The Real Charlie

Various Updates on All and Sundry

Time to catch up on things here at the old blog, much neglected now that I am a Facebooker. I'm noticing my Facebook updates getting a bit too wordy, which probably means I need the longer format of the blog again. Can I shoot to be on here once or twice a week? I should try.

1. The chickens were a lot of fun. Roxanne helped me put them into their coop at night, and Stella joined me to let them out in the morning. They liked eating yogurt and tearing up my lawn. But over two weeks, I got precisely zero eggs. I suspect that my neighborhood was not fancy enough for these birds, used to life in swanky Weston, Massachusetts. I saw some chickens at another house last week and it made me miss my poultry.
2. The new home office is coming along very slowly. Much more cleaning out is needed, especially of books. I need to get rid of a lot of books, and am actually considering bringing a box of them to work, letting colleagues take what they want, and then giving the rest to the town library for their book sale. Downside: my colleagues will see some of the crap that I read. Can I say that all the bad and obscure military history books were Abby's?
3. MMWR is very focused on the Swine Flu (or novel H1N1 influenza as they call it) but still occasionally shares some information on more esoteric sources of human death and injury. Like farmers getting killed by their own cows. And people giving themselves hepatitis by taking herbal remedies for suspected parasites. Your tax dollars at work. And I mean that as a good thing.

I'll leave the assortment there for tonight. I think I owe my few remaining readers an investment update, perhaps I'll post that tomorrow night.

Cleaning Out

So Abby and I have created a new office in our house, in the otherwise disused formal living room, and we are slowly cleaning out the former office, soon to be a true guestroom. As part of this ongoing effort we are cleaning out the guestroom, especially the great heaps of paper and ephemera that have accumulated over the past five years. Tonight I packed up a big box of college-era memorabilia destined for the basement that included the following treasures of the past:

• set lists from four Superchunk shows
• set lists from my radio show
• transcripts from college and graduate school, including my one F ever
• many party posters and invitations
• freshman facebooks from 1993-1994
• letters (on paper!) from friends studying abroad
• letters from my mentors, mostly full of sage advice, some of which I even took
• photos of Amherst buried in deep snow from the frigid winter of 1993-199

A few things have been deemed too precious for the basement: my school photo IDs from seventh grade through graduate school, a folder full of letters that my father sent my every week (and that included a $20 bill to boot) from 1990-1996 and a set of emails that I printed out years ago that include Abby and I scheduling our first date!

I completed these tasks and then discovered an email from an old lost friend in my inbox. The nostalgia is thick around these parts this week, I tell you.