The flu is here. Or so I thought, convinced by the days of fever and Montel Williams. But then I heard that I might not even have the real flu. Now that would be super annoying.

In other news, the Watertown Weasels, who began the season as OTAN in a partnership with the French, have made it to the Newtowne Fantasy League Championship. I'll be playing against Alexander James Goldman for a prize of $160, which, as commissioner, I have already spent.

On the fantasy football website, always a font of information along the lines of whether Darnerian McCants or Brandon Stokely would be a better third receiver to have, there was this gem comparing Fantasy owners getting ready for the big game to - what else - real football players:

The torrent of mental questions you can give yourself can be as exhausting as if you issued hundreds of press credentials for access to your brain.

Well, my friends, those credentials are being cut off. I'm reatreating in to my coaching bunker for the rest of the week. The good lord gave me the opportunity to play this game, and Iplan on putting the best team I can on the field, giving it 110 percent, and not letting our fans down.

More from the carpenter

More from the carpenter: "Where the heck did I put those screws? I'm feeling very blonde today. Very blonde, very blonde."

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

There is a carpenter here right now. He is replacing a door. Just a minute ago, he started talking to his drill. Fair enough. I thought he was talking to me, so I asked him if he needed anything. He said, "No, just talking to myself. You're lucky I'm not singing."

I said, "I guess I am lucky."

Then he said, "Or doing my Marlon Brando imitation."

From the basement, my brother-in-law, Jacob, yelled, "Do it!"

He then proceeded to sing/talk all of Joan Osborne's "What if God was One of Us?" in his version of Brando's voice. All of it. Right down to, "Except for the Pope maybe in Rome, Freddo."

Teriffic.

Shhhhh.

As a freelance worker, I sometimes grow to miss all those delights that come with office work. The comfy chairs. The free water. The presence of other people, who sometimes go out and bring you coffee. Unlimited xerox use. To combat the 'I can do whatever I want all day' blues, I decided to pack up my stuff and head straight to the one place in America where contract workers, day traders, and the homeless can safely mingle: the public library.

The Watertown Free Public Library is a nice old building that used to be a mansion belonging to some mill baron or slave trader or something. Watertown, which is about 3 miles from downtown Boston used to be the summer community of the superrich, before they all moved to Truro. Apparently I am doing all this in the wrong order. But anyway, I went to the mansion. Entering through the back door, I went straight upstairs to the 'quiet study room.' To me, it has always seemed odd to have a room like this in a library, which is essentially supposed to be a, um, quiet study room. Or set of rooms. But there it was.

The Quiet Study Room is my new favorite place to get work done. For one, it does not have wireless internet access and so I do not waste time checking out my fantasy football team. For the record, OTAN (my co-coach is a French guy) is headed to the playoffs, in 2nd place. I predict a championship. I also do not...uh...well, there's a lot of stuff on the internet that can waste your time. I guess this is another thing I miss about a real job: getting paid to screw around, just as long as you are in your seat. If they made you go to gym and gave out grades instead of sticky notes, work would be high school.

Anyway, so three hours - every minute billable, a first - whipped by in the Quiet Study Room and my laptop battery died, so I headed downstairs to read magazines as a reward. If work is high school, then the regular part of the library is the cafeteria. I mean, except for the eating. Three people were on their phones. One of those women was interrupting her cell conversation to yell, across the room, to another patron. The two others were, like everyone else in the library at 1 pm, old. If you want to meet old people, the library is the place for you.

It is easy to find them, too, because old people tend to be loud. I don't know if it is because old people also tend to be deaf, or if it is because old people sometimes tend to be oblivious, but man alive does it seem like the lungs are the last things to go. I will do my best to reproduce the best of the monologues verbatim:

"THIS IS HARRY KAZMANIAN. KAZMANIAN. KAZ-MANIAN, KAZ. K-A-Z-M-A-wait. K-A-Z-M-A-N-I-A-N. IS THIS BIGELOW AUTO BODY? WHAT? WHAT? GOOD. OK, THIS IS MY SON'S PHONE SO I DON'T KNOW IF I'M HITTING THE RIGHT BUTTON, BUT I BROUGHT IN MY CAR FOR NEW BRAKES AND NOW I NEED A RIDE HOME. A RIDE HOME. I TOOK THE BUS TO THE LIBRARY TO WAIT AND NOW I NEED A RIDE. FROM YOU. WHY NOT? I DON'T HAVE NO MORE CHANGE. YOU HAVE MY CAR. I NEED A RIDE, NOW. TO HOME. OR TO GET MY CAR. MY SON IS AT WORK. A RIDE, FROM YOU."

Re-reading it now, I guess it was only really funny at the time because it was so damn loud. Even the other old people were laughing at this guy, unless maybe that was gas. I have heard that old people are sometimes a lot like babies. The librarians, for the record, did not appear bothered by shouting in the library. But I was bothered. Oh yes, I was.

Oops, it's December.

I've whiled away another month with infrequent postings. Not that I've gotten much else done. The lack of structure around here is killing me. I think I need an office manager. Or a strength coach. Something. Either way, I can account for last week: Thanksgiving preparations.

First, we cleaned the place up. Then, we bought a ton of groceries. Two birds, a root cellar full of vegetables, and a lot of whipping cream. For the pie, not the celeriac. We then put the groceries away by shoving the bags into the corner of the sunroom and kept cleaning. It became clear that if Thanksgiving were every weekend then we would have a house where you could safely eat dinner off the bathroom floor.

We then moved to put together our fun new bookcase from a store at which we will never shop again: Hold Everything. One, nothing can hold everything and if you think of the name as a sort of double-entendre then it just doesn't make any sense. How does suddenly telling someone to wait relate at all to buying furniture? And two, the stupid thing didn't fit together, which is the least I expect of expensive furniture that I have to assemble myself. Since we were putting the finishing touches on it at 8 o'clock on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, no tradesmen were available to help us. Let this be a lesson to you: if you need either custom glass shelves or to rent a router for Thanksgiving, do it before 3 in the afternoon. Also, don't call Home Depot at any time to solve these problems, because they do not rent routers ("liability reasons" - as if renting circular saws to Joe Home Handyman is safe) and they do not sell glass. Also, if you decide to rent a router, a tool you have not used since camp when you were 13, for the purpose of 'customizing' yor brand new bookcase, do not tell your wife about this plan. In the event you can find an outfit with sufficiently liberal risk-management policies to rent you one, your wife will most likely not allow you to 'work on' the new bookcase.

But the router (admittedly, a bad idea) was not necessary anyway, because someone is always available to help Leah. Though there were yams to cut up, she spent an hour on the phone with a very helpful customer service guy named Adam in Oklahoma City and convinced him to give us 50 bucks, just like that. And that was only the beginning. Over the course of the next three days, Adam in Oklahoma City called us three times to tell us about how they were going to refund our shipping and buy us new shelves from the glass cutters around the corner. Message to online retailers: you cannot hide from Leah if you make her angry. She will not give up until it costs you money.

The big day involved much less fighting. In fact, unless you count my 4-year old niece insisting that she be allowed to count chips and salsa as dinner (No, we did not include chips and salsa on the menu for grownups.) and move straight past turkey to dessert, harmony was the order of the day. I learned that if you host Thanksgiving then you will most likely miss all the football, which is too bad because I liked hosting. Oh, the power. I also learned that having three ovens, even if they are on three different floors, helps a lot.

So, to sum up: We cleaned and straightened for five hours, cooked for seven or so, washed dishes all along and then for another hour afterwards, and ate for roughly forty minutes. I plan to start looking at this holiday like a race and seeing if I can try to bring my split times closer together. Imagine cooking for four hours and then eating for four more. That would be something.

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly sitting still and trying to maintain the eerie level of cleanliness that the house had achieved in the prep for Turkey Day. I became a compulsive counter-sponging nut, having nightmares about rings staining my thirty-year old formica counters and things, in general, somehow becoming sticky. I do not like things to get sticky. I also acted weird about mopping and folding laundry. I will be trying to work on this so the house can once again descend into a pleasant state of entropy.

Now it is back to the grind, which is an easier thing to accept when you are essentially unemployed. My freelance clients do not care if I sleep until 10 and have an hour-long lunch of Thanksgiving leftovers. Or if I stop working right this second. Which is what I am going to do. Have a nice night.