Before Maine, Megan and I lived in Vermont. For much of my Connecticut family, moving to these northern reaches of New England is tantamount to moving to Siberia or the Himalayas. Some ask us if we had snow in August. Others maintain the belief that I commute to work via dog sled. But with global warming, winters up here are like the CT winters of my youth. In other words, they’ve gotten kind of soft. Case in point, our first winter in Vermont, we received next to nothing for snow all winter. In fact, we got so little snow I never once had to drag my snow blower out from the shed to clear a path. Often a broom would do the trick on our deck and walkway.

The snow blower was a gift from my great-uncle Lew (not to be confused with the term “great uncle” - he is one of these as well). My Uncle Lew lives next-door to my folks and used to run a hardware store. When the store finally closed, he brought all the stock home with him so if you needed any tool, he was guaranteed to have three or four of them unopened in his basement. He also stalks garage sales, junkyards, and the sides of roads for mechanical treasures in need of repair. Knowing this, you can rest assured that the snow blower he gave us was old. It was most likely assembled while the latest song from newcomers Men at Work cranked over the factory sound system. The machine is so old that it can safely be called a snow blower and not the politically corrected moniker of snow thrower as are advertised today. Why they changed the name, I can’t say; some marketing people just liked it better that way.

So our “one-lung” snow blower sat dormant for much of its Vermont tenure. We moved to Maine during the tail end of Winter ‘07. Initially, we shacked up with my in-laws. They’re lucky enough to have a tractor with a snow blowing (throwing?) attachment, so any snow we got didn’t stand a chance. Once again, our one-lung’er sat in storage, unused and unloved.

Now that we are in our own house with our own driveway, snow removal is solely up to me. While I failed to get the snow blower out of storage before the first storm of the season, I did have her out for the past few. Of course, I had no guarantee that she’d start up at all. Nonetheless, during a swirling storm, I brought the machine out to the snow-strewn driveway, filled the tank with oil and gas mixed to the right ratio (I think), primed the engine, and yanked on the starter cord while hoping for the best. The first few dozen pulls did nothing, but then I cleverly held down the bar you have to hold down to run the engine and pulled once more. The snow blower burst into noisy, rattle-y, fume-y life.

So while everybody else - and I mean everybody else – on our street has their driveway plowed, I can be found pushing what looks like a Commodore 64 around while a steady stream of snow catches the wind and whips me in the face.

^*I don’t mean Paul, the other one-lung’er in our lives.

With computer troubles at home and work, my Wit-o-meter has cranked down to [insert something bland and unfunny here]. The very fact that I have to rely on bracketed content in my opening sentences should indicate how strapped I am humorously.

So, if you can spare any comedic change, please drop any surplus in the comments.

Last week we braved the wilderness of the Hannaford parking lot to bring home our Christmas tree. We settled on a seven-foot conifer trucked down from Aroostook County, the northern bulk of Maine. The money we paid went to Kiwanis International – an admirable organization dedicated to serving and strengthening local communities through goodwill and volunteerism. I initially thought the Kiwanis were dedicated to funding genetic research to finally fuse an iguana and a kiwi, but the Internet has proven me wrong once more.

After a week in our living room, I don’t have to fill the tree stand with water three times a day; we have reached stasis. Despite trimming the tree carefully—adding our bobbins, lights, and Spider-Man collector ornaments delicately—we still vacuumed up enough pine needles to build a quite decent scale model of Oregon. Neither Hazel nor the cats have managed to bring down crushing, festive injury upon themselves. With the gifts now wrapped and stowed under the tree, I’m sure the temptation will be even greater.

At work, our holiday card is ready to ship. We send out about 200 or so to our board and important contacts. When they arrived last week, the staff (all 13 of us) was asked to sign them using either blue, black, red, or green ink. I piped up asking if we couldn’t just use digital signatures in the future, but was told that option would be too impersonal and counter to the spirit of the season. So I went through and slapped my John Hancock on each card, trying my best to keep the scratching pen tip (I chose black ink – very festive) free of any undercurrent of spite I may be feeling about this task.

When we were all done, I flipped through the pile. Despite the excellent consistency I saw in my placement and overall appearance, I could not help but notice that my signature absolutely sucks. Not too give too much away to any identity thieves in my readership, but my signed name looks nothing like “John”. It starts out like the EKG readout of an epileptic man under attack from a troupe of rabid mandrills and finishes with said man flat-lining. I’d like to change it, but I think I am locked in by both legal necessity and muscle memory. I cannot create a smooth flow when signing my name no matter how many times I try. And I can’t blame the rising and falling length of my surname as the culprit as Megan has not succumbed to this after almost five years of signing her married name.

A co-worker suggested that this is a male/female thing, but I don’t think that holds up. One of the best signatures I’ve seen is J.R.R. Tolkien. This is a fellow who spent a lot of time writing, but his signature never suffered. It’s artful, it’s legible, and it’s everything I’d like my name to be. Of course, I don’t think I could get away with the tri-dotted delta flourish.

After a cold and snowy start to the week, the view out my office window has blue skies, calm seas, and roofs dripping with melting snow and ice. In short, it’s warm in Maine and I am happy for this. Shortly after Hazel’s 30-hour sickness last week, both Megan and I caught strains of it. Since we’re older and frailer than our daughter, both of us have been sneezing, coughing, and (belly)aching ever since. Megan is about a day ahead of me in symptoms and recovery, so I should be out of the woods soon. Yesterday I was running a fever and was all loopy; I’m no microbiologist, but that high internal body temperature must be how my system destroys the virus or whatever much how napalm fire strikes can destroy people who live in a country we decide to muck up. This gives a whole new dimension to the term “germ warfare”.

While being sick at work is no fun, my sore throat and cough have given me a gruff, gravelly voice. With each phone call that I answer, I know that I am terrifying the caller while simultaneously filling them with a sense of wonder and curiosity about the well-lived voice greeting them telephonically. For those of you who don’t know, my normal speaking voice is nasally. Audibly speaking, I talk how Bob Dylan sings. Megan theorizes that the more nasality a singer displays, the more I’ll like them. This may hold water, as this egocentric attitude is backed up by my love of They Might Be Giants, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Rush. Luckily this self-serving attitude doesn’t spread to musicians with beards, as ZZ Top and Anthrax (via Scott Ian) don’t often find their way into my iTunes library (though Cat Stevens does and provides support for both hypotheses).

After rereading this post, I think that fever may still be cooking a few bugs inside me at a brain-simmering bubble.

Megan and her mother went down to Portland for a day of chain store shopping on Saturday, so Hazel and I had a whole day to ourselves. In between naps (hers, not mine), we read books, played with plush animals, and even took in “The New Yankee Workshop” AND “This Old House”. If there is a better formula for weekend fun, I have yet to pluck it from the ether.

Just after dusk, I packed up the daughter and headed north to my in-laws’ for pizza and to pick up Megan. As Hazel snoozed in her car seat, I was left alone with my thoughts on the 45-minute drive. Most of the trip takes place on Route One. Instead of the Boston-Post Road of my youth with its movie theaters, mall, and Milford Amusement Center (we’ve got the fun!), this stretch on the First Highway of America has woods, trees, forests, and a few stands of pine and spruce. During the brief mile or so through downtown Camden, I was treated to many houses and B&Bs aglow with the holiday spirit. Megan loves Christmas but I always rein her in with the amount of lights we string up each year. Being festive is one thing, being the house that puts Clark W. Griswold to shame is certainly another. However, I think I’ve found a solution in the vein of a five year plan.

The Five Year Plan: Megan and I are going to buy a bed-and-breakfast. Not only will this allow for Megan to decorate her little heart out with yuletide abandon, but this is a business that would make the most of her loves of home decorating, cooking for large groups of people, and designing graphic media in the way of advertisements and such on a year-round basis. Plus, we live in the perfect place for such a business, as folks from far and wide love to come to Midcoast Maine and will need a place to rest their fanny-packed patoots. And even though there are quite a few places with rooms to let in the area already, I’m sure our youthful outlook will stand out in a world of doilies, wallpaper, and mounted moose heads.

Which brings us to what to name our future inn? Not counting a play off of the street or neighborhood our future inn is built upon, the names fall into two distinct categories:
Names Megan Has “Taken Under Advisement”/Suggested Herself:

• The Sleeping Inn
• The Stay Inn
• The All Join Inn
• Reynard’s Roost

Names Megan Would Bludgeon Me With If They Were Corporeal 

• The Seroton Inn
• Original’s Inn
• The Millennium Falk Inn

The last one is a name I think we can really make work in a deceptively dorky way. If the name is changed to the Mill Falc Inn, we can say that the building used to be a granary or something. Or, with the name Mlle. Faulk Inn, our business becomes surrounded in the colorful history of Mademoiselle Faulk, a French dignitary whose emigration to New England immediately following that unpleasant incident with the orangutan caused quite the stir among her fellow Parisian aristocrats. 

Additional names are welcome. Also, should anyone have the urge to own a stake of a soon-to-be successful hospitality venture, this five year plan could be moved up to three.

The first time my parents came up to see Hazel, she was just one-week-old and was stuck in the hospital with a bad case of jaundice. The second time my parents came up to see Hazel, she was seven-weeks-old and back in the hospital for hernia surgery. The third time my parents ventured north to see Hazel, it was this weekend and the state of Maine got socked with a pretty ample snow storm. The white stuff is still falling today and is collected on the ground in one- or three-foot drifts. In short, grandparents should have it easier.

Luckily, with being snowed in all yesterday, Hazel enjoyed tons of Gramma and Papa time. They may have said they were coming up for my and Megan’s birthdays, but once my 29 candles were blown out, I may as well have been a houseplant. This of course is fine by me, me being Dad John. It may have taken a little punching down upon my inner Young John to step aside here, but my birthday gift copy of Emmett Otter’s Jug-band Christmas certainly helped sooth the whiny beast. If you’ve never seen this holiday classic, think “The Gift of the Magi” meets The Wind in the Willows. I dare say that the movie is worth the flight to Maine needed to get oneself to my living room for the next DVD viewing. I’ll even supply the popcorn.