Greenville, Maine

On the weekend of January 17th, my friend Libby, her friend Sue, Thom and I all went to Greenville, Maine for the long weekend. Where's Greenville, Maine? Good question! It's like in the middle of Maine in the middle of nowhere. When you think you're lost, take a left, and there you are.

We picked them up bright and early on Saturday morning to get a head start.

The night before, I didn't sleep a wink because I was in tremendous pain. Took Advil...but to no avail.

So here I am wondering how the heck will I be able to make a 6 hour drive to Maine in such pain. Took more Advil.

The ride was uncomfortable, but manageable. When we got to the border of New Hampshire and Maine, we saw 2 deer running across the road...one got hit and went flying. That was a very disturbing site to me and I got bummed out for awhile.

I wanted to stop at this interesting looking shop on the way, but we drove by it. We turned around and stopped. The Open flag was flying and the drive was shoveled out, but the place was closed. It was a little freaky and we were joking around that this town had become overrun by zombies. Everything was so quiet. Got back in the car and kept driving.

We got to Greenville around 12:30pm, and if it wasn't for Sue, we would've been driving for another half an hour. She noticed the sign for the Moosehead cottage resorts, but the GPS unit had the cabins on the other side of the damn lake. What the?! The GPS doesn't even know where this place is!

We went to the grocery store and picked up some food. For some reason, I was surprised they had "real" food! It was like a regular grocery store. I was expecting some weird stuff, like moose jerky or something. The town is located on Moosehead Lake, so EVERYTHING was Moose something. Moosehead this, Mooseass that. They are definitely exploiting the majestic moose. We were hoping to catch a glimpse of one.

Got the cabin and unpacked. What a cute cabin! Except for one thing...the heat wasn't working! It's like -18 friggin degrees and the heat was not working. Libby put in a call right away. We were huddled under blankets and playing a game of Rummikube, when we hear a truck approach. I looked out and saw lights, people! We heard someone come up the porch, stamp their feet to get the snow off, and WALKED RIGHT INTO THE CABIN!! No knocking or anything. Err, excuse me?! "I hear your having a problem with the heat." Understatement. He opened the thermostat and fiddled with it for a sec and decided he was going to look at the boiler. He was gone for a few minutes and told us that the boiler was set at too low of a temperature and he turned it down, but since it was so cold, it might take a while to get it up to a decent temp.

After Libby spanked us at RummiKube, I went to bed because the pain was bad.

When we woke up, it was snowing. I had to admit that it was very pretty. Libby and Thom decided to go sledding out behind the cabin because there was a hill. Sue and I looked at each other and said, "Have fun!" I brought the camera to take pictures, because I knew hilarity would ensue! And I was not disappointed. First of all, there was a lot of snow, so when they tried to sled down, they sunk into the snow and got a bunch of snow in their faces while they went down. So here they are, at the bottom of the hill, wondering how to get back up. They stood up, and sunk into the snow up to their hips! I'm here snapping pics because they kept falling over. Ten minutes later, they get back to the top. They did this a few more times and then got too tired.

We tried to go to town and shop, but it seemed every damn shop in Greenville Maine was closed for snow. Are you kidding me?? It's Maine, that's all you have there is snow, and you close your shops because of a little snow? I was majorally bummed, I wanted to shop. There was one shop open, and the owner of the shop used to live in Massachusetts. Go figure, a Mass girl opens up her shop, but the natives don't.

We went to dinner at a place called the Stree Free Moose. I don't know about you, but I don't think Moose get stressed. We walked in and the entire bar turned and looked at us. That was hilarious. What was more hilarious was the barmaid. Just to recap: we're in Maine, it's 2 degrees and it's snowing like it's never going to stop. The barmaid was wearing shorts. Shorts. With woolly boots and a T-shirt right out of the 80's. And she thought she was hot. Up there, she might have been. Anywhere else...not so much. I had the pastrami, because they claimed to be the "King of Pastrami". Again...not so much.

We left the next day and it was still snowing. All in all, it was a very fun trip!

Random thoughts from a random mind

Words of wisdom from Captain Mayonnaise: Picking your nose in the winter is like digging through a box of Triskets.

What I learned from watching American Idol: If you sing LOUDER, it doesn't make you sound any better.

Emergency Room Doctors are only good for 2 things: stitching up gashes and curing poison.

It doesn't matter how old they are, if you put 2 brothers in the same room together, they will wrestle and beat each other up.

Weatherpeople are the only ones who can be wrong 99% of the time and still have a job!

Have you ever had KFC at a K of C?

Apparently, I'm like an oyster...but instead of making something that's worth anything, I make a useless stone.

I will write more about the kidney stones later.

There's crime in Brookfield!

We've had our first brush with the violent, rampant crime in Brookfield. The cops were at our house and everything, it was horrible. How can something like this happen in our quiet little town? This is the end of the innocence. I'm afraid to go outside.

Wild kids are to blame, other people down the street were victims too.

I am calling it, "The brutal, deliberate EGGING of 2009!" LOL

Yes, we were the victims of a senseless egging of our home! The cops were taking photos of the carnage. They were trying to figure out the path the hoodlums took. It happened sometime between 6:30 and midnight. We were at a friend's, luckily, no one was hurt.

I can just imagine the conversation:

Officer #1: Yup. It was an egg, from the look of the shell, it was a brown egg. Brown eggs are local eggs, so this egg was fresh.

Officer #2: Good observation. And from the way the yolk oozed down the side of the house, we can determine the egg's trajectory, and pinpoint the location of where the criminal was standing.

Officer #1: He had to have been left-handed. There's no way the egg would've smashed in this pattern if he was a rightie.

Officer #2: Brilliant...the culprit had to have been wearing glasses.

Officer #1: Why do you say that?

Officer #2: He almost missed the house. He almost couldn't of hit the broad side of the barn. If he had 20/20 vision, it would've hit more to the center of the house.

Officer #1: You're right. Let's get some pictures. Then we'll get this information down to ballistics.

Officer #2: Do you think we should fingerprint the eggshell fragments?

Officer #1: There are few eggshell fragments left. The culprits must've known that we would do that, so they collected as many as the fragments as they could.

Officer #2: Take a sample of the frozen yolk. We'll run DNA tests on it to make sure it was a chicken egg.

Officer #1: Great thinking. Let's get this back to the station STAT!

I would expect to see this as a made-for-television movie, so keep a lookout for it, it's absolutely compelling!

Happy 2009 everyone!