Well where the fuck has Jesse been, seriously, bitch never calls or writes or anything.  I'm finally in the last week of "Pirates".  Come monday I finish work while the sun is still up and I get to sleep  the same hours as the beautiful I girl I live with before she forgets what I look like and starts asking me for ID to get in to the house.  All I seem to want to do these days is write either game world constructs or prose poetry.  Work is officially boring, rehearsed fantasy is good once, maybe as many as five times, not a month.  That is all really. 
 

So now we have the internet coming directly into our house ( you are welcome FBI).  I should be a little more reliable in posting the next few years, but we'll see. I can be pretty flaky.  In totally unrelated news I've found myself doing research on SETI.  (Ahem) After a short pause for Makey-outy time.  Right Seti.  I love the idea, I love that we actually think we can find intelligent life somewhere else in the Universe.  Frankly we are looking for intelligent life somewhere else in the galaxy, but why pick nits.  Based on my years and years of study of planetology and radio telescopes I feel rather underqualified to say this: We will have no idea what to do when and if something pokes it's language (because why should whatever they are have heads) out of the stars and says "Hi".  We suddenly stop being the Lords of all we survey and some asswipe head of state (ours if it happens in the next fifteen weeks or so) will just fucking shoot at it and there no hillbilly in a biplane will be able to save us.  That is all.

So I have returned home to Maine for awhile.  I drove all the way there alone for the first time in years.  It is very boring to drive that far alone.  but lo I did arrive in Bangor for the American Folk Festival before heading back the homestead, letting myself in while my parents bought groceries, tipped over a cactus and then locked myself back out of the house trying to bring in dry laundry as a favor to the aforementioned parents.  I was off to a good start.  Despite the general foolery of the evening I took a nice walk around the property, as is tradition upon returning home, and found that the great golden birch that had always lorded over my back yard was gone after never truly recovering from the Ice Storm of '99.  I found it comforting that I missed the tree, it's good to know that three years in Boston hasn't strangled the rural out of me.

The next day brought "the great raising".  Using two logs and 12 bricks my father and I lifted the wood shed 10 inches out of the dirt to keep it from rotting, mechanical advantage is the bomb.  This is how we solve problems here, with what is at hand.  It is one of my favorite lessons from life here: "Use what you have to do what you need."  At work I am faced with different problems all the time and I find myself far more likely to look at what is in arms reach to fix the problem than go the twenty feet to the tool room to look for a better designed tool for the job.  Years of having only an 8lb gray tool room will do that. 

The upshot to all this is that our families teach us all different things.  If we are lucky they teach us what they believe to be the most useful way to go about solving problems.  Even if they are absent they give us instructions on how to be.  I don't know what any of you have learned about how your parents helped make you who you are but I was reminded of a great many valued lessons over the past 36 hours.