazy dirt bike riders.

Most fun I’ve had since *last* weekend.