The Wife is out picking up large amounts of carved animal flesh to feed to our dogs, which leaves me alone with the news: we have an offer on our house.

Actually, not completely alone. I told the dogs, and I told the carpet cleaning guy, who was here for a second time this week to re-shampoo Bon's office. After it dried, the "sea-foam" carpet started to form cancerous looking brown stains. I think it's cat urine left over from the previous owners that soaked into the pad and came up during cleaning. Or soylent green.

Anyway, it's our first offer, but it's a lowball amount, so now we have to go into the whole game of back and forth. Yay.

An offer. On my house. I guess I am moving, after all. Dammit.

There was a murder in my yard this morning. A loud, thoroughly raucous murder. I heard the murder through the open windows in the kitchen, as I sat eating my toast in nothing but shorts, as the already sultry-at-6am air wafted in against my back. I was reading about Sarah Jessica-Parker at the time. The sound outside the window sent a chill down my spine, even in this heat.

There's been a number of murders on my street since we moved in, and this wasn't the first murder I'd heard, then watched, in my own front lawn. We had an even bigger murder in the back yard once. I'm thinking perhaps it could be a selling point: "Buy this house, bring your binoculars, and watch for a murder!" we could say on the listing sheet.

Some people don't like to see a murder. I personally find it interesting, and in a way, kind of uplifting. Then again, even if I do, perhaps it's nothing to crow about.

Ages ago, before the Internet bubble burst and blogs were all the rage, we had a cleaning lady. Every two weeks, a Portuguese woman who spoke no English would come over and clean the house for a couple of hours. If we needed her to do anything different, Bon would call her husband and he would tell her over the phone.

When we had to let her go because I was sucking off the teat of Massachusetts unemployment, I made a solemn promise to my beautiful, wonderful Wife that I would pick up the twice monthly vacuuming duties -- we can't go more than that or the dog hair around her gets thick enough to fill large throw pillows.

I hate vacuuming.

In the early days of high school, I vacuumed a lot. Many weekends I spent entire days just cleaning at my parent's house -- dusting, dishes, scrubbing, whatever. It took me years to realize that I was doing this because my mom loved it, that mean she loved me, thus I was getting pure and utter approval and acceptance, which is something I wasn't always feeling outside of the house as puberty hit me like an SUV might hit a wayward moth floating on the Interstate.

Of course, my puberty was a cakewalk, but back then, it felt like an hell that I could not control. I compensated by sucking my families dead skin cells and cigarette ash using a central vacuum system.

To this day, if the Wife and I have a major fight, I will sometimes cope with my anger/resentment/disgust/whatever by scrubbing cups and plates or washing windows. Since we've discussed this phenomenon, I sometimes wonder if she instigates arguments just so she'll have an occasional clean counter top. (I'm sure she doesn't, but if I were her, I would. "My hon, you look terrible today! Look at all those dirty plates...")

Now, of course, I have to clean no matter what mode I'm in, because, well, there's nothing quite like selling a house.

Unless you count dragging your genitals through broken glass. That might come close.

I'm just realizing -- or re-realizing, since I know I went through this selling our last house sale in 1999 -- that I really, truly, and utterly detest cleaning things when I'm in an otherwise good mood. Cleaning only makes sense in my broken psyche when I'm royally pissed or depressed.

It doesn't matter though. We are in the never ending cycle of:

1) Clean the house.

2) Leave the house when someone wants to see it.

3) Have some free time, maybe we can a movie... no, wait, have to clean more, people might come over.

Now, I have nothing against a clean house per se, but I live with a woman who can't walk into a room without first scanning to see that all pictures, clocks, and wall hangings are perfectly symmetrical. With that kind of pressure, this house doesn't get that unkempt. Now take this inability to allow clutter to the extreme needed to sell a house for an asking price of $.3699 million dollars (yeah, sounds cool, don't it?) and you'll know my current personal hell.

(The things we do to sell for big bucks. We turn on every light before we leave so the place will look brighter. We make sure the toilet seats are down. All the dog beds get picked up and put in closets behind the clothes. I even tuck my chair in at my desk.)

That's the easy stuff. It's the constant wiping of surfaces, scrubbing of walls, and sweeping of floors that is killing me. We had our upstairs (which is all wall-to-wall carpeting that I despise) professionally cleaned, but that only made some of the stains worse -- we think he sucked them out of the carpet pad. However, it has spared me some vacuuming time.

Still, it's only a matter of time. The dogs are shedding like sheep being sheared and it's my job to make sure the wool is gathered.

So, it's all over: our house is no longer FSBO.*

We signed the papers this evening to put it under Re/Max, the realtor company with the ubiquitous balloon motif, with a realtor who claimed he could sell the place for $10k more than what we'd been told it was worth before. The dollar signs in my eyes were, of course, large, but this was done less for my capricious avarice as it was for my overwhelming sloth-dom.... I can't stand the thought of hanging out for open houses and making calls to place ads and all that horse-puckey. Besides, with the increase in the house price, giving the guy his 5% will not leave us as poor as it would have before.

I spent the rest of the evening, after downing a couple of hot dogs and some fine Victory Markets potato salad, posting more stuff to eBay. I've got about 40 products up for sale right now, so jump online and buy my crap. Or don't. There's plenty more where you came from, bucko.

I'm now catching up on my blog reading... I used to spend at least an hour a day perusing blogs and linking off to more blogs, and book marking blogs, and thinking about things for this blog... but now I spend maybe two hours a week on anything blog related. I find I skip any long, verbose blog posts (like the kind I always do) and make time only to read the witty bits that have terse sentences and short paragraphs. Does that mean I'm outgrowing blogging? Or that I had more time before I took on 80211-Planet?

And now I blog.

Things I'm thinking about:

I still want a bidet in my new house, wherever we end up. And I want an office with bright canary yellow walls like this one.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund guys were supposed to give me a redesign a couple weeks ago, but I haven't seen it yet. So I can pretty much guarantee we won't have CBLDF.org redone by July 4th. Too bad. There was an article in the latest Comic Buyer's Guide [requires free registration to read] about the Fund, but did they mention the URL for the site at all? Not once. I wrote them a letter about doing that probably three years ago, but I guess it didn't stick.

I need to go to bed and get up early. Tomorrow we're going to Vermont for the wedding of my good friend Vikki and her beau Ed. I hope a visit with many old friends will recharge my funny batteries and make this page worth reading for more than just my random bitching. Unless that's what you like, in which case, hey, enjoy, dumbass.

*For Sale By Owner

I really don't. I can't think of anything pithy or interesting. I could go on about the selling of the house, the fact that I haven't watched more than one hour of telelvision in 72 hours, that I had to vacuum the house for an hour last night at 9pm in anticipation of our first showing, that I'm making mega bucks this week on eBay selling stuff (including broken stuff! unbelievalbe... but they better not screw me since it clearly states IT'S BROKEN), that i still have to finish painting the front porch... but none of that seems interesting.

We thought we had a house. But we don't.

What we do have is our current house on the market a little bit ahead of schedule and dry asses.

Here's what happened: Bonny went out to Ithaca this past weekend, all by herself. She had a job interview at the ol' alma mater and aced it -- when she called me after, she said "I'd be shocked to not get an offer," which is pretty amazing as her ego really isn't that big. At least not compared to mine.

After that she looked at houses.

And looked at more houses.  And then some more.

She looked in Ithaca, Newfield, Dryden (both suburbs), and south into Big Flats and Horseheads, two towns with terrible names that are only an hour or so from my parents, but another hour back to Ithaca. There were a couple of nice houses, but nothing like the one she fell in love with just outside Ithaca on Saturday. She got in before it was even officially on the market. It is an old farmhouse in immaculate condition with a barn/garage, three sheds, 10 acres of land, and freakin' library. She loved the house, even went back to see it on Sunday.

By Monday, even though I'd only seen it in pictures and via Bon's vivid descriptions (and even though I was nervous about the fact that it's more money than I want to spend and one shed has a bad roof and the old stone foundation leaks into the basement like a fat guy in a dark suit on the Fourth of July), we made an offer. Of course, as we'd been told, making an offer in a sellers market doesn't mean jack without the cash to back it up. So, I went out Monday morning at 7 to the Lowes Home Improvement and bought a gigantic "FOR SALE BY OWNER" sign.

As of this morning, that sign is out, and our house is listed at ISoldMyHouse.com, the local New England spot for FSBOs* to make a listing. It doesn't put us in the almighty multiple listing service that realtors worship like a volcano god, but it's free, and this move is all about saving money, god dammit.

As of today, our offer for the Ithaca farmhouse (for $10k less than asking price) was rejected. No big shock I guess, though I was hoping the lady selling the house would take some pity on us as the first offer. Not that Bon and I haven't been wishing her bad karma ever since. We're vindictive and petty, but you've got to love us.

To be honest, I wasn't sold on even bidding on the house until I heard about the bidet.

Yes, the downstairs full bath of that farmhouse has a bidet. I've never seen one live, let alone used one, but I've always thought it fascinating that Europeans, who (no offense to my overseas readers) can have some of the most questionable smells emanating from them in public, go all out for using the ol' rear admiral on a regular basis. Yet, we hyper-clean, overly-lilac-cented-hygenic (in some cases) American's will make doo [get it??] with nothing more than wet cheese cloth to clean with.

Bon couldn't quite grasp the whole bidet concept. I tried to explain it to her ("We're going to have to buy some brown towels") but we ended up going online to find a description of how to use one. She thought the whole thing was such a riot -- she especially liked the description that said to move the posterior up and down for effective cleansing --  that after I went to bed, she continued to search Google for bidet info , even finding a contest at PoopReport.com for renaming the porcelain squirter. The winner was, of course, "buttsink." She called me out of bed twice to her office to read things on that site.

No one likes poop and fart jokes more than my wife, god bless her.

Sadly, bidet or not, that house is now out of our sites (though I hope she doesn't get any offers so we can come back in two weeks and try again). Our current house is already getting some traffic: a realtor came by today, another might bring a family to see the house tomorrow, and a third person has been e-mailing Bonny about it. It'll probably go fast. And now that we don't have any prospects out in Ithaca, it'll probably go faster.

I wish I'd saved that box my refrigerator came in. With a length of garden house and a puddle, I could probably make my own bidet.

*For Sale By Owners

Here's how screwed up the world is: I just sold twelve GI Joe comic books I bought in 1983 for a grand total of $8.10 on eBay. The Joe Team, for those not into the world of funny books, is experiencing a bit of a resurge in popularity in the field, along with other 80's stalwarts like the Transformers, Micronauts, He-Man, and (the only one that was really good) Battle of the Planets (AKA G-Force).

Some guy in Quebec bought my Joe comics for $93.

Woo-Hoo!

All told, I made $220 bucks this past week selling comics. Not all went for what they were worth, but the big ticket items (I sold my complete set of FROM HELL for example) more than made up for that.

Gotta love the worlds biggest flea market.

I'm sitting in the Philly airport's C terminal, trying to work, and there's this tiny housefly that has decided I am the most fun person in the world to annoy. I'm wearing a polo shirt, and thus he continually lands on my bare forearms, just light enough to tickle me and make me aware of his presence. Since I don't want to look like a complete psycho by slapping at myself constantly to get rid of him, instead I just flap my arms out at the elbow, as if I were doing a chicken dance on one side. At one point the damn insect went from one arm to the other and back again and then back AGAIN so I likely looked like I was having an elbow-related stroke.

I arrived way too early at the airport -- I always do. Even before 9/11/01 warnings to arrive early early early, I was rabidly obsessed with never missing a plane, and would make sure I had at least an hour to sit in the airport just in case they changed a gate or lost my reservation or whatever. I once landed at O'Hare in Chicago after my connection had left and spent two hours crossing terminals to find another flight home and don't relish doing it again. Therefore, here I was at the airport a full two hours before my 9:30 flight to Boston.

I got to see full-blown fear-of-technology panic in action this morning. In the line ahead of me at e-ticket check in (where you go up to a video kiosk, put in your credit card so it can read your name, and then follow the prompts so it'll print out your boarding pass) were an elderly couple. At least three kiosks were empty and beckoning to them to step up, but the woman, a wizened old dear in her early 70s that I'm betting used to be much taller than her five foot two inches, stood in front of her husband and looked from one to the other and then the third and back and around again as I waited behind them. She'd lurch forward, change her mind, then lurch back. Finally, someone behind counter taking bags noticed her plight and told her if they didn't have bags to check they could go up to the gate to get boarding passes. She beat a hasty retreat with her husband in tow.

Security this trip has been a breeze. No removing shows, no pat downs, no full body cavity searches. I haven't even been asked to turn on the laptop. Maybe it helps that I didn't have the makings of a lethal weapon in my bag this time.

I didn't get breakfast at the hotel (since I went right out the front door to catch the $8 dollar airport shuttle, half the price of a cab) so grabbed a bagel and orange juice in the terminal at a Sbarro of all places. They also had out some pete-za pies out, natch. But as much as I love day old pizza for breakfast, the thought of eating a warm slice of Sbarro pepperoni left me cold.

I'd like to thank my wife for making me realize that OJ "from concentrate" is the stuff that tastes like battery acid. Of course, that was the only kind hey had at the Sbarro. Years ago, my underdeveloped pallet -- that can't tell the difference between Chardonnay and Chablis, but can differentiate a classic Coke from a Pepsi -- didn't even know there were different kinds of juice of the orange, and didn't care. Now I feel sufficiently snobby that, while I drank my OJ from concentrate, I didn't enjoy it. (Sbarro did toast my bagel in their pizza oven, and for that I'm grateful.)

I'm writing all of this at gate C19 with no Internet access. During the conference I was truly spoiled with walking around the building and having access at all times, continuing to have IM conversations I had started in whole other rooms, just opening up the laptop after an hour to find all my e-mail downloaded. I've got an understanding now why wireless ISP aggregator services like Boingo might actually make it (though there are currently only about 40,000 paying subscribers for the service). I know I could get a comp subscription with my job, but there's no reason to, since I barely travel. Makes me wish I traveled more… and then I remember that I'd rather stay home.

I have an idea for a short film, based on real life. Starts with a wide-shot of two women, both working those little kiosks at the airport that line the oversized hallways aisles, each sitting on a tall stool next to their booths, just across the hall from the pay phones and the woman's loo. One woman's cart is filled with faux jewelry and cheapo watches, the other is selling overpriced memorabilia for the city of, oh, let's say... Philadelphia. Travelers walk by and rarely gawk at the wares. The occasional cart filled with the elderly and handicapped and unlucky sods with broken legs goes by, beeping like a garbage truck in reverse -- one actually goes by ringing a bicycle bell to get people out of the way.

The two women, both in their early thirties, wearing the same airport uniform, stare into space and are not speaking. They don't even notice the potential customers. One of them has a cup of coffee and occasionally perks up enough to sip it.

Suddenly, one of them lets out a shout to the other, and they start a vibrant exchange about their boyfriends, until one has to tell the other her boyfriend left her. During all this, carts continue to guy by, beeping, and whenever it happens, they have to shout "What? I didn't hear you!" In the end they are laughing riotously at one another (while a gentleman looks on at some Philadelphia-labeled teddy bears, looking occasionally at the laughing clerk, wondering if he'll ever get waited on… but as her laugher continues, he moves on to his gate. Finally, the laughter subsides and they both fall to occasional giggles, sighs, smiles, then gradually to silence and blank stares.

Tired. Want to sleep, should work. But I just can't bring myself to do any, so instead I sit in front of the screen of this laptop for no good reason, in my hotel room, surfing the Web on the last high-speed connection I'll see until I move, my thighs sticking to the horrible vinyl chair.

Yes, my love affair with traveling to Philadelphia is over.

I'm not going out with a bang either. I went to dinner tonight with my boss and one of the company's main IT guys, both of whom live in Minnesota (the company offices are in Connecticut. Don't ask.) We followed the IT guy to a place in Chinatown where he had a great lunch earlier in the week, and it was among the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten in my life. It was a buffet, which should have been a signal. Second signal was that they had fries on the buffet. Final signal was when I put the food in my mouth, and signals traveled from my taste buds to my brain.

During dinner, which was punctuated with talk of lead paint, who gets screwed over by downloading music and movies, and if Microsoft is really screwing over anyone, I found out I'm the only person that works for the entire company that works off a dial-up connection. Oh, wait, no, one new hire has dial-up. But she'll have DSL by next week. Pathetic.

There was a bit of excitement at the end of the day after my final panel was over (where luckily all the guys talked too much so I didn't have to do any question asking) -- I thought someone stole my laptop. Turns out, I (or someone, since I don't remember doing it) put my bag on a chair in the front row. I've been purposely not saving passwords and so forth on this system all week just because of that very possibility, but to actually face it head on was a bit of adrenaline I could have lived without.

So, tomorrow I'll get up at 5am, check my mail, download a couple of news releases to re-write on the plane, and hopefully be home by noon so I can finish working and say good bye to the wife as she heads out for a weekend of job interviewing (at Ithaca College, they called back) and house viewing (some very good prospects on the list this week.)

It strikes me that one could sleep all day long in a hotel room. The curtains are multiple layers of fabric thick, and can shut out all outside light quite effectively. Hotel rooms can be like inside a masoleum. Bon doesn't allow us to have such darkness in the bedroom at home for fear I will sleep too, too much -- the only concession she made to me when choosing curtains is that they are dark blue (which she wanted anyway, so much for concessions). However, those curtains are as thin as cheese cloth, and hold back about as much light as your standard sheet of Saran Wrap™.

Last night I was all schmoozed out. I had a ticket for a free drink at the show's cocktail reception and couldn't even bring myself to get the booze (wine or beer of my choice). I gave the ticket to my favorite events person here and told her to find it a good home. Then I went back to my room, slept, watched a DVD (The Man Who Wasn't There… not bad, but not the Coen Brothers' best; but it had Scarlett Johansson in it, so who cares?), read, thought about blogging but couldn’t summon the mental energy, and finally went to bed around midnight. A pathetically boring night, but hopefully it replenished my batteries.

Today: more of same. I'll be baby-sitting a room all day to introduce speakers, moderating two of the panels, and sitting on this laptop wirelessly surfing. Well, not too wirelessly, since the battery charge is only good for about 2 hours (less with the wireless network card running full tilt boogie all day to keep me connected), then I've got to plug in. It's only been a half hour as I write this and the battery is down to 77% charge.

I should have brought another DVD over with me, and my headphones… well, probably not. About the time the dais collapses and several speakers in my room die when convention drapery suffocates them, I might get in a smidgeon of trouble.

Hotels in the middle of downtown Philadelphia that:

It's midnight and I'm sitting in my underwear in a hotel room in downtown Philadelphia, giddy over the fact that I just got the high-speed internet connection in my room working.

It doesn't take much to make me happy.

The trip down was uneventful. At Logan Airport, I bought a $30 copy of a book I know I won't like very much (Violets are Blue by James Patterson... he revealed who the bad guy in this one was in the last book, but is now acting like it's a big secret, which I guess it is if this is your first Patterson novel. The books annoy the crap out of me anyway, as protagonist Alex Cross spends all his time wondering "why do I track down scummy serial killers" and never changes a thing about his life. Ever. This has been going on for over a decade in these books. I'm sick of hearing it and wondering which of his lovers/family members will get whacked next. It's all ways "personal" with Alex Cross.) I think when I'm done with it, I'm going to sell it used on Amazon immediately.

When I got to the hotel, I was trying to head to my room to do my usual travel ritual, which is to lay on my bed with a scalding hot wash cloth on my face. I don't know why I started doing this a few years ago, but I love to do it when I'm in a hotel. I've tried it at home, but it's not the same. But on the road, once a day, wash cloth goes on. Unfortunately, I got nabbed in the lobby -- I didn't even recognize Ted from the main office, but he saw me and invited me to dinner with a big group of the sales and events people. So we went around the corner to a seafood place and I awaited the social discomfort of being at a table of 13 people I never met before.

As the meal progressed, however, so did the wine in my glass progress to my gullet. Nothing works as well to loosen my tongue, and before I knew it we'd been sitting for 3 hours (2.5 of which was spent waiting for our meals) and chatting away about spouses, work, the fact that we're not getting raises this year again, etc. It turned out quite nice.

Knowing how bad I can be with names, I spent a lot of my concious time when I was quiet running down the names of everyone at the table over and over, so that when I see them tomorrow, I'll know who they are.

(So the secret's been revealed to the principle players, but I've been asked to not reveal it to the general public. Sigh. Well, anyway, it's still damn good news, and no, it doesn't involve me passing on my genetic make-up, having found a house (yet), getting cosmic revenge on those who have transgressed against me (tho that would be nice), or moving back in with my parents. For now, lets just say, certain members of my family don't want to have their belly rubbed at work.)

Maddie did this on her site, and I thought it was clever, and since blogging is all about stealing other people's ideas and warping them to your own sensibility, I'm doing it, too.

Spot the lie, reveal it in the Comments, and whoever gets it first will win a prize of my choosing. (This was hard to do because my life hasn't been very exciting. I mean, c'mon, look at #4. Also, strangely, many of these things have to do with driving. I don't know now why. I think it would have been easier to tell nine lies and have one truth...)

1) I once shook hands with The Incredible Hulk.

2) In the first car accident I ever had, there was a child in the car I hit.

3) When I was a kid, I thought I would some day syndicate a daily newspaper comic strip that starred vultures as the main characters.

4) I think damp skin smells like peanut butter.

5) I have run out of gas on major highways and had to walk to gas stations three times.

6) I shot out the windshield of my great-grandmother's car with a BB gun.

7) I have never taken any drugs in my life (assuming you don’t count sweet, sweet alcohol).

8) I hit a cat (I think it was a cat) with my dad's pickup truck once and didn't stop.

9) I love roller coasters.

10) I don't know what a carburetor is or does. Or even if I spelled it right.

I've got a secret.

I was told to tell no one. (For a very good reason.)

So I won't tell (well, that's not true, I've told a couple of people, but I know they don't have anyone to tell that would ruin it), but I'll say this:

It's good. It's happy happy joy joy knews that makes me smile whenever I think about it.

It's a good day.

All that said, I have to admit, comic collecting is a very stupid hobby. Unless you like heavy lifting.

After over 25 years of collecting the monthly bits o' boyhood fantasy, I've amassed over 27 full boxes of the damn rags -- and that after pulling out probably another short box worth of funny books to sell on eBay soon. Sorting the last four years worth of monthly purchases into my overall collection so they'd be in alphabetical order -- the frickin' Holy Grail of comic collecting! -- took two nights of quite literally back breaking labor as I carried boxes up stairs to stack, sort, bag, file, and the carried the boxes down again to be shelved.

Admittedly, I came to my senses by the time I got to the Ms and stopped taking boxes up and down stairs and filed them in my basement office, where they are permanently kept. But I thought I was being a good husband by spending time with my wife upstairs... she, who looked upon me and my mad hyper-sweaty activity with sadness that seemed to say, "Why doesn't he take up philately?"

I've never read anything that won a Pulitzer before. Well, at least not on purpose. I suppose I might have accidentally read an article or column somewhere that won a big award. Though I don't think they give those awards to articles in Stuff or Highlights for Children (my fav when waiting at the dentist's office... I loves them Goofus and Gallant strips!).

(Actually, I just checked, and I did read a Pulitzer Prize winning novel before, Ironweed by William Kennedy... but I defend my honor by saying it was for a class and I don't remember anything about it except that Jack Nicholson was on the cover. And I have seen the movie of The Color Purple.)

Anyway, I am reading a Pulitzer Prize winner now: Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. I would probably not have tired it except for the fact that I thought Wonder Boys (based on another of his books) was a great movie and that it's about comic book creators. Albeit fictional creators of the Golden Age based loosely on Superman's creators Siegel & Schuster, though with much more fascinating backgrounds, I assume.

Salon said in a review of the book, "Chabon has created an important work, a version of the 20th century both thrillingly recognizable and all his own." Probably true. More relevant for me, however, is that its an important work to comic book geeks because it treated the industry and revered creators with respect (and Chabon has since been a honored guest a couple of comic conventions). And even better than that, it's a damn good read.

"You never know how much you use a railing until you paint it."

I heard my grandfather's voice today for the first time since I was 18.

He told a dirty joke and made me cry.

You see: In the 1960's my dad joined the United States Air Force. He was a desk jockey of some sort, and was stationed near London from 1961 to 1964. During that time, he would make home movies and audio tapes of himself and send them home to my grandparents and his brother (my uncle) David. David and my grandparents made tapes in return to send back.

At some point in 1987, when I was working at the AM radio station in Hornell, I dubbed over one of my grandparent's recorded reel-to-reel tapes for my parents onto a cassette so it would stand the test of time a little better. The original main recording on the cassette was made on the weekend of May 11, 1963 (with a follow up of some audio from the first week of December, after JFK died).

I found the cassette copy I'd made at my parents house last time I was out and asked to borrow it, and only just listened to it in the car today.

If I listened to the audio when I made the duplicate 15 years ago, I don't remember much, outside of David acting as a radio announcer at the beginning, saying "This show is: Griffith to Griffith. I'm David Griffith." He would have been about 19 I think, just finishing the year at RBI in Rochester. He had a very pronounced lisp which he has never had in my lifetime.

My grandmother was, as I'd expect, the main voice on the record. Grandma kept meticulous diaries of her every day -- we read many of them after her funeral last year. The entries were never very in depth about her feelings or opinions or problems or joys, just that she ate this, bought that, washed something, threw something out. The tape was much the same, as she was reading from notes she'd made over the months of April and May 1963. Yet her day-to-day back then could be fascinating, and her voice was so strong (compared to my memory of her). She remarked on no less than four bomb threats coming into the elementary school where she was a teacher over the last few months. She'd bought a long white coat and worn it with a "ridiculously large" hat to a luncheon with a speaker from a school in Minnesota, where she had one of the bests lunch she ever had (served buffet style). Her brother Charles was in town, having recently visited Australia. She said David's new rooms at school were very nice, and surely worth the extra dollar a week he paid, for a total of $10 a week rent.

David explained at length plans he had for an upcoming dance at school in Rochester. He figured he'd be paying $90 for renting a car, jacket, getting tickets, etc. -- including his rent for the week. He described a skit his fraternity would be doing that was a take off on the Jackie Gleason show. Then he went to watch a car race on the television.

Grandma talked more, the tape turned over and I thought, dammit, maybe Grandpa John doesn't get on tape to talk about the new car radio he'd just bought and had installed (it was a radio that you could take out of the car into the house if you wanted).

Then, suddenly, Grandpa was there and I felt so weird, because he of course sounded like I remembered and yet no exactly. He said he had a story to tell and when he was done, he'd hand the microphone back to Skipper because she liked the story so much (Grandpa always called Grandma Skipper, though he didn't on the tape, but it makes me happy to have just remembered that).

The story went like this:

There was an old retired widow who was lonely, so she got a dog. It was a police dog [I assume he meant a German Shepard, but who knows what was considered a police dog in the 1960s] and by the time it was full grown, the dog was very big and ferocious and mean. So much so, that no one would come to the see the woman anymore; not friends, not neighbors, not even the mailman would come to hand her packages.

She was telling someone about the predicament one day and the person suggested the woman have the dog "doctored." The woman took this to heart and decided it might be best for all involved.

Later on after the dog recovered, she was on the front porch with her pooch when the mail man came by with a package for her. She said, "Aren't you going to bring that package up here for me to sign for?"

"I'm not coming anywhere near that dog," said the mailman.

"Oh, he's okay, I've had him doctored," she replied.

"Really, what did you do, have all his teeth pulled?"

"No, I had him doctored!" she said again.

"So what?" said the mailman. "I was afraid of getting bit, not raped!"

Grandpa immediately swiveled the mic toward Grandma and she had burst out laughing. I was tearing up, as I laughed along with her.

In fact, she laughed throughout the tape, free and hearty and happy, something I wish I remembered more of about her. She could seem so damn cross all the time when she was alive, especially before Grandpa died in 1988 (at her own funeral last year, I spoke briefly to the assembled in the church about her mastery of "the withering stare") though she loosened up considerably during the lonely 13 years she lived without him, strangely enough.

Grandpa, though, he always laughed -- long and hard and he'd always slap his knee and say, "Oh, shoot!" when he was done. He and grandma taught me the first joke I ever told to other people, about the guy who had a pig in his car, was told to take the pig to a farm, yet later was seen again with a pig in his car. The man was heard to say, "the pig liked the farm so much, I'm taking him to a ball game today!"

My uncle was and is always the funny one in the family, but Grandpa was always the best audience.