Are we there yet? How about now? Now? Now?

As just about anybody who's ever read this intermittent blog knows, my wife and I have been expecting a baby girl for the past nine months. Now we're officially "overdue" with Baby Sampson showing few signs of wanting to leave the warm white noise machine of the womb where she practices kung fu every time she gets a taste of grapes.

With no plans to induce, it's left us to plod through stages of nesting heretofore unexperienced by this blog. Patching up paint marks in the nursery wasn't so bad. Sorting Baby Sampson's clothes by size, month and season seemed reasonable. Hand washing glassware with vinegar to remove hard water marks ... not so much. At a minimum, the tasks are decent distractions from the job and answering "any baby news?" e-mails, which will eventually elicit sarcasm bombs on people offering innocent support. Ironically, the baby is the adult here while we've been reduced to toddlers in the backseat wondering if we're there yet. This is a spring break road trip to Florida and we just crossed the Florida state line only to realize we don't know if we're going to Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami or Key West. It could be a while. Fortunately, there are some smoke detectors that need their batteries changed.

Let the record show...

...that during a recent three-mile run an oldish red Ford Taurus passed behind me with its window down. Honk. Honk. From the passenger side a young female voice declared with authority, "Nice booty!" and sped away. I can only assume it was some eastern european model as I did not get a clear look at my admirer.

That is all. Have a splendid day.

My Vegetative Domestic Kingdom

No, seriously. At some point I'm going to be a regular contributor to my own blog. Of course if you know me and know my upcoming schedule that's about to unfold, you're probably thinking of an acronym that goes something like GTFOH. But I'm trying. Sort of. A least a little bit.

Anyway, I've wanted to blog about Bertrand Farms for the past few months and finally got around to snapping some pictures of the root patch, which is my domain of beets, onions, radishes and other vegetables that people don't really like. Good thing we're such good producers because who wants more raspberries, peaches and strawberries, anyway? Oh wait, you do? And you? And you too? Figured. No offense taken. I don't even eat my own produce most weeks and there are a dozen beets that have turned into colorful paperweights in the fridge. Beets are the brussel sprouts of the vegetable kingdom.

You might notice that the picture on this post is not of beets or onions or radishes at all. That's because for how boring they are to eat, they do even worse in photographs. But if you're like to see a bunch of weeds mixed with crops that also might be weeds, I can post those pictures if you'd like. Until then, let me placate you with piglets. Everybody loves piglets. I have a couple small cows to call in as reserves if necessary. Or the horses eating carrots. There will be cooing, just not about beets.

At this point you may be wondering why a 31-year old sportswriter works on a farm, a.k.a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) when he could spend his summer golfing and repairing a house that's falling apart. Yeah, I wonder that too. But to combat the sometimes boredom and occasional listless of the college football off-season, I needed something to provide a little structure in my life. And considering I live in Indiana, I figured why not embrace my reluctant Hoosier roots. OK, so the farm is in Michigan, but whatever.

As you might imagine the kind of people attracted to work on at CSA usually read Esquire, drink gin and tonics and enjoy foreign films. Or perhaps they extoll the virtues or eating beef organs and poo-poo the use of toilet paper. Or maybe they worked as a vetrenarian in the Congo and had a child there while their wife had an infection in her leg, that turned out to be a maggot. Or maybe they're Mormons, lots and lots of Mormons. So you know, just your average American working the land. Food doesn't discriminate.

I'll save you a detailed description of how to rule the roots, where I'm known as "the expert" which is code for "you were here last year, right?" It's weeding. That's it. If you can weed, you can grow onions, carrots, kohlrabi and any other vegetable your mom made you eat before dessert. But when I say weeding, I don't mean popping out dandelions, I mean ripping out would-be shrubs. I mean getting down on your knees. I mean yanking until you can barely grip your steering wheel on the drive home. And most importantly, I mean weeding ALL THE TIME.

I once worked at a garden supply store, where part of my job was gathering shopping carts. I found this depressing work, whack-a-mole work that you never completed, you only took a break from when the store closed. Farm weeding has that perpetual-ness to it, just with dirt, rain and the threat that if you don't get those shopping carts fast enough they'll transform into Megatron and destroy the store. These weeds are vindictive, I tell you. They have dark souls. They haunt my dreams. They don't mind crowding out crops and denying the CSA patrons that sixth, seventh and eighth beet they deserved.

Then there's the fact I'm a beet farmer. And have a cousin Mose. And I wear short-sleeve dress shirts with ties. That took some getting used to.

By now I'm sure you're wondering how you can sign up for your local CSA. Don't worry, I have enough beets for all of us.

My Vegetative Foreign State

By the time I boarded the plane to return home, basics such as subject-verb agreement had been lost. The finer points, distinguishing between that and which were long gone, at the bottom of a private pool or swallowed whole by Guardo the South American sea lion like a handful of baitfish. If a vacation is an exercise in relaxing, a recent trip to Bucerias, graciously bankrolled in part by our neighbors' five-bedroom home there that sits a block from the beach, was an assault on intellect. My brain quickly became a plotted plant wilting in the 90-degree afternoon heat. In seven nights, I'd nearly slipped into a vegetative state.

What a small price to pay for the privilege of lounging by a pool that's surroundings had better landscaping than my own home inside a property that saw care of a pool boy, maid and gardner multiple times each week. My work extended no further and no deeper than fetching errant pistachio fruit from the pool's not so deep end. Handstands often followed, but rarely for long. Bucerias, a small town north of Puerto Vallarta, both not infected and very affected by the oink flu, wasn't so much a place to escape as it was a locale to flick off reasoning skills required beyond decisions between pico de gallo and guacamole.

If not for Guardo the sea lion, there's a good chance I would have had nothing to offer about the week in Mexico if only for the fact I would have been incapable of expressing it. But Guardo demanded a keen intellect if you were to receive a kiss on the cheek or a ride from this 350-pound water dwelling mammal. Fortunately, I could deliver in between scuba diving at Las Marietas islands, which is Spanish for "smells like sea gull feces." The adventurous heroine of this blog jumped in the water first in full wetsuit, likely giving her the look of a curvy in all the right places sea lion with aligned teeth and no whiskers. She quickly swam to Guardo, who kissed her on the cheek and received a smooch right back. Guardo feigned embarrassment, raising a flipper to his forehead to hide blushing.

After a few more kisses to other divers, Guardo moved on to rides, jumps and clapping. Without a care for his leash, Guardo proved to be a genuine entertainer. He had no self-consciousness about his six gnarly canine teeth that had a classic stalactite and stalagmite look. Finally, Guardo called it an afternoon, hopped back up onto his boat (nearly flipping it in the process) and returned to port. Blog heroine and I returned to our dive boat, ready to search for eels and pufferfish. Fortunately, neither required the level of brain power necessary for a sea lion encounter.

Our remaining time in Bucerias was much less adventurous, an assortment of sleeping, reading, eating and drinking. It proved to be a collection of IQ depleting activities, aside from runs through Malcolm Gladwell and Barack Obama's books, the perfect tonic to our billable hour and message board lifestyle at home. Now if only my cognitive processes would return to their pre-Mexican state.

Memories of Duke

I'm not much of a crier. Nothing against the involuntary reaction, I'm just not wired to let tears flow without alcohol working as a prerequisite. The last time I lost it came about nine years ago at 1 a.m. at a dive bar in Greencastle, Ind. Four years of DePauw wound down. The real world loomed. I didn't want to go. I sobbed. Two days later I left college for good, ironically stuck behind a funeral procession on the way out of town. My tear ducts have been on vacation ever since through, joy, sadness, loss and death. Sure, there's been a misting at funerals, the occasional lump in back of throat, the cutting of onions to make a lasagna for one. But no wailing, no inconsolability.

Then came Duke. More on point here, there Duke goes.

As this blog's masthead hints, part of life here centers on labradors. That swimming, sepia Cody is our permanent animal fixture, a rescue dog that joined the family five years ago while we lived in Chicago. He is our child, albeit one turning into a curmudggeon set in his K-9 ways. We're taken so much more joy from Cody that we've returned, why we work with a rescue agency to help other labradors find homes. It's the Different Strokes of dogs around here, our temporary residents ranging from J.D., who stayed two weeks before finding a home, to Ryder, who spent two months here before his adoption.

Then Duke, a two-ish black lab, slipped seamlessly into our home. He arrived six weeks ago, no doubt scouting our property beforehand, taking notes on our behaviors. He knew as much what not to do (counter cruise, jump on furniture, pester Cody) as much as what to do (walk kindly, rest his head on your leg, work as night watchman). Duke had more love to give that we could accept, although we tried. His excitement knew no bounds, but it did know blood. He wagged his tail so furiously when we'd let him out in the morning or serve his dinner that he broke the skin and left red wisps on our walls. Gleefully, we debated keeping him for good.

Yet Duke had a background we never understood and probably didn't want to know. He arrived fresh off surgery to both hind ACLs that forced him to sit awkwardly and made him skittish near strangers. But most days his affectionate personality wouldn't let him stay away. If you'd sit on the floor, he'd seize the opportunity to lick your chin. If you'd sit next to him in a chair, he'd sit too, raising one paw to place it on your leg. He craved the connection. I did too. But the mistrust remained inside Duke and showed to strangers. There were lunges that made you question who did what to Duke in past months. But then he nipped a friend on the nose, drawing trace blood. The moment forces you to think of kids, the real ones of friends and the hypothetical ones of your own. They would not fully be safe. Duke could not stay, nor could we honestly offer him for adoption.

We alerted the rescue agency. Twenty-four hours later, they informed us Duke could be put to death.

I cried, the kind of cry when tears blur vision and speech turns to blabber. I apologized to Duke as he nestled into my lap. A frayed wired in his circuitry led to the bite, but the real Duke was the one who had placed his paw on my knee in an act of consolation. They say there are no bad dogs, only bad dog owners. In that case I was wretched for letting Duke coo his way into such danger.

Later that night my wife returned home. Duke licked the tears off her face.

Finally the rescue agency found a place for him to receive training in the hopes to finding the right fit of a home. It turned every walk into 30 minutes of savoring the steps, every pour of kibble turn into a tap dance for food that Duke master while waiting semi-patiently. Drop-off day came Monday, as Duke left us for a spacious boarding kennel in nowhere northern Indiana with yard to run around and other dogs to chase. His crate sits empty near our kitchen. Cody wonders where his friend with that exuberant tail has gone. That tail and everything attached to it will be missed.

Therapy for the Madness

Yes, laziness is behind the lack of posts since last month. Yet give March Madness its due, that mind-numbing marathon of college basketball viewership that is as good an annual checkup as any about my resistant progress into full-fledged adulthood. For those out of the know, every year for the past decade I've gathered with the same group of college friends to watch the same four days of games, eat the same Chicago style pizza and tell the same jokes. Only the beer has changed, upgraded from days of Ice House 30-packs to four-packs Goose Island Bourbon Stout. Oddly, the latter costs more than the former.

This year's Madness, a competitively dull affair that not even a few speculative parlays couldn't energize, marked the end of an era for me as host. My three-year term as M.O.P has run its course, with next year's festivities moved to Seattle, Grand Rapids or whereabouts unknown. It just won't be in my living room, which had transformed to upscale frat house for four days each of the past three years. You probably don't know too many wives or labradors living in frat houses, part of the reason this set up never made much sense to begin with. It required more understanding from Mrs. Attorney than Bill Raftery has onions.

It was with great relief that I watched this year's Madness party disband, the living room's stadium seating returned to the shed and the secondary television removed from in front of the fire place. All good things must come to an end, but I'm not uncertain of this event's virtue these days. The pizza tastes like sleeping on a futon until 11 a.m. on a Thursday without repercussion. I value that sentimentality, but its cost inflates by the year. Conversations of crawling are now about infants, not tavern variety. There's more talk about what we left behind for the weekend than what we left it for. Will the Madness continue? The proceedings leaving my house will help. But this four-day college reenactment may be a production that's starting to run long.

An Endorsement: Walking

Feet may be the new tonsils.

In other words, in the next millennium there's no doubt they’ll turn into vestigial appendages that serve no purpose other than adornment in leather. While that’s a worthy reason to maintain feet ¬– foot massage must persist for purposes of marriage pacificiation – an endorsement of walking remains in order after last week’s trip to New York City.

A stroll down Lexington Ave. from 57th to Union Square (14th-ish) reminded me not only how much I’m locked in a commuter town but the invigoration that comes with an urban stroll. Our Labradors will tell you we don’t walk enough, even in this unseasonably warm February, but the energy that comes from a city march is something to be savored.

The sprint/jog through “Don’t Walk” signals. The threat of oncoming cabs. The Plinko ricochet through stationary pedestrians. Enjoy it, city folk. We country mice have nothing close, unless you count walking the golf course, wheeling the trash can to the curb or working out those needy dogs.

The city walk is a walk with purpose, a walk that means business. The subway is a shortcut; the cab an overpriced convenience. So walk. You’ll feel better for it, and not in some carbon footprint kind of way. And if you walk enough, you’ll work your way toward walking’s older brother: running. Now that’s something truly worthy of an endorsement.