Always now I'm a day behind. Yesterday I went from a houseful to emptiness, like a bubble that just burst. Yet the sun shined brightly--it had been so long--and I decided on a slow meditative walk around the back 40. Oh, that light dusting of snow, like sugar on fried dough, it just makes me feel so sweet on the earth.

Yesterday was my kind of day. First the family hug-up in the sunroom, then Jessie told me she wanted to do the woodshed workout. She's pictured above doing the bear crawl, which segues into pushups, then the flipover to the crab walk (pictured below). We also did ab work with the kettlebell and assorted other exercises. But if that's not enough for one man's happiness, Jake invited me for a walk in the afternoon. We did the Tanya Loop and it was just beautiful with the crunch of snow underfoot and the mist rising off the pond. Stupid me: I didn't bring the camera.


This is my new favorite exercise: the bicycle pull-up. It works your back, abs, arms, shoulders and parts of your body you didn't even know you had.

The love...

the pride...


and "the Creeper!"

Cara and I have been sleeping on an air mattress to make room for our most wonderful guests, who've hopefully been comfortable on beds and couches, but who can resist watching the snowflakes drift down on the skylights?

Unrelated note: I whupped Evie's butt in Skip-Bo.

A thorn among roses...

The beautiful people descend on Machias. The picnic table is a Gilka special. Eve declined to stroll in the chill, so we imported Amila from Bosnia. She's sandwiched between Jessie and Jake--who I'm sure need no introduction.

Due to the aforementioned insomnia, I stood Ernie up this morning. So this afternoon I decided to go out back and atone for my sins. When I left Jessie and Amila were feigning studiousness on the couch--but when I returned about an hour later, oh the truth was out...

Last night I could not sleep. Got me to thinking about this and that, as will happen in the insomniac frenzy. Recently Cara and I watched Little Dorrit, a BBC mini-series based on the Charles Dickens serialization. Often there would be a family quarrel or misunderstanding, and instead of beating the argument to death, the father would say: "We will never speak of it." It made me think that this is a useful life strategy. Air out the unpleasantness, but then agree to move on. Forget about "closure" and the need to "process" your grievence. Life is too short, yo.

The winning touchdown.

Talk about brawn.

Emma and Celia in their natural habitat.

Perfect weekend in Beantown. Thanks to my most excellent brother-in-law Chris for the tickets to the football game. Pictured here are my long lost cousin Kevin and me with our good friend Doug Flutie. Before the game I had the pleasure of showing Chris and Kevin the key elements of the woodshed workout at their fancy Boston fitness club. I guess I should apologize to Ernie and Corey for not offering valet parking. Yeah, that's right, guys in red jackets at-the-ready to park your car before you get sweaty.

This afternoon I did a workout that was on the hard side--jumping rope and animal walks and a 100 pull-ups--and what sustained me was envisioning myself at the BC game on Saturday with Chris and Kevin and Max eating unhealthy ballpark food. In a sense, I was erasing my guilt before I even felt it. But then when I log on to my blog, my sister is asking if I'm up for a run before the game. Well, how can I do that, jarring my stomach around on the streets of Boston? Do you think that's any way to prepare for a hot dog eating contest with your big brother? So, I guess the best I can do is to take it under advisement.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, obsessive behavior is a family trait. I've given a long rest to used trucks and the stock market (never again to the latter), but have revisited an oldie but goodie: fitness. I used to go to the gym at UMM, but now I stick to the homegrown. Ernie and I are still doing the woodshed workouts--with headlamps--and I've added a few new wrinkles. I do push-ups in my office between students (I shoot for a hundred a day), do a hanging-from-the- rafters routine with Cara (what the heck is that? you wonder), and try to do other odds and ends. This past Saturday, for instance, I bear-crawled the length of a football field, and let me tell you, when I was done I was panting... like a bear. Do bears pant? Or do they just poop in the woods in silence?

I got a message for Ol' Man Winter: Bring it!!!!!!

As always, my mother is my best librarian. She loaned me this book, which is about the experience of the poet Baron Wormser living off the grid in the woods in Central Maine with his wife and two daughters. They lived without power, running water, etc. for 25 years. He talks a lot about the spiritual (my word) nature of heating with wood--the felling of trees, the meditative quality of splitting wood. He said that each time he put a stick of wood into the stove he could remember its origin. I'm not quite at that level, but there really is something about doing for yourself. Anyway, this book is beautifully written; he makes the mundane magical.

Behold, in the Land of Birch Wisdom, the human mule, hauling a cubit of wood to his ark--after the flood. Oh, the backwards way of it all. What wisdom, what strength, and such a happy grin. Yes, put the man in the great outdoors--or in his backyard--and let him bray, let him howl at the moon, let him carry his wood, so that he can feel good... when he spends hours on the couch, reading and dozing, impersonating the Mighty Uncle Max.

This is my home away from home--but not too far away. Lately I've done a few two-a-day woodshed workouts. I've added bear crawls to the routine, often tromping through the frost-encrusted grass on all fours. I used to do pull ups from a branch on the tree in front of our house in Blue Point. Aunt Rose, who lived across the street, often asked Cara: "Is Michael still hanging from trees?" Obviously, if she could see me now, she'd realize I've upped the ante in the weirdo department. Well, she's 90 years old, so I'm sure she's seen stranger...

Since we've entered the desperate-for-daylight days it's imperative that I spend as much time outdoors as possible (otherwise I get gloomy), so now when I get home from work I change clothes as fast as I can and I'm out the door. I'm lucky, though, since I get off at 3:00 P.M. Poor souls such as my sister work until the ungodly hour of six. That's why she's stuck doing hot yoga with a bunch of strivers.

I jest, of course.

But what about this: I live in the so-called Sunrise County, as the sun rises first in the country on our shores. And it's a nice thing, if you want to wake up at 4:30 in the morning in the summer. You'll notice, however, that nowhere is it mentioned that the sun also sets first here, meaning that it's getting dark when Keith Richards is just getting out of bed.

I mention Keef because I lost my self-control and ordered his autobiography (Life) from Amazon. It's supposed to be a good read, if a bit on the trashy side. Anyway, I'm a bit guilt-ridden about the purchase, so if anyone would like to borrow it (to ease my conscience), let me know.

My blogging conscience--otherwise known as Camille--has spoken: I've got to get my Shitake mushrooms together. Blame it on the rain. I've been dutifully carrying my camera around, and feeling remiss in my lack of postings; but, no excuses. So, I promise, there is more to come...

Last year I had a dream (not a Martin Luther King kind of dream, that's omnipresent; but the sleeping kind) in which I was driving to work and I passed a house being framed-up. Wow, I thought (in the dream, which was so realistic that I was stuck behind a school bus), I can't believe somebody's building a house in this economy. Then I passed another construction site, this new house even closer to completion. I guess the recession is over, I thought. Well, you know what happened next: I woke up.
But now, at the end of my road, there is actually new construction. Perhaps our little burg of Marshfield is like the proverbial butterfly in chaos theory. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon or someplace which leads to a storm somewhere thousands of miles away.
Not that I advocate the building of more houses--we seem to have enough of those. But enough with the doom and gloom already.

Election Day. Yikes. Don't forget: no matter who you vote for, a politician will take office. And politicians are all _ _ _ _ _ _. If you're having trouble filling in the blanks, just call my favorite father-in-law and he'll help you out.
I am Birch Wisdom and I approve this message.

Yesterday we hiked in what we thought would be mist and rain and turned out to be a steady onslaught of fat snowflakes. Ernie spotted this seal washed up on the seaweed. At first I feared that it was going through some sort of end-of-life ritual, but I was later informed that it's common for seals to be stuck on shore while awaiting high tide. Kind of like missing that last train out of Penn Station...

The reason I did the post with the book and coffee was not, believe it or not, to incite my siblings to critique my milk-frothing technique, but to discuss the decline and fall of literature. Max and I have been having an on-going conversation (for years) about whether people read anymore (books not blogs). I insisted that there was a reason all those bookstores were closing; Max said people still read, but that they got all their books from Amazon.

Recently I used the book pictured in my last post to bolster my argument. I said that it used to be that there were several "big books" at a time, that Roth and Bellow and Updike, etc. could share shelf space in the great American cultural psyche. Now, it seems, we only have room for one major work a year. And this year it happens to be Jonathan Franzan's Freedom. (As a side note: many female authors have made the argument that only a male author could get this kind of attention).

This line-of-reasoning was so compelling that, at the age of 47, I won my first argument with Max. Ever. Heady experience, let me tell you. But there's more: in an essay collection (How to Be Alone) that Franzan wrote some years ago he himself made the argument that people don't read anymore. What's more, men read significantly less than women, which is why he got into the brouhaha with Oprah because he thought that having her insignia on his book jacket (for The Corrections) would turn off whatever potential male readers were out there. He was disinvited from the show for making this comment. Of course he was: the truth hurts.