Kitt

Here's hoping 2014 is a much better year for you Dustin! Come hang out with us when you can. We can be a pretty supportive bunch!

LMAO! Exit 6 should continue to serve the mixed beers in question but call it "the F word"!

Not to mention the fact that all he really wanted to do was find an easier way to the east indies!

Well the cleanout is done - and yes the baking soda was the oldest thing in there. Now its the newest. There was one bottle of salad dressing that expired "last year" but only at the end of December.

LOL I think its the box of baking soda put in to absorb odors, but I haven't done my new years cleanout yet. Let you know tomorrow afternoon - its how i plan on spending the "stuck inside" time of this coming snowstorm.

Admittedly it has been much longer since I was in college compared with you, but if i remember correctly I would have been still drunk on waking at 10 am. Welcome to the world of the "older" generation where we pay much more dearly for our previous evenings consumption!

Or write it into your stories the way Mark Arbour does!

I think if you have lived so comfortably that seeing opinions like those was a shock to you - you should consider yourself very lucky. Most people, both gay and straight, will run up against some form of blatant discriminatory BS sometime in their lives. Best can be done with opinions like those is identify them as BS and not let them bother us.

The world would be an awful boring place if we all thought and acted the same now wouldn't it?

I think all of our participating authors should get a round of applause. It takes a lot to put yourselves out there in the first place, and even more to write a story more or less "on demand" based on someone else's suggestion. Well done everyone! And congrats Joann!

LOL - That's easy to handle - he just has to make the Ravens fan someone he doesn't care much for. He's got 10 years of story to cover first though!

Aww- you know the idea is in there now Aditus. By the end of January you are going to HAVE to write it down to get it to leave you alone!

Stupid Cupid - stop picking on me! Sorry - couldn't resist

I agree Jeremy - someone has to repair your car, keep your furnace running properly, fix your plumbing, and any one of a thousand other "blue collar" occupations. Everyone can't start as a rent boy and end up running a multi-million dollar adventure capital firm. I also agree its fun having some of the action in my back yard so to speak. While taking care of business on Friday I found myself close to Ramsay and decided to go looking for Don Bosco. I never found it but it was fun looking. Funny thing though...never did see a NJT bus the whole time I was in the area.

In 1492 .... Columbus sailed the ocean blue....

Malfunction implies an accident - that it was unplanned. I still do not believe that was the case.

The nice thing about hair is it grows back.

First things first, thank you for another excellent chapter. I was wondering if the Christmas day posting would postpone things a little and was pleasantly surprised to see it didn't. The flight from Ohio to NJ was not nearly as bad as I was expecting. Will did let go with both barrels, but seems it was a smaller gauge. I am not sure it was Will's place to say some of the things he did, but they were things Wally needed to hear. It will be interesting to see where that goes next. Zach is an interesting character. On the surface he seems to be just what Gathan presents him as - a manipulative brat. But as we see more of him I am wondering if he became so manipulative in an effort to get out from under golden boy Gathan's shadow? That he feels Will is the only one he can trust to be a true friend at this point says a lot for where his head is. While when it comes down to the wire I am sure his parents would be there for him ( at least I would hope so!) they really need to let him know that. Zach seems to think they have written him off just as Gathan has.

How much is too much I think is a hand in hand question with to tat or not to tat. Very personal and very individual. For me, any tat is out of the question, I am simply too chicken to volunteer for that many holes to be popped in my skin. I have had my fill of needles! I know it is not the same, but the holes they need to poke in me to monitor the state of my health are more than enough! That being said, I think there is a big difference between cohesive well designed and executed tats like Sasha's shoulder piece, and the conglomeration of shit a friend of mine has collected. No one tat on his body is more than 5" square and he had at least 60% of his body covered last I saw him in person. They are not in any way related to each other, and some were completely foolish drunken choices, like the name of a girl he had been seeing only a week at the time and broke up with before the tat had finished healing. Would I ever advise a person not to get a tat? No. Would I advocate long hard thought before any tat? Hell yes. We are not talking about something you can sell at a yard sale if you get tired of looking at the picture now are we?

The traditions in my family have stayed pretty much the same although greatly downsized over the years as the family is greatly reduced and very scattered now. The party started Thanksgiving weekend. My uncle grew Christmas trees for wholesale and Thanksgiving was harvest weekend. We would all drive up to his farm in Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Gram and mom would cook while the rest of us were in the fields as soon as it was warm enough to bale the trees without cracking branches. The traditional Italian meal ( at least my families version ) would start around noonish with pasta, meatballs, bracolli ( a sort of meat roll browned then simmered in the tomato sauce, no i didn't misspell the veggie. I am not sure I spelled the meat roll right lol), sausages, and salad. Then back out to the fields for more tree cutting/baling while dishes were done and more big cooking, and dinner was the usual Turkey, stuffing,potatoes, turnips, cranberry sauce, salad, etc. We did eventually split the two huge meal sections to dinner on Thurs and Friday and cut back to soup and sandwiches at lunch time. We would have anywhere from 10 to 20 people staying there for the weekend. If harvest went well and we had time the guys headed off to the gun shop for an afternoon of drooling while the gals headed into town and started Christmas shopping. His farm was also the destination for the great migration another one mentioned and as most of us filtered out over the day Sunday, more would filter in for opening deer season on Monday. Various groupings of these same 10 to 20 people got together every weekend to decorate and shop thru December. Christmas eve was a big thing with the traditional pasta with seven types of fish at grams house, but we only whistle stopped there as we spent most of the eve with dad's great grams. That was another huge gathering of all the cousins aunts and uncles usually totaling about 30 or so if everyone came. Food was sort of pot luck with every mom bringing something from lasagna from us to baked beans and anything you can think of in between. Midnight mass was followed by opening presents ( we usually needed to wake the younger ones up!) Christmas day was just as crazy at mom's family. The same huge dinner ( pasta plus turkey) started around 10 am with an antipasto and was basically non-stop rotations of eating, visiting and dishes, with breaks for football in between. Gram was oldest of 12 and gramps was oldest of 13 so don't ask me how many aunts uncles and cousins were in and out all day! Boxing day was spent napping and cleaning up! Now we are much fewer since the days of 12 kids are long gone, and most of us remaining are scattered to the winds, but I still try to do the traditional foods and collect as many relatives as I can here around the holidays. Now the turkey gets lots of plates made and frozen for reheated meals and pasta dishes are much smaller but I still make the pasta with fish, just lots less of it. We did add the skype visit with Sasha this year that I hope will continue for a long time. It was a great idea and i am currently trying to catch all the out of state relatives to see if we can set up something similar with all the relatives that cant travel!

Damn well told Joann!

Thorn- maybe bro's mum thought it would be a cool reference for your stories? This year everything was fairly normal ( to my great surprise ) but last year hubbies mom gave me an in bottle wine chiller and pourer. You freeze the silly thing then insert it into a bottle of wine to pour and chill at the same time. Nice thought - if i drank wine. My one glass of wine a year will do nicely with an ice cube ty.

Lovely story Cole! You do new takes on old themes so well. I love the rebirth of Danny's feelings through finally letting go of Brian. I am with Lisa in that I am glad he chose to stay with Cayden. I think he will come to find that while he may not "need" Cayden the way he did two weeks earlier, now he will need him in a totally different way. I enjoyed every word, even the ones that made me cry.

You should vote WL. The only reason I am not is I will not get stuck in a "ma likes me more" situation!

I agree- it DOES make him a douchebag. Like it or not people like that do exist in the world and we have to hope not to have too many come into our own lives and do our damnedest not to be like them. And my apologies - when you quoted the question I thought you understood. The question was "If you were on the outs with someone in your family and they showed up without any warning would you be comfortable with it?" After that you asked what made me think Zach was on the outs with his family and I explained what was behind the thought. And in case you are wondering what the first instance of your not answering me was, that was back a few pages when we were discussing if Will can or will learn from his mistakes. I will quote the whole section and bold the specific question for you. How can he learn from his "mistakes", if he doesn't see them as such? Simple - remember while it may be several weeks in our time - in Cap time this all went on in a matter of a couple days. Funeral, car, dinner making Austin uncomfortable and blow up over the car after, then off to Hawaii all in under a week. Will may not see it as a mistake YET. Have you discovered all your mistakes in life within minutes, or even hours of having made them? Sometimes it takes a while to come back and bite you in the ass, and some mistakes bite harder than others, Now, if you would prefer not to answer, I can respect that. Just say so.