Dear Every Hotel In America,

As a frequent traveler, I love your services. It’s totally better than the alternative of sleeping in a random alley on a cardboard mattress using an old newspaper for a blanket.  I also love your tiny soaps and shampoos that make me feel like a giant when I hold them. And your carb heavy breakfast “buffets?”  Fantastic. I would never have thought to make guests cook their own waffles and then insist that I provided them breakfast.  Genius. 
However, I must take issue with the key cards every hotel in America now uses.  I get that it’s a cheaper system than old fashioned keys, but why is it that you can’t figure out a way to prevent the keys from deactivating under normal circumstances?  It turns out that if you put that hotel key in your pocket with other items you would expect to find in a pocket, it will deactivate faster than the XFL. 

To be clear, by items you expect to find in a pocket, I mean cell phones, car keys or credit cards.  I don’t carry around an electromagnet or a button of cobalt 60. Basically, everything I carry in my pockets on a daily basis ruins those key cards, forcing me to wander back down from the fourth floor and get a new key made after I stumble back from Applebee’s in a drunken stupor. The the desk clerk is always annoyed at giving me a new key and treats me like he hate me (bonus XFL reference!). 

I’m not a technology guru, but this seems like a fairly fixable solution, especially considering these things have been the norm for 20 years. Get it done yesterday, please. 

Sincerely, 

The Guy Who Usually Leaves A Pair Of Shoes In The Room By Mistake 

Or it certainly looks like I do. 

I don’t understand how a barber could do this and say to herself, “Sure, the back of his head is supposed to look like that.”  I mean, I’ve had jobs I don’t care for and been apathetic about them (I once failed to open the gas station I worked at on time for a month straight – since nobody noticed, I kept pushing it later and later until this station that was supposed to open at 6:00 a.m. on Saturdays was opening at 8:00 if they were lucky).  Still, how could you do this to a human being?
When I was in high school I once tried to drink an entire two liter bottle of Sun Country peach wine cooler.  Does anyone else remember wine coolers and that Sun Country came in a 2 liter bottle that just looked like you were chugging off-brand Mountain Dew?  I had nearly forgotten about that until I remembered that one of the late gas station opening days was a direct result of this boyish adventure with a crappy alcoholic beverage.  

Anyway, I didn’t really have enough to fill an entire post, so I tried to round it out with he wine cooler story. For the record, I did not finish the bottle and I puked in someone’s Ford Taurus. Good times. 

Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of the back of your head?  Here are some other attempts. 

Here’s a video effort. 

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And just because I was completely bored, a slow motion video. 

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Finally, when you go to the bookstore in Maine, this is what the gardening section looks like. 

In the fire services there is an agency that tracks “near misses.”  Essentially it doesn’t wait for a serious injury or death to occur before they investigate a situation that went wrong – instead, they investigate and publish accounts of things that went wrong but through nothing more than sheer dumb luck ended up with no deaths or serious injuries.

They would have liked to see what I did the other day.  I fell off a ladder while repairing a gutter.

I’d like to point out that I have been on ladders all my life – I’ve been a painter since I was in sixth grade and I’ve been a firefighter for more than a decade.  This isn’t the first time I ever climbed a ladder.  It is, however, the first time I ever climbed one and then took the short way down.

My problem started when I was attempting to fit this gutter repair into a short window of time, so everything was hurried.  I carried a ladder around from the back of the house only to realize I had gotten a ladder that was too large to set against the house underneath the gutter.  The smart thing to do would have been either postpone the project until I had more time or simply go get the correct ladder.

You ever had one of those moments where you say to yourself, “This is really not going to work,” but you decide to do it anyway?  This was definitely one of those moments for me.  The problem was it carried the risk of serious injury.  Just as my father who broke his neck falling from some staging in 2001.

So I set this completely incorrect ladder for the job against the building at a ridiculously low angle.  I could have bailed at any time – I was just looking at it and pretty much seeing the future.  But my haste got the better of my and I climbed the ladder anyway.

Like all evil inanimate objects, the ladder was tricky and remained fairly stable while I climbed it.  Then as I reached the top it kicked out and dropped straight down.

I wasn’t watching the situation from a very good vantage-point, but I like to think I hung onto the roof and gutter just long enough to look like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff and hanging in mid-air before plummeting.  I can tell you this – I stayed there long enough to grab the gutter, thus ripping it off and turning this simple five minute repair into an hour repair.

When I fell down, my leg landed between the rungs of the ladder which was propped up slightly – I have no idea how I didn’t break my leg at that point, but luck was with me and I merely bruised and scraped my shin.  However, the granite steps and the paving stones of the front walkway cushioned my fall and I didn’t die.

Battle wounds of being a farmer. If you look close, you can see the scar from a motorcycle accident up on my knee. My legs would like me to stop whatever it is I am doing.

I have to start painting the back of the house today, so I’m going back up on the ladders.  If you don’t see any more blog posts, you can guess what has happened to me.

Let’s talk about the term “farmer” for a minute.  I’ve thrown it out there, so let’s kick it around.

My grandparents were farmers.  It was an indisputable fact.  They ran the Maine breeding co-op and had cows, bulls, horses, a mean and nasty goose that would terrify and chase young children whenever it got the chance.  I mean, really terrify a poor kid to the point where just having to walk through the farm yard while they were visiting would cause pee-your-pants-level anxiety but he would be too scarred and embarrassed to tell anyone he was afraid of the goose because it was just a stupid bird, never-mind the fact that it was actually a bird nearly as tall as the little boy and everyone knows birds are pretty much the same as dinosaurs, so really was he a little pansy for being afraid of being chased by a dinosaur?  No, I don’t think so.

Yes, my mother’s parents were farmers.   No argument there.

I do not want to be a cattle or dairy farmer.  I want to plant a vineyard and an orchard and I want to make wine and cider.  Now, you could choose to define this avocation as vintner or a, um, an….

Google has failed me.  Evidently there is not a proper name for a place or a person who makes cider.  Brewers make beer in a brewery.  Vintners make wine in a winery and they grow grapes in a vineyard.  But nobody has a name for a cider maker?  How is that even possible?  We have names for everything – some of these professions have even become actual surnames. For example, a person who makes barrels is called “Cooper.”  In Italian they refer to a seller of fennel “Finnocchiaro.”  In Texas, they call someone who makes interceptions “Romo.” But I can’t find anything for someone who makes cider.

The process of making cider is much closer to the process of making wine than it is beer, but at a boots on the ground, drinking it by the pint level, cider seems closer to a beer product than wine, so it’s hard to say whether to lean toward vintner or brewer.  Maybe I’ll call it a cider mill and refer to a cider maker as, let’s say, ciderer.  No, that’s not cool.  Menter.  You know, from fermenter?  I’ll work on that one and get back to you.

Anyway, so you could call what I want to do being a vintner and you could call the farm a vineyard, but that presents two problems.  First, it sounds sort of pretentious for this blog.  I mean, when we get to the point of actually selling wine, sure, we’ll probably have to call it a vineyard.  But for now, I’d like to stick with farmer.  Second, I want other more farmy type things.  Chickens.  Goats.  More dogs than we should really have.  That sort of thing.

But in the spirit of farming, here is a selfie of me getting photobombed by a cow.

Does this angle make my eye look creepily huge?