From whiskey river:
Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that’s on its mind and can’t make itself understood, and so can’t rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.
(Mark Twain, The [...]

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[Today's post is my contribution to travel writer Angela Nickerson's Blogapalooza blog party. The theme of Angela's Halloween Blogapalooza is "What a Strange Trip It's Been," for which her instructions are:
...put a photo of a pumpkin at the top of your post and tell us the story of your strangest or scariest trip ever.
Be sure [...]

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[This post continues yesterday's. I won't redefine any of the terminology here, so if you find yourself a little confused it probably just means you need to read that one.]
In the fall of 2003, The Missus and I were preparing to host her sisters, brother, and their families for Thanksgiving.
At the time, the four families [...]

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As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post.
We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” which [...]

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From Richard Selzer’s Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, quoting Lady Mary Wortley, via Hugh Walpole:
People wish their enemies dead — but I do not; I say, give them gout, give them the stone.
From “When in Gout,” by Allison Williams, Time Out New York, April 16-22, 2008:
You would know if you had [...]

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When I first moved down here in 1993 to be with the woman who would eventually become The Missus, among the things that excited me (as opposed to the things I dreaded) was her writing circle.
At the time, she was enrolled in a graduate creative-writing program. She had met numerous other writers through that program, [...]

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His time as a boy had passed many years ago. But, he suspected, he would always and forever be The Boy. His mind would ever run like two trains on two parallel tracks at once, one inside his head and the other outside, the trains always synced up, The Boy always and effortlessly stepping back [...]

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Last month, I reported on a new initiative which our local neighborhood was undertaking — a neighborhood crime watch. The Missus and I learned of this initiative, as I said, via a letter from our street’s block captain: “As your block captain, I will be asking for you to provide phone numbers, and e-mail addresses, [...]

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[Continued from yesterday's brief "We're still here!" post.  All images accompanying this post come from the online "Readers' Gallery" of photos posted at our local newspaper's site.]
Dear Family –
I know some of you have been keeping a watchful eye (”eye”: ha ha ha) on The Weather Channel for news of the damages suffered to our [...]

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Back in the day — you know, the day — you could say (as I used to) “I work for the phone company” and no one would doubt which phone company paid your salary. That’s why Lily Tomlin’s old “Ernestine the telephone operator” could say, without ambiguity, “We’re the phone company. We don’t have to [...]

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