doodledee

A quick down-and-back to Rochester over the weekend. Mostly to attend a party in honor of the man shown above with the big smile on his face. Why is he smiling you ask? Sure, that giant beer in his hand probably has something to do with it, but it's mostly because after 39 years of slavin' for The Man, my old man is officially done working. And yes, those are people years, not dog years. 39 of them. I know, wow. All for the Same Man. I know, WOW. Do people even do that anymore? I would bet not, and I can think of 401 reasons why. And they all start with 'k'. That's a 401k joke in case you missed it. I'm thinking I shouldn't have gone with it now that I had to spell it out, but whatever, I laughed.

So yeah, he's done. And now he's spending his days doing whatever it is you do when you don't have to work anymore. And honestly who cares what that is, I don't even want to know, I don't want the surprised ruined, because when I get there - the day before I turn 45 - it's going to be awesome. I just hope it includes go-karts.

Two other notables from the down and back:

• The Elk Farm in Pine Island had a new[er] sign up that mentioned that in addition to 'meat products', they now also sell antlers. "Oh sweet!" I say, "We should get some antlers!" "No," she says. "We could use them as a coat rack!" "No," she says. "To hang keys?" "No." "I got it, we..." "No." "One pair?" "No" "A smal..." "No." She wins. Again. Boo.
• We stopped along the way home and did the pumpkin thing. It was a hardcore working farm this time. Like "over there are 1000 cows and over there are a couple truckloads of pumpkins we arranged into a 'patch'... have at it." Lemme just say you could smell the Halloween everywhere. But it was still the usual blast. The yard of the farmhouse had been decorated with like 200 crazy ghosts and zombies and stuff. Total Griswold style. So that was cool. And then when we were done the nice farmer dude wheeled our wagon load of pumpkins over to our eurotrash sedan and helped me load them up, all the while making odd pseudo-political conversation in what seemed to be an attempt to get me to take a stand on the Iraq war. What this guy didn't realize is that if it would have saved me a couple bucks on pumpkins, I would have taken whatever side he wanted. Duh.