1) Yellow walls in my basement office.
2) The fact that an ice cream truck has gone up and down my street every day this summer.
3) The complete lack of traffic on the street. Except for that ice cream truck.
4) My neighbors next door (Ann and Jori and their kids -- the two quietest children I've ever seen) and across the street (Marty, the retired cop. He has diabetes but still likes that Bonny brings him Xmas cookies each year.)
5) Dragonflies. If there were a contest for the coolest looking bugs ever, they'd win. And I'm sure they'll going to lead Kevin Costner back to OSCAR!
6) The screened in front porch. Even though I barely ever used it.
7) Getting UPN via my DirecTV dish (grrrr.)
8) Hardware floors throughout the downstairs.
9) Having the dining room next to the living room so we could watch TV during dinner. (What, you think we had conversations? We were in the same house all day, every day, for a year!)
10) The fenced yard.
11) Having city sewer service. I've never had a septic tank before and I'm not excited by the prospect.

I think my dad is even more worried about it than me. He was very excited when the latest This Old House magazine (to which he subscribed me) had a big article explaining septic tanks. He also told me this story, which he says is the extent of his knowledge about septic, that he read in the paper years ago: Guy is pumping out someone's septic tank. Lady of the house comes down to watch. She sees several foreign items in the sludge and asks what they are. The guy sheepishly says, "Ma'am, those are condoms." Woman says, "But my husband and I don't use condoms!"

Sadly, I don't know if it was the husband or a son or who got in trouble on that one.

1) Mature Landscaping.
When Bon and I looked at a couple of houses out in Ithaca earlier in the summer, she expressed disdain for their use of the term in their ads, and then all she found were some potted flowers. "We have mature landscaping at home," she'd say.

Mature landscaping translates into having plants so old and thick they might as well be trees. Having flowerbeds so over grown with lilies and daisies that they creep out over the sidewalk so you are always walking on the lawn. Having vegetation so thick that you can't even reach the weeds.

I hope we plant absolutely nothing at the new house (though I've been told the place is already overgrown with weeds. That's easier, because then I can just kill everything outright.)

2) Crows.

3) Mosquitos. (I should have a West Nile joke here. But I don't).

4) Stones on the edges of the drive way. The previous owners must have run out of money -- the paved a strip in the center for one car, but wanted it wide enough for two, so they put rocks on each side. Which I used to hit with the snow blower and throw into the yard all the time.

5) Showering. Despite having a nice full bathroom upstairs, the extra large tub did not lend itself well to a shower curtain rod. In fact, we never found one. No rod means no curtain means no showers up stairs. I'm not careful enough to deflect all the water toward the wall. So for three years, I've only showered downstairs then had to go back up to dress.

6) The town of Hudson. It's a nice, quiet, cute town. With absolutely nothing to do and only two moderately okay restaurants.

7) Rocks. MA yards are filled with rocks the size of small cars. At least mine is, all with little peaks sticking up threw the lawn.

8) The kitchen floor. It was never sealed properly and looked bad (though I liked the color).

9) Wall to wall carpet. Sadly, there's MORE wall-to-wall carpet in the new house. So maybe I'll miss having less of it.

10) Putting peanut butter in the refrigerator. This has nothing to do with living in MA, but dammit, my wife always puts the PB in the fridge! It's too hard to spread that way. Hard PB ruins the bread! It's an outrage. So in Ithaca, things will be different. I'm putting my foot down.

Peanut butter will go in a cupboard where it belongs.

And we're only buying chunky, too. Creamy is for losers.

It's amazing when you can pin down a turning point in your life to an exact minute. But I can.

April 28, 1989 at 2:07PM Eastern Time. That's when I read a letter that lead to what I've referred to ever since as THE MEGAN PAPERS.

Six months earlier, on the night before Thanksgiving '88, my high school girlfriend had dumped me for another guy. She did it over the phone.

I didn't take it very well for about a month. Once back to school, I fell in to the freshman job at the dining hall and hanging out with my friends in the dorm and moved on (though still spent too much time obsessing over the Girl I Was Obsessed With in high school, who ended up in the same college as me. Sigh.).

One thing I thought I'd successfully done with my Ex when we'd been going out was share my love for the graphic arts. She read a few of my comics on a regular basis and claimed to enjoy them, including my perennial favorite, Scott McCloud's ZOT! At the time of our breakup, I was having a necklace custom made for her in the shape of ZOT's lighting bolt symbol, exactly like the necklace ZOT gave his girlfriend Jenny in the book. I thought it was very romantic. What fun it was then, to pick that up a necklace for a woman who didn't want me and to pay $150 for it out of my destitute freshman wallet. I ended up giving it to her anyway at Xmas '88 when I saw her in the flesh for the very last time in our lives. At the time, I didn't think I'd ever want anyone else to have it... I wish I had that necklace now.

Anyway, in sharing comics with her (including others like Watchmen and Groo) I figured, well, I would continue. I made (and still make) my comic purchases in bulk through a mail order house called Westfield Comics, so I'd always order duplicates of titles she liked, and I continued sending them to her, even after we broke up.

On April 28, 1989 at 2:07PM Eastern I got the letter from her telling me she did not want any more comics from me, she felt I was trying to win her back with gifts, and that her current beau, a chap named Bob, was not happy that I was sending them.

Something in me snapped.

I vented about this turn of events to the guys on my dorm floor and they were, all of them, unfailingly supportive of my position: that my ex was now a bitch who should pay dearly for her hubris.

Thus were born THE MEGAN PAPERS -- a series of letters written by my friends spelling out to her just exactly our position and her faults, both real and concocted. Each note took delight in telling her exactly what orifices she could use to stick her head even further into. These letters are crass, crude, and (most likely) criminal. While none were overtly threatening, they conveyed explicit vitriol and disgust with her, her gender, her appearance, her religion, her new boyfriend, and anything else we could conceive. Most were written on my own computer, and printed and lovingly signed. A couple of guys hand wrote notes -- Kevin (AKA FuckFace) wrote three full pages in long hand.

My friends were thrilled -- as was I, at the bonding experience if nothing else -- and were psyched for me to send them off to her and her boytoy, post haste. I promised all they'd go out in the mail the next day.

I never sent them.

Instead, THE MEGAN PAPERS went into a manilla folder and a file drawer and there they have stayed for the last 13 years, occasionally getting a read every three or four years when I stumble across them. I never told my friends. They thought they'd successfully crushed her like a bug. I didn't want to take that away from them.

I'd like to say I didn't send the notes out of respect for her in the end, but it wasn't that... it was fear. Her father struck me as the type to not take too kindly to these missives and even in that "more innocent" time I could easily picture myself up on charges for harassment, or worse if he could make it stick.

I did send her a letter (I don't have a copy of it... this was all pre-e-mail and I actually wrote a lot in long hand myself then) and told her, fine, you'll never get another comic book from me again and not only was I not interested in winning her back, she could take a flying.

And that was that for a few years. After graduation, while I was living in a basement in New Jersey, in some fit of born-again Christian guilt, she wrote me a note begging forgiveness for hurting my feelings then. So I did. Little did she know we came very close to me being the one needing to beg.

We corresponded a couple of times after that, but my life was on a very different plane from what had come in high school or freshman year. I'd been to the moon and back in the world of love and life and employment (so I thought). I think it was the same for her. Our correspondence stopped as suddenly as it began as we moved on to the real world.

I'm still glad I never sent the papers to her. Reading them today, they seem -- they are -- so juvenile and puerile that I know if my non-existant daughter ever received the like, I'd go straight to the cops, if not the source to beat the little punk behind them senseless.

The turning point for me in all this was realizing that things you do can have a startling negative impact. I'm lucky I realized it before I put a stamp on an envelope.

And I'm also lucky I've got the PAPERS here -- for as horrifying as they are in many ways, they also remind me of a great time in my life filled with close friends who I knew were behind me. Good thing I didn't have to find out if they would be behind me in court.

I got to tell one of my writers (ahem) today something I was told long ago by my former boss, Dan, who is now one of those in the trenches with me at Internet.com, slugging it out each day to improve the world for IT people every day through pithy prose.

Dan's writing rules were simple and have stuck with me for years since he first wrote them on a white board in his office circa 1995:

1) Say what you're going to say
2) Say it
3) Shut up.

I think he should write a book on the subject, though I think it would be hard stretching each step into a chapter.

I was told yesterday that I don't rant or complain much in my blog.

It's hard to be this good natured and kind, but I expect I do it so well that there's scant reason for me to complain about anything.

Still, I've got one major pet peeve that I've been subject to twice in two days, and it's caused my fantasy world to explode. I've so vividly planned murder over this very thing so many times in my head that the thoughts of self preservation ("what if he's got a gun?") and social decorum ("what if he's frickin' retarded?") that prevent me from taking action have almost taken a back seat to my seething disgust.

I'm talking, of course, of tailgaters.

Webster's defines the act of tailgating as "following another vehicle too closely."

I define tailgaters as the "filthy scum of the earth that should be creatively flayed alive."

I've got news for you tailgaters out there. Guess what? If we're on a two-lane road and there's a double line and I'm going too slow to suit your dumb redneck ass, do you really think putting your bumper against mine is going to make me speed up? Did you ever happen to think that maybe I know the speed traps on this road? Did you ever happen to consider that perhaps there's a dangerous curve ahead? Did you ever happen to think you're a friggin' asswipe?!?

Damn, I'm ready to pull a Bixby and Hulk-out here. Counting to 10. One. Two. Three...

Okay. Sorry.

My dad was an ambulance driving EMT for 32 years. One of my favorite stories he told me once had nothing to do with dismembered bodies or dead fat people on gurneys or delivering babies in elevators (though I did hear a good baby delivery on the elevator story last week). Nor even people who died due to tailgaters.

No, the story goes: He was transporting a patient from Hornell to Rochester, an 80 mile or so trip even on Interstate 390. As he was driving along doing over 70MPH with the lights flashing, the family of the patient in the ambulance was following -- right on his back end.

Dad called the cops and had the car pulled over.

Yes, the grieving worried family, not knowing if their family member is dead or alive or drugged or vomiting or flirting with the nurse in back, they just want to be there when he arrives, to hold his hand and console him in his time of need... my dad got them jacked to the shoulder by the State Troopers.

I love that! It fills me with sheer glee. I want to go hug my dad just thinking about it. Because that's what tailgaters deserve. Because when you tailgate, you are human scum not worthy of eating my toe jam.

I got a letter from our lawyer handing the transaction of our house purchase in Ithaca on Friday. It actually wasn't a letter to me or Bon, it was a carbon copy of a letter to the lawyer for the sellers, pointing out a small itsy-bitsy problem that might have cropped up.

Turns out they people we're buying from may not own the house. Or the land it's on.

That's oversimplifying a very complicated thing, but right now the paperwork is incomplete. A church owned the land in the 1970s and 80s and transferred it to a development corporation in 1987. That company went bankrupt. From there, I'm not clear on what happened. Did the church get paid for the land or not? Maybe not. That could be a problem.

Then again, it could be nothing. There's probably some piece of paper in a laywer's or court clerk's office somewhere that will clear it all up. Even if that's not the case, chances are we'll still get into the house as expected, via the early "pre-possession agreement" we already have (meaning we get to move in before we actually own the house/land and will pay rent).

The question now is, when will we close and actually own the house? On time (Sept. 9)? Probably later. It is, indeed, too soon to know.

However, as a wise person probably once said (since I can't say I've ever actually heard anyone say this), it's certainly not too late take a bottle of Maalox with a vodka chaser while I worry.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's lawyers are filing an appeal in the highest criminal court in Texas in the obsenity conviction of Jesus Castillo, manager of a Dallas comic book store. Castillo has recieved six months jail time, a year probation, and a $4000 fine. Read the full story at ICV2.com.

And that's why I'll never stop working with the Fund.

I'm not a napper. I don't nap. Maybe as a child, but not since I've had conscious memory has it been in me to take naps. Once a year I might get the urge and actually pull it off, but not often.

Today, however, I thought I was going to fall asleep at the keyboard. That's what I get for staying up past midnight with the TiVo and getting up around 5:40am when Siren made a noise like a car backfire ("KACK") and left a small glob of stomach acid on the bedroom floor. After that it was pointless to sleep, so I got up, ate, took the dogs swimming, and was at work by 7:45.

So after I got done with work, I went up stairs into my 90 degree bedroom and lay down and took a nap. It was hard going at first, but eventually, I was out. Here's how my nap (filled I might add with colorful dreams that seemed to last much longer than the 45-minutes I was out) ended.

RING.

RING.

Christ.

"Hello."

Pause. (We all know what that means.)

"Hello, I'd like to speak with the man or the woman of the house, please."

"This. Is. He."

"Good afternoon, sir." I'm calling on behalf of Marty Lowry of the Prize Patrol, who's been trying to reach you for some time regarding a drawing you entered to win a Chevy Tahoe."

"Hurm." (My thought is to say, what, Marty's too good to leave a message? But why bother. We know there's no Marty. So instead I say, "Hurm.")

"Do you have a pen and paper handy sir so I can give you the 800 number at which to call him?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

"The number is tool free at 866-XXX-XXXX." (All I heard in my head was blahblahblah-blahblahblahblah.)

"Okay," I told him. "I'll call it with all due haste so I can get my free truck."

"Sir, could you repeat that number back to me so I know you'll reach him?"

Caught in the lie. Horrors.

"No, actually, you're right, of course, I can't repeat it to you, because I didn't write it down and I think you know I have no intention of making the call."

"Yeah, uh..." He was no doubt looking for his next index card with the speech about what I was missing out on.

Click.

I hung up and closed my eyes. It was too late though. Nap time had passed. Maybe I'll get another one sometime in 2003.

Is this what's considered the perfect weekend?

Yesterday I got up at 9am and started packing. I hit Bonny's office with a vengeance (the kind best served cold, as Khan says the Klingon's say, though how the hell would he know? He never met one... but I geekily digress). Maybe this was my subtle way of getting back at her since she is off having a life and I'm here all by myself, frittering away my noon, suppertime, chore-time, too.

By the afternoon yesterday I had run out of boxes for packing books. Books make up about 90% of what I seem to be packing. Packing our house every two years always is a fun reminder that we live in a tinderbox just waiting to go up in the fuel of novels, magazines, comics and files I horde like an old lady hordes cats. At least cats aren't flammable. Well, not without chemical tampering.

I called a local liquor store and asked if they had extra boxes -- they do every day, I was told. This took me back to my college days... back then, moving every year, I had to find boxes and somehow was lead to a liquor store. Their boxes are great -- perfect size for books (not to big) and sturdy, and some times with handles. So it's apt that I'm moving back to Ithaca and taking all my stuff in boxes that say "Michelob" and "Jose Cuervo."

Our friend Jean brought me some boxes from her place of work -- Friendly's. They were also perfectly sized boxes, but a couple I didn't feel I could use, as I could still feel crusted fish batter on the surface of a few. I don't think having coffee table books that smell of cod is the way to being life in the new house. I finished my day putting away most of the books and knickknacks in the living room.

There's still so many things to pack. Christ.

I tried to sit and watch a DVD last night, a film my friend Jill had recommended long ago (because her cousin was an animator on it), called "Waking Life." I had to turn it off after 20 minutes. I've never walked out on a film in my life, but I'd like to think if I'd paid big money to see this one, I would have. The animation was certainly interesting, but I'm the guy who couldn't take the talkiness of "My Dinner with Andre" which at least had the inimitable Wallace "InConTHEEVable" Shawn in it. This talking head extravaganza was too much for my psyche. If I want deep psycho-babble, I'll read Heinlein.

Today was CBLDF.org day. I'm finishing organizing the site redesign conceived/completed over a month ago. I want to make the site automated, using the amazing MovableType. Still, I wasn't looking forward to it... I had it in the back of my head something would go wrong with it no matter what I did. So I got up late (9:30am), had a leisurely breakfast of toast and OJ while not reading the Boston Globe (they already stopped delivering it... all I read is the comics anyway, which I read online later), and then took the dogs for a walk. They played in the water for while, then I got home by 11:30, finally sat, and started working.

I pretty much sat here until 7pm with one stop for lunch (pot stickers! Yum!) and to feed or play with the K9s.

Now it's after 9pm. My ass is sound asleep. The site is working, with some caveats. It's not launched yet, though. Soon.

I've been listening to the same oldies station all day, which plays way to much Smokey Robinson (because they're promoting a concert with him next week). And they play that frickin' lame ass "new" Elvis song just about every hour. Who'd have thought an oldies station would be as bad as the bubble-gum pop stations? How many times can I stand to listen to "Tears of a Clown"?

Time to go up stairs and watch Alias and the continuing train-wreck that is Sex in the City (I can't... look... away.... mostly because I'm hoping for more shots of Kim Catrall's boobs. I've loved her since Porky's. It set quite an example for this 11-year-old. I even liked her as a Vulcan). And even that show at it's worst is better than rotoscoped philosophers going blabblahblah for two hours.

As my previous post conveys, I'm not above saying stupid things. Some might say I pride myself on it, but even I know when I've crossed the line. Just as often, I've been on the receiving end of people saying strange things. The questions is, do you point it out when someone says something that makes no sense on Planet Earth?

A woman at our vet's office front desk has a bizarre affection for my dog, Kylie. When Kylie was in for her spay operation and had to spend the night, this woman actually went and brought her into the front to spend the evening behind the desk with her, that way Kylie wouldn't be lonely. When I picked Kylie up the next day, there was a note from "Kylie" saying how much she loved this woman and she would love to go live with the woman someday if we ever gave her up.

(I'm sure if Kylie was human we'd have had to take out a restraining order based on that alone.)

Last night I had to go to the local Veterinarian's office to pick up some records they'd made of our dog's medical histories, so we can take them to NY after we move and find a new, overpriced canine quack. The Kylie-loving woman was behind the counter and making sad faces and comments about how we shouldn't leave. Trying to make small talk, I said, "sure, we'll stay if you want to take over the mortgage on the house we just bought."

She frowned, looked at her computer screen, and said "No, can't do that, we're doing that all the time."

Wha??

What does one say to such a non-sequitur? Nothing. I smiled and nodded and took my papers and left without a comment on that slip up. Because I think that's probably best for all involved.

I base this on something that happened to me when I was in the eight grade.

I was walking from my friend's Mark's house back to school after lunch -- I ate there every day by myself, watching Benson in his living room (Mark and the others had lunch a different period than I did). As I was walking back to Hornell High, I passed by a girl who I considered one of the more beautiful in existence even at age 11. This stunning beauty left me a drooling freak even ignoring me, so today I was in overdrive when she actually asked me a question -- she wanted to know what time it was.

I only barely glanced at my digital watch when I blurted out, "It's 69 minutes past 11!"

I think she actually paused long enough to look at me with sadness and say, "So is it twelve o'nine?"

I nodded, mostly to bury my head in my chest, and hoofed a hasty retreat to the comparative safety of playing dodge ball with upperclassmen.

Thus, my un flagging opinion: Let strangers have their dumb slip ups. It's far kinder to let people think it's gone unnoticed.

Unless of course they're friends or family, in which case you save up the knowledge for ridicule in the future.

The sign of good friends are those who, when you pronounce a word wrong that you realize you may never have said aloud before, and you say it like it sounded in your head, and they don't understand you, those friends blame it on their own geek-ness instead of your own stupidity.

I have good friends.

(FYI, the word "tithe," as in giving one tenth of your income to a church because you're, well, stupid, is pronounced with a hard "I". Not like "tith," which is what people with a lisp call breasts.)

Let's hear it for living the dream.

My youngest first cousin, Jeremy (I've got more second cousins than I can remember the names of, since my first cousins have been having kids since before I graduated high school), is living the dream. He's writing comic books. Even if it's just for his own fun, it's more than I did, and I hope he goes for the gold.

I had my chance. I was hired by DC Comics in May of 1994. The offer was on the table.  I would have been helping them make CD-ROMs and do audio books and probably would have been a driving force in making their first Web site (which, in reality, sucked donkey farts until about a year ago). Chances are I would have known all the editors and thrown out ideas and wrote some things and maybe, just maybe, become a comic book writer. Like the dream.

Maybe I could have been the next Evan Dorkin. Or Brian Michael Bendis. (Well, they can both draw, so I'd have settled for being able to write some decent dialog. Hell, I'd have settled for licking Jeanette Kahn's boots.) Perhaps. Perhaps.

Instead, I went north, and worked for five years at a computer magazine that ultimately told me, in Vonnegutian fashion, Go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. Go take a flying fuck at the moon.

Anyway, my point is, Jeremy, still in college, surviving a lot of crap in his life, has come through in flying colors and is working and playing and doing something he enjoys. By the time I was just a freshman I was taking my job too seriously. I hope he's having a damn good time. Seriousness can wait.

Who uses the word "impetus" in e-mails to people they haven't talked to in ten years?

I do.

I might just lose weight this month. Apparently when my wife isn't around, food takes a back seat. I've skipped lunch the last couple of days without her influence. She's like clockwork on meal times, since she gets headaches or cranky or [Dog help me] both when she misses a meal. Me, I eat when I'm hungry.

Sadly, when I get hungry after missing a meal, I get REAL hungry, so the positive effect of the missed meal goes, well, missing.

Worse, though, I'm apparently a complete idiot in a kitchen by myself. Here's some fun things from meal preparation time in the last week:

1) I decided to have a couple sausages for dinner. I forgot to get them out of the freezer though, so I had to pry two links apart from the pack with a butter knife. As I'm taking the ice-covered spicy wieners to the grill, I realized I forgot something (tongs maybe... I forget), and spun around. The frozen sausages flew out of my fingers like wet soap in the shower, and landed directly in the dog's water dish. (Yes, I rinsed them off and ate them anyway... I let these dogs lick my face, what do I have to be afraid of?)

2) Tonight, making spaghetti and meatballs for one (and I made a freakin' vat of the stuff so I'll have plenty left over for a few days), I went into the cupboard to get the salt to put in the boiling water, and it slipped from my hand and hit the little jar of toothpicks. Small pieces of wood rained everywhere on the counter, but the majority landed in the full bowl of food I'd just prepared for Kylie. I then spent the next five minutes picking bicuspid-picking splinters, now soaked with meat juice, out of the bowl. If I missed any, they've probably perforated her bowel by now.

Here's hoping I make it the rest of the week without harming myself.

I've been up since 4am.

I was high on caffeine for 5 hours (a glass of Pepsi at 4:15am with a NO-Doze). I didn't stop for 4.25 hours as I drove from my in-laws to my house in MA.

Now I'm crashing, crashing, crashing... and it's only 9:17am.