My new jacket

And speaking of high fashion, I’ve been scouring the earth in search of the perfect spring coat. It’s no easy feat because I spend the autumn and winter wearing a Carhartt jacket, a beautiful piece of outerwear I love so much, I will one day be buried in it. Finding an equivalent jacket for the warmer months has proven challenging, but after checking Bean’s, Cabela’s, Kohl’s, every Goodwill in the state and that weird army surplus store in Portland, I stumbled up a nice-looking Bass on Amazon. It’s a beaut. Kind of looks like Carhartt’s skinny kid brother. Even better, some complex glitch in Amazon’s pricing algorithms caused the price of my preferred size and color combination to drop from $79 to just $18. Ka-ching! As soon as I bought the sucker, the price shot right back up to $79, which tells me for sure that this was fated to be. My only problem now will be deciding which coat to be buried in. I won’t be wearing pants, just so you’ll know.

Did you just assume my time zone?

There’s a proposal afoot to keep Maine on Daylight Savings Time permanently, a concept that is incredibly misunderstood and one already being fiercely debated. If people disagree this much from the get go, maybe we should establish different time zones according to individual preference. Feel like a cocktail? Adjust your personal time zone to make it Happy Hour whenever you feel like it. Feeling snoozy? Declare it Nap Time and just dare your boss to make something of it. Customers getting you down? Make it Closing Time and head for home. Me, I’m going to go ahead and identify as Pacific Time so I can be three hours late to everything.

Wasps

On Wednesday, I published a column about my woes with wasps, which have completely invaded my summer space. Many of you wrote to commiserate and blah blah and yada yada. Thanks, but what I was actually fishing for was a volunteer to come over and get rid of these flying nightmares for me. I’m sorry, did I not hint strongly enough?

Bad day

Wednesday was a lousy day. A wretched day. It was one of those days that sucks the moment you step out of bed and gets suckier by the minute. It was a day in which annoyances came from all fronts: professional, personal, animal, vegetable and probably mineral. I bring it up mainly because I want you to send me liquor, but also because I wanted to ask: Have you ever noticed how traffic lights seem to sense when you’re in a foul mood and how they conspire to make crappy times even crappier? I saw many lights go yellow ahead of me, I sprained a tonsil just by swearing so emphatically. And this went on long after midnight – ain’t nothing like a red light at Pine and Webster streets in Lewiston when you’re the only car on the road in the middle of the night – because the thing about bad days is that they never want to end.

Explosive

On Tuesday, I found myself driving behind a fully loaded pickup truck operated by a private demolition company. Had it been Wednesday, I surely would have rear-ended that truck, because Wednesday was out to get me, in case you missed that earlier.

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