The Real Charlie

Real Farmer Daddy?

I don't know about Farmer Daddy, but we are hosting two nice hens in our yard for two weeks in their fancy a-frame chicken tractor. Casey the chicken guy told us not expect eggs, but we'll see how that goes. We also haven't named them yet. One is white and the other multi-colored. The multi-colored one is quite feisty and a bit dim.

As you can imagine, Roxanne and Stella are most excited about our house guests.

My mother's family is from Colchester, Connecticut, once a hotbed of Jewish chicken farming in America. So I guess I'm back to my roots, in a strange sort of way. Updates as events warrant here and on facebook.

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.

Slightly Famous

Check it out, my house and the artwork of the lovely and talented Abby are on the Cookie magazine blog here. The article has a few mistakes (like the spelling of our name...) but it's fun to see our abode and our stuff online.

Fifteen Years

I had my fifteenth Amherst reunion this weekend. I had a great college experience for the most part - interesting classes, good professors, good friends, lots of fun and hi-jinks. Amherst played a huge part in making me the adult that I am today. I've been a loyal alumnus, giving and raising money, advocating for the college and faithfully attending reunions. At my tenth reunion I had a brand new baby and was more focused on her than the college or the goings-on. This time I went alone, Abby didn't join me until dinner time on Saturday and the girls stayed home. So I had some time to look around and observe.

College Town

Amherst and nearby Northampton are quintessential college towns. Downtown Amherst is fairly vibrant, certainly fewer closed stores than Newton or Wellesley, and the town does a great job using its town green as a magnet for activity. There was a big craft fair and a farmer's market while I was there. Sadly, I'd say half or more of the bookstores are gone from my time there. Someday there will be a college town with no bookstores at all, and that will be sad. My brother and sister alumni will appreciate that Antonio's remains and is still excellent. Northampton was a bit more rundown, missing several of my old haunts and way over-restauranted. I had a latte at the Haymarket Cafe, where I had my first ever espresso beverage in 1991, the same night I saw Slacker for the first time. Amherst and Northampton remain full of interestingly dressed and decorated hipsters, many very attractive young people and, for 2009, a shocking number of smokers.

Physical Plant

Amherst has physically transformed itself in the past decade. I stayed in Charles Pratt, my former house of pain as a geology major, now an artfully and spectacularly transformed dormitory. I was literally agog at the building for the first twenty minutes I was there. The new geology building is well designed
for Amherst's special kind of research-based undergraduate science education, and the natural history collections are just beautifully displayed. Other dorms looked great too. I do miss the old Valentine Hall, the dining hall, with its strange little rooms each with its own character. I ate in East, with the radio people, the hipsters, the theater people, the self-described "Korean Posse" and the smokers. It is now the fancy faculty dining room. I gawked in the window of the radio station, but could not gain entry, which I would have been excited about. A lot of my best times at Amherst happened in or because of WAMH, 89.3 FM.

Slowly Getting Older, and Older Still

Five years ago we were overrun with strollers and pregnant women. This year we had to run our own childcare program because we had so many 3-5 year olds. There were about 115 alumni, about 90 spouses and friends and probably 50 little kids. We are not an especially quickly balding group, but definitely a graying one. And we can still put away a ton of beer. We have lost one classmate in the past five years, to a car accident, and we raised our glasses to a brave alumnus now serving with the US Army in Iraq.

We were fewer in numbers this year than five years ago (typical for 15th reunions, my friends in the development office tell me) so I saw somewhat more of the older alumni, mostly men (Amherst didn't go co-ed until 1976) and chatted with them a little bit. They love the place, warts and all, and mostly forgive its good and not so good changes over the years. There is a certain camaraderie among them that I think is a product of being at a men's college, and of their eras, that we will all have a harder time sustaining. Still, when I went out this morning, I saw that the late night crowd had dragged most of the chairs out of our party tent and arranged them in an array of little circles, all across the freshman quad, a universe of acquaintances renewed.

Mostly Not About Swine Flu

So it's been far too long. Facebook has proven to be a major suck of personal computing time away from this blog, and my hesitancy about blogging on a few topics that might be vaguely work related has also kept me away. But it is time to get back here and get back in touch with the oversharing diarist and pseudo-journalist inside of me.

Back in the day I used to blog quite a bit about Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a truly charming CDC publication chock full of disease, injury and accident related news you can use. Right now, not surprisingly, it is a lot of swine flu updates. But there are some other good tidbits, like this report on the "fun" that results when you have a day camp at a petting zoo. Because sometimes frequent handwashing just isn't enough...

And as if flu from a pig or diarrhea from the farm animals isn't enough, there was this report on pet related injuries a weeks back. Best statistic: 2/3 of cat-related injuries occur when people trip over their cats. This is why I have houseplants, and prefer my "domestic ruminants" well-done.

MBTA Complaints

I have generally avoided being one of those bloggers who always is kvetching about the T. As old readers know, I was once well-known (well, at least on Universal Hub, and thanks to that once in the Globe) as a spotter of speed traps and dumb driving in Chestnut Hill. But once I stopped driving to work regularly, I stopped blogging about my commute. Part of that is because my life as a commuter rail rider (Worcester-Framingham line) has been generally easy, and often on or close to schedule.

But today was pushing it. The train was about five minutes late this morning, not too bad. Right outside of Boston, in the CSX yards, it came to a screeching (literally) halt and the power went out. After ten minutes sitting dead still, getting colder and colder, motion resumed and heat returned, and we limped into South Station, twenty minutes late. This afternoon the train was pretty much on time, but with blasting heat and filthy dirty.

I could blame financial woes or the winter or what have you, but I have no point, just the grouse that my commute is making me cranky. So I'm warning the world, I may be about to become one of those annoying T bloggers with a litany of complaints. But it might get me writing on here more often, and would that be so awful? Don't answer that...

Did Mordechai Ever Eat Burritos?

I sat down to watch a little bit of golf this afternoon while Roxanne and Stella were having dinner and while Abby was cooking. I told Abby that it looked nice and warm and sunny at the tournament (it was cold and snowy here), and she asked where it was taking place. I told her, "Marana, outside Tucson." "Tucson," shouted Roxanne, "that's where Queen Esther lived!"

"Um, no Rox, " I responded, while Abby stifled her hysterics with a dish rag, "that would be Shushan, as in Persia, not Tucson, as in Arizona."

And Stella still conflates the words "misty" and "dusk" into a single term, so asking her at 5 Pm "what time of day is it?" brings a quick response of "Whiskey! This is the time of day I call whiskey!" How can I not smile when stuff like this happens around my house on a regular basis?

A Month Without A Post?

No, I can't let that happen. So an update about my thinking in terms of investing right now. I am still holding a lot of cash and even more "near cash" in the form of 3-6 month FDIC insured CDs, spread out at a few different banks. I have maintained my exposure to the municipal bond market through a relatively short duration (5 year-ish) managed account, which gave me a scare last fall and subsequently rebounded nicely. I am concerned about a lot of state and local finance issues, so I am taking the popular advice and staying national, with only about 15% of my muni bonds in Massachusetts. So Alaska, Maine, Virginia - keep your books in order!

And I still have some equity exposure - 10% in my taxable accounts, much more in the retirement accounts. I'd add to it if I felt better about whether we are at the bottom or not. I easily could see this market testing the lows of November and then running down another 10-15% in the next few months. After that the road back will be fairly long, fairly slow and full of opportunities to make some money investing in good companies, and also to lose tons of money. And Uncle Sam's hand will rest more heavily on everyone, mostly for ill, and will eventually reach deeper into our pockets, which is always for ill, in this closet libertarian's book.

Meanwhile, we are weathering things well enough in this house, thank God, to allow us to enjoy some interesting meals out lately. I heartily recommend Rincon Limeno in East Boston for excellent Peruvian food (try the ceviche, the roast chicken and anything fried) and Jojo Taipei in Allston (Three Cups Tofu, Sour Cabbage and the Taiwanese Noodles, which Roxanne inhaled). On the beer front, both Publick House Provisions in Washington Square, Brookline and Wine Gallery on Route 9 in Brookline, near Brookline High, are worthy of your patronage. Very different vibes and selections - your domestic micro six pack needs will be met with a smile at Wine Gallery, while the very hip PHP is the only place in town that I know of to consitently carry De Koninck - the true king of beers.

Deception!

Roxanne joined Abby and I at the dinner table tonight as we were finishing up our meal. "Tell daddy what question of the day was at school," Abby asked. "What do you like to hug," Roxanne told us. "What? That's not what you told me!" Abby responded.

Well, it turns out that at four years, ten months, Roxanne has discovered the joys of deception through sincerity. Roxanne, often deadpan and always dead serious seeming, convinced my wife that the "question of the day" at nursery school was "what is your favorite meat" and that, furthermore, all the kids answered "lamb chops." This should have raised flags, because 1) that is a strange thing to ask a bunch of 4 & 5 year olds, 2) most kids that age don't like lamb chops and 3) Roxanne loves lamb chops, obsessively so, and works them into any conversation imaginable. But no, Abby bought this story.

For your information, Roxanne's answer to the real question was her plush USA (aka Hugg America). My answers are "Roxanne and Stella" for hugging and "chicken" for the meat.

My Minimalist Inaugural Post

I was trying to come up with my seemingly obligatory inauguration post and was struggling to describe my mixed feelings of resignation, trepidation and vague hope (in that order) attached to Obama's inauguration tomorrow. The NY Times did my work for me, though, by going to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and talking to the good conservative people there. A quotes like this says a lot about this country, and about how most conservatives and Republicans act on the patriotism and the profound love for this country that lies at the very heart of the conservative movement:

"Oklahomans understand and respect the elections process,” said Chris Benge, a Republican from Tulsa who serves as speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives. “Once the president has been determined, the vast majority of people are willing to get behind him."

A far cry from the "stolen election" and "let's flee to Canada" whining of 2000 and 2004, eh? And most conservatives of my acquaintance with a more or less fully lamped chandelier feel more or less the same way.

So I'll be watching tomorrow, with less joy and enthusiasm than most here in Boston, but with the same deep love for our country and awe for our system and constitution that I share with our next president, and his predecessor, and so many others.