It's All About How You See It 01/20/23

After three installments on Craig, we can safely say that the thread of this underwear story has run out. Sorry, couldn’t resist. At the last second, John came up with the final joke on a joke line about putting the item up for sale on eBay. With Dottie asking for Craig’s autograph, you can’t be too sure what her actual motives were. I was listening to sports talk radio in the car the other day (please don’t judge me, the Giants are in the playoffs for the first time in years and I can’t get enough), the former star running back Tiki Barber told a story of people coming up to him asking him to autograph footballs for a holiday, birthday, etc. And then he found out that some of those people were turning around and selling them on eBay. No one has asked for my autograph or John’s. Yet. Of course neither of us were former underwear models either.

The other comic was based on a real incident, as opposed to the stuff we make up out of thin air. John and are both proud new grandparents of beautiful baby girls. I regale him with stories about mine, he doesn’t have as many stories yet because his granddaughter is still an infant. In the case of this comic, it was based on my granddaughter who was about 1 1/2 years old at the time. She came for a sleepover along with her dad and mom (who doubles as Joanie and my daughter). The next morning, our kids packed up the car to go to breakfast and head back home. My wife joined them for the breakfast part. When the kids buckled their daughter into her car seat she started wailing. When Joanie returned home from breakfast, I commented on how sweet it was that Charlotte (our granddaughter) looked at me and cried when they left. I asked her if she noticed Charlotte crying because she missed her grandpa. Joanie told me gently that no, Charlotte was just crying because she hated being buckled into her car seat. Oh well, a guy can dream, can’t he?

Have a great weekend, especially those of you who root for the Giants, and we will see you next week with two new ones.

Andy and John

Perspective 09/09/22

If you’re old enough to be reading The New 60, you’re probably old enough to have grandchildren. And if you’re old enough to have grandchildren you know that you’ve just been knocked back a rung or two in the family pecking order. Speaking from experience, my wife and I rented a beach house this summer and invited our daughter, her husband and their child, who doubles as our first grandchild. Now admittedly she is cute as a button, likely the cutest baby ever (okay that’s just grandpa getting carried away…a little) but enough is enough. One day my wife was feverishly working, door to our bedroom closed as she conducted a zoom meeting on her computer. I needed to desperately ask her a question and couldn't wait for her meeting to end in order to ask the question. She had at least another hour to go. So I gingerly opened the door and entered the room. She looked over her shoulder, saw it was me and waved me away, as if to say “Get out of here, can’t you see I’m in the middle of an important meeting?” I retreated. Now to be fair, she is the only one of us with a full-time job since I unceremoniously “retired” from advertising at the end of 2016, and her work is very important. At any rate, not five minutes later our granddaughter came crawling down the hallway, and I, feeling rejected (and being a wiseass) , wanted to get my wife back. So I said to the baby, “Want to see grandma? C’mon, she’s right in here. So baby Charlotte crawls right up to the door, and slaps at it, making a loud sound repeatedly. My wife comes to the door ready to hand me my head, when she looks down, sees who’s making the racket, and in her sweetest, highest voice, says Hiiiiiiiii sweetheart, want Grandma to pick you up?” And of course she does, brings Charlotte to the computer, introduces her to the zoom meeting, and everybody is oohing and ahhing and speaking in their own high voices for the next five minutes, before she hands Charlotte back to her mom, shuts the door and resumes the meeting. Now couldn't she have done the same with me? Granted she couldn't have lifted me up, but at least an “Excuse me guys, I just have to speak to my husband for a second, oh wait, want to meet him?” I mean I am 69, which is not nearly as cute as our 16- month-old, but I am temporarily disabled with a broken ankle suffered while riding a bicycle. So give me a little break, but wait, I’d rather not have any more breaks. Okay, I guess it’s pretty tough to score sympathy points when competing with a baby. She wins. As does my wife and her accurate set of priorities. But what I had to say was important. Something crucial like, “Could you pick up some tonic water at the grocery store?” In truth it was so unimportant that I can’t even remember what it was. So maybe it wasn't that important, but it did inspire our first comic.

Next up was Pickleball. John is a tennis player and has also tried his hand at Pickleball. It is being billed as a great sport for seniors, right up there with walking and frisbee golf. It requires good hand-eye coordination and not much running since most people play doubles and the court is about a third the size of a tennis court. But what it does require is a lot of quick movements including lunging. Back to my broken ankle. I was reading an article about the emerging popularity of Pickleball, when they quoted Dr. Neil Roth, an orthopedic surgeon, extensively. Dr. Roth said it was a great game for seniors for many reasons but cautioned that he had repaired a lot of broken limbs as a result of Pickleball. That stopped me because that is the same Dr. Roth who just performed surgery on my ankle. When John and I discussed how we were going to approach Pickleball, I suggested doing a comic about a broken limb, but he went right to the fact that part of the court is called the kitchen and we both knew who has trouble in the kitchen. Loveable old Marv, that’s who.

So that’s it for this week. Enjoy your weekend, Can you believe it’s already football season? See you next week with two new ones,

Andy and John

Snitches get Stitches 6/24/22

This week, we go to a place where I thankfully don’t have much experience. Prison. John maybe, but not me. Okay, not him either. I do have some experience with babysitting these days however. If you don’t yet have grandchildren you’d be amazed at what type of qualifications it takes to be a babysitter. At least around New York City. You have college graduates, art history majors, child development experts, all vying for these jobs. No kidding. My own daughter’s babysitter is leaving to act in a production of Macbeth this summer. True. But we decided you can’t judge a book by its cover, so we went in the opposite direction and had Sam and Shellie hire an ex-con, covered in tattoos, to be little Sammy’s babysitter. We figured, how many degrees does it take to change a diaper (actually several). If you remember back to when we first introduced the babysitter, Sonny, he had a deeply intuitive understanding of how to speak to babies. And once Sam and Shellie got over the shock of seeing Sonny, they quickly decided he was their man. We get requests from some of our readers to do characters with alternate lifestyles, and we always respond, “We write about what we know.” This is why the strip is not filled with ex-inmates. Similarly, Sonny talks about what he knows. So John reached back into his prison knowledge base and pulled “snitches get stitches,” out of his a…I mean, out of thin air.

In our second comic, we have Sonny making up a bedtime story for Sammy. What else is he gonna talk about? He’s going to tell a better story if he speaks about what he knows. All we know is one thing, little Sammy is going to grow up to have quite an imagination. That is certainly one way to afford your kid a “well-rounded education.”

We’ll be back next week with two new ones and, before you know it, it’s going to be the 4th of July. Yikes, where does the time go?

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Ahh, Baseball and Fresh Dirt. What could be better? 5/13/22

With summer rapidly approaching, our thoughts turn to baseball. And since this is the New 60 Comic, we turned to the joys of taking your grandchild to a baseball game. As summer rituals go, this one can’t be beat. But, it gets even better when it comes to teaching your kids (and now grandkids) how to keep a proper baseball scorecard, a feat both John and I managed to pass down. My first job out of college was as a sportswriter for the Pawtucket Times, and part of that job was, from time to time, to be an official scorekeeper for the beloved minor league team, the Pawtucket Red Sox. Trust me when I say it didn’t pay well. You got $4.50 for the scorecard you turned in to the league and an additional $4.50 for the one you turned in to the team. I learned this one night when covering for the sports editor for the local newspaper (my boss) who was attending the wedding of his 8th or 9th chlld (I didn’t do such a hot job of keeping score of how many children this guy had). Before the game ended he called from the wedding to tell me to just leave the scorecards on the scorer’s table, and he’d turn them in. When I turned to a fellow reporter who worked for the Woonsocket Call and asked why my editor would ask me such a thing, he replied, “Because he’s a cheap bastard who was thinking about the $9 bucks he was missing out on.” That summed up my editor perfectly. Anyway, suffice it to say that the experience made me into a pretty good scorekeeper. For instance, do you know what it’s called when a guy steals a base and the catcher doesn’t try to throw him out? Defensive Indifference, and it goes in the scorebook as DI. Did you know when the pitcher walks a batter, you don’t score it as a “W” for walk, but a BB for “Base on Balls?” Did you know when a pitcher strikes a guy out, it doesn’t get scored as an “SO” it gets scored as a “K?” Unless the batter strikes out without swinging his bat, in which case it goes into the books as a backwards K (there’s no way to type that on a computer)? Did you know, and more importantly, do you care? Well, it’s a time-honored tradition to pass this skill along to the next generation, but it is becoming a lost art form. When my dad used to take me to games, he’d buy a scorebook and pencil for 0.15 cents. And he’d lose interest in scoring by about the 6th inning. So is it any wonder that when Al teaches his grandson, the kid takes his eye off the ball, so to speak, and turns said eye to a gigantic swirl of cotton candy? I’m proud to say that my son, even at age 7, would’ve known how the bases got loaded, and besides, he never cared much for candy. My wife and I used to routinely steal his Halloween candy and when he got a little older, he’d just hand it to us.

Our other comic this week goes to the joys of grandparenthood (is that even a word?). Unlike scorekeeping, which never changes from one generation to the next, the rules of being a parent, and therefore a grandparent, are constantly changing. Hence when you treat your grandchildren the way you treated your own children, you may be out of step with current thinking. Our childhoods were more laissez-faire. When we said we were going bike riding with our friends, our parents said, “Okay, just make sure you’re home for dinner by 6.” Not so much anymore. Nowadays the parent drops the kid off for a playdate, and then the playdate parent says “You can ride your bikes but just around the block and don’t you dare go into the street!” So it is in this changing environment that Al falls a bit short of his daughter’s expectations. Although both John and I thought his comeback was pretty good. Anyway, it’s a new dynamic. We were used to telling our kids what to do, but when it comes to taking care of their kids, they’re the ones telling us what to do. Although we still might let them stay up a half-hour after their appointed bedtimes, but shhh, please don’t tell.

Have a terrific weekend and we will be back next week with two new ones.

Andy and John

Man Plans, God Laughs 03/17/22

You know the phrase “Man plans, God laughs?” When you think about it, it’s really true. Though why God laughs - I haven’t the slightest idea. I remember a case in my misspent youth. I was driving back to college with a friend of mine. We planned. We rolled a bag of joints for the roughly 17-hour trip from NY to St Louis. Please don’t judge. I was a teenager. At any rate, somewhere along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a police car comes up the left lane, sirens blaring, going at least 100 miles per hour. After cursing, we lifted out the ashtray and placed the bag in the cavity, and then stuffed the ashtray back in place. I envisioned a phone call, “Hi, mom and dad, about my second semester, I’m gonna spend it in a Pennsylvania prison instead.” But God laughed. The cop just whizzed right past us, chasing whoever he was chasing. After a massive and collective sigh of relief, we removed the ash tray and went for the baggie. Not there. It had fallen into the innards of the car and was likely lying untouched somewhere on the Penn Turnpike. Man plans, God laughs. Our comic was a bit less dramatic illustration of this saying. In this case John stood out on his deck and looked out over his property and talked with his wife about prepping the garden the next day. They went to sleep that night and when they woke up in the morning, there was an issue. 6 inches of snow had fallen. God laughed. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the grist for our first comic.

The next comic is something we’ve all been through. Most recently, my wife and I babysat for our granddaughter so our daughter and her husband could have a night out. They had only two remotes to their tv. They patiently explained how to use them and in what order, and after our grandchild went to bed we went to watch a movie. Guess what? I had no idea what to do and so, despite having hi-def multiple streaming options at our disposal, we ended up reading. It has also happened to John while staying at 1) a beach house and 2) a ski rental. Each one presented a new and different problem trying to figure out how the tv works, regardless of how detailed the owner's instructions were. Whether you end up reading, playing cards, Monopoly or a mean game of Twister, you don’t end up watching tv. To each his own. And with that, this half of the New 60 is signing off. Because I'm on vacation visiting friends in London. And I'm being kind of rude.

See you next week.

Cheerio,

Andy and John

HAPPY NEW YEAR 12/31/21

This week we bid adieu to 2021. And it got us to look back at last year’s New Year’s Eve poster when we were gleefully kicking 2020 out the door. This year had to be better, so we featured Al’s happy new grandchild, dressed up as 2022 and Al as Father Time (not particularly enjoying the moment), or, in Al terms, being Al. 2021 looked a lot better than 2020 for a while, but now that the Omicron variant is here, things are upside down again. Suddenly we do not feel as free to hop a plane, go to a hotel, dine indoors, take in a play or, heaven forbid, a movie in an actual movie theater. One ultra-responsible, artsy movie theater near me is staying open, at half capacity, but is no longer serving their delicious popcorn with real butter (rather than butter-flavored topping—word to the wise, don’t ever buy something that says “flavored” or “style” it bears no resemblance to the real thing. A couple years ago a woman sued Kraft when she discovered that the “guacamole-style” dip she served for her Super Bowl contained no avocado. I would’ve sued her for buying guacomole-style, but I digress). I guess we’ll have to stop shaking hands again and start doing elbow bumps when we meet friends. I don’t mean to suggest we will look back fondly on 2020 someday, just that 2021 felt all too similar to 2020. Or as Janis Joplin once vamped in a live recording, “It’s all the same f’ing day man,” only she didn’t say f’ing.

Our other comic is based on a present my wife sends to her favorite clients and friends during the holidays. It is a massive tub of chocolate-covered popcorn. And when I say chocolate-covered, I don’t mean just chocolate-covered, you actually have to bite through layers of chocolate just to get to the actual popcorn. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. John and I both took on this challenge in our respective houses. He challenged himself last year to see how long he could make the popcorn last. He failed miserably. I told him this year I could make it until mid-January. I just recycled the empty plastic bin a couple days ago, on December 29th to be exact. But I have an excuse, I swear. The excuse is our 32-year - old son came home to visit and consumed massive handfuls, accompanied by milk. I realized how quickly I had to replace the half gallon of milk to estimate how much chocolate popcorn he consumed. So that’s my excuse. On the other hand, my wife was recovering from a breakthrough Covid case (she was triple-vaxed) and out of concern for me and my son, never plunged her hand into the popcorn tub. Thankfully, she is all better, and what I’m trying to say is I ate way too much of that stuff. But it’s okay. Now we can live up to our New Year’s resolutions about hitting the gym on a regular basis. Or, if you invested in home exercise equipment, about riding that damn bike several times a week. But first you have to take all the shirts and hangars off the Peloton handlebars before you begin. Otherwise your knees keep bumping into the shirts and if they’re not covered in plastic from the dry-cleaners, you might sweat all over them. And then you’ll think, “Forget it, it’s too big a hassle,” and go back to eating chocolate popcorn.

Have a wonderful last weekend on 2021 and we’ll see you next year with two new ones, once we sober up from New Year’s Eve.

Andy and John

Planes, Trains and Automobiles 10/22/21

Okay so there’s not really a comic about planes this week, but the trains and automobile parts, yeah. First the car part. When it’s time to fill up (and you drive a gas-powered vehicle) we get less and less help from the “service station.” I mean, where’s the service? Nowadays you’ve got to get out of the car, remove the gas cap, squeegee your own windshield, fill ‘er up with gas, pay in advance with your credit card that the pump doesn’t recognize in the first place, so you have to go inside anyway, and then you forget your mask so you have to return to the car to get your mask, and you haven’t even started pumping the premium yet. Want to check your oil, or refill your washer fluid or make sure the tire pressure is good? Fuhgeddaboudit.

This is one of the ways that society has unravelled. I was low on gas, and out on the eastern end of Long Island this summer when I pulled up to an old-fashioned gas station this summer with a name I’d never heard of. Royal Gas. I was looking in the glove compartment for the aforementioned gasoline credit card and when I sat up I nearly had a heart attack. There was this stranger hanging by my window, way too close, looking in at me. Tentatively, I rolled down said window and shakily asked, “yes?” The scary guy then said, “Regular or premium,” and it took my another second to realize that he was going to fill my car up for me. What was he gonna do next, offer a free toaster oven? Not. But that fit the narrative for our first comic, another in the Then and Now series.

Next up was the second and final version of our Model Train series. As we pointed out last week, John was much more into electric train sets than I was. Only thing I remember about my dad’s set was a rocket launcher and one of the coolest things ever, an exploding box car. Okay maybe it wasn’t the coolest thing ever, but it was pretty cool. No, really. I guess you had to be there. At any rate, we wondered what would happen if Al’s grandson got his hands on the train set, without having Al peering over his shoulder with one of those dad-like, “Don’t you dare touch anything until I say you can” kind of looks. The kid lets his imagination run wild which is obviously an excuse to let our imaginations run wild, and this was the result of our overwrought imaginations. Speaking of imaginations, I imagine some of you thinking, “Grow up already and write about something relevant or at least something happy,” but as Leslie Gore might have sung decades ago, “it’s our comic, and we’ll whine whine when we want to, whine when we want to, you would whine too if it happened to you.”

We will leave you with that and have a pleasant weekend, email the comic onto your friends so WE have a pleasant weekend and we’ll see yo next week with two new ones hot off the proverbial press, or at least off the internet.

John and Andy

The More Things Change... 10/15/21

The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’ve never quite understood that one, but whatever it means, it applies to both of this week’s comics. First the Train Set. Now John and I grew up differently from one another. He loves to build stuff, cut down trees, carve pumpkins, manly stuff like that that he probably learned from his dad, who in turn learned from his dad and so on. And so he is naturally enthralled with things like train sets. Me, I’m Jewish. When something needed fixing or building, my grandfather called the super, my father called the super and I call the super, and we don’t even have a superintendent. So we found a guy who is great at fixing stuff and call him when the need arrives, which is often. But back to the train set. Come to think of it, my dad did have a Lionel train set at one point. I can remember an exploding box car, which you tried to hit with a rocket launcher as the train was moving, but that’s about it. I imagine John’s childhood train set to be much, much more detailed. With the diversity of train set experience hanging between us, we settled on one thing we have in common, age. And let’s face it, when you want to show off your fancy toy train set to your grandkid and the kid doesn’t recognize anything in it, it’s a little deflating. And that was the influence for the Train Set comic. But not to worry, we are going to have a second train set comic next week. You don’t build (in this case, draw) a whole train set only to use it once.

Next up is the trip to the library. But what this is really about is clutter. Maria Kondo wrote a best-selling book about removing clutter. Really, people are attracted to books like hers, which to me seems like more clutter, but anyway… She says that you should only keep things that “spark joy.” I say, “spark this.” But she has a point. In my childhood home, the train set didn’t spark as much joy as the ping pong table it was sitting on, so after a while, bye bye train set with exploding box car and rocket launcher. I have a theory that there are two kinds of people in most relationships, hoarders, and chucker outers. I am a chucker outer. If I buy a new pair of jeans, which isn’t often, I put an older pair in the clothing bin in our local strip mall. Same with shirts, shoes, etc. My wife is a “collector.” In this case we switched roles and made Marv the hoarder. His wife Rachel wants to get rid of stuff. But when he was at the book fair at the public library, he saw so much stuff that sparked so much joy, he kind of forgets his mission.

7 years ago, my wife and I, empty nesters now that our kids were out of the house and graduated from college, sold our house and moved to an apartment. Now that requires a whole bunch of downsizing and, let’s face it, different things “spark joy” in different people. I remember a conversation we had upon moving in. Me: We cannot possibly have 4 sets of china in an apartment. She: Or 4 tv’s.

Guess how that ended? As I might say, you never know when a 4th person might come over and want to watch something different from what 3 other people are watching, so we really need 4. And as Joanie might say, this was my mother’s set, this was my grandmother’s set, this is my great grandmother’s and then there’s our everyday dishes and it makes me feel good to have them. So we compromised and kept everything, just in case.

That is it for this week. We will be back to you next week with two new ones, including what Al’s grandson wants to do with the train set.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John

Twins, twins 9/16/21

Twins are nature’s way of saying, so nice, let’s do it twice. On the one hand, you get over the process of having a complete family more quickly, but on the other hand…

What if they’re not on the same sleep schedule, feeding schedule (well that would be technically challenging since there’s only one mom and two kids) or pooping schedule? So John and I decided to have a go at another three part series, called Twins Come Home, parts 1, 2 and 3. So why do they appear on the website in reverse order, you ask? That may be because someone has not figured out how to put them in, in the correct order. One of us, but that particular person, if it happened to be me, should be given a pass today because it’s Yom Kippur and because that person happens to be fasting, and because being hungry makes that person pissed off and because that same person is expected to write a sunny and funny blog while he’s hungry and pissed off, capiche? I’m not saying that person is me you understand but if it were, that is how I’d react.

Oh yeah, the comics. Part one was last Friday featuring the exhausted parents and the calm, cool and collected grandparents. We can afford to be cool because we get to sleep through the night and not be awakened every 3 hours or so. So we imagined what would happen if the grandparents offered their services as babysitters for a night. We imagined the bedraggled couple would accept their offer rather quickly.

This summer, my wife and I shared a beach house with our daughter, son-in-law and their new baby. They wanted nothing more than a night off to feel human, go to dinner and a movie, and we wanted nothing more than to hang with the baby and put her to sleep. A win-win if there ever was one. Which leads to the part 3 comic, in which no sooner do the parents leave, than the baby starts shrieking. This too comes from personal experience. I recounted to John how my daughter asked me to babysit for one half an hour while she got on a phone call about a potential freelance job. My wife was working, my daughter and son-in-law were working so it was just me and the baby for 30 minutes, from 2pm until 2:30. I couldn’t wait. As soon as my daughter got up from the living room the baby started crying. I picked her up to soothe her. She cried louder. I rocked her in my arms, she began to shriek. Doors opened from other rooms, what are you doing to her? Nothing! I swear! I took her outside so nobody could hear anymore then when she calmed down I walked back into the kitchen to see how much time had passed. It was 2:08 This went on for the rest of the time, outside, inside, me: oh look, this is a tree, these are branches, want to shake the branch, go ahead, shake it…2:12

Finally, mercifully, my daughter’s phone call was over a few minutes early and she came out to her daughter who suddenly was all smiles and sunshine. When my daughter asked how it went I said, “Fine,” even though everyone in the surrounding zip codes could hear it wasn’t fine. John turned this story into Twins, part 3, even though you see that comic first, is that clear? Yeah, I don’t understand it either.

Enjoy the weekend a lot more than I am enjoying this freakin’ fast. And we will see you next week with two new ones, not about the twins.

Andy and John

Expectations 6/18/21

Sometimes things turn out much, much better than we expect. And sometimes they turn out a lot worse. I remember once coming home to find my young son with an enormous 6’5” mountain of a man, I had never met before. When I went to ask him who he was I noticed he was teaching my son the alphabet. Turns out he was the boyfriend (and later husband) of our nanny who was taking care of our older daughter at the time. He was partially the inspiration for Sonny, the tattooed, ex-con, mountain of a man who is quietly becoming the best nanny we’ve ever seen. Sam and Shellie hit the nanny-jackpot with Sonny. We combined this story with another one that takes place outside my window several times a week. What I have observed is a mommy-exercise class. All these new moms have their babies in jogging strollers, including the instructor, who shouts out exercises they do while hanging on to the backs of their strollers. My daughter, a recent mother herself, enrolled in such a class in Brooklyn. One of the funnier incidents she recalled occurred when the instructor was demonstrating leg lifts (expertly illustrated by John) while simultaneously changing the diaper of her own baby! Anyway, since this is about Sonny, we changed the class to a nanny-exercise class. There really isn’t a big difference between a mommy class and a nanny class except for the fact that the nannies aren’t clad head-to-toe in Lululemon gear.

Now you might be wondering why I first talk about the second comic you see. I have reasons but they are both complicated and boring, not the stuff for a blog. Suffice it to say that the latest comic you enter appears first in the newsletter. Now you probably have no idea what I just said do you? That’s okay because I don’t either.

Moving onto the second strip (which of course appears first - don’t ask, I’m beggin’ you), we revisit the constantly evolving world of bicycles. There are two basic types of riders. One, like John, have carbon-fiber bikes that weigh only a couple pounds, and they also have pedals that require a special bike shoe that clips into said pedals. They think nothing of taking a 50-mile ride (I think that’s a lot of distance even when i’m in a car). Apparently, you have to wear brightly-colored spandex (which is a total non-starter for yours truly). As for the clip-on shoes, you just have to remember to unlatch one of your feet before you come to a stop, otherwise, crash! The other type of bike rider is like me. I have an electric, pedal-assist bike that helps me get up steep hills (after which I turn the motor off, I promise!!). It weighs about 55 pounds and has upright handlebars and a comfy seat. Readers, no matter which type of rider you are, we all experience the occasional fall. But when you pass 60 years of age, a fall exposes a dichotomy. The dichotomy is between the way we perceive ourselves as bike riders and the way others perceive us. I know this because I fell about a year ago after just passing the entrance to my apartment building. I sheepishly got up and before I could hop on the bike again, 5 or 6 workers, gardeners, delivery guys, etc., all came sprinting to the scene of the accident and asked if I was okay. ‘I’m fine,’ I insisted as I ignored the pain in my left buttock. Marv stands in as a cross between my type of bike rider and John’s.

That’s it for this week. We will see you (at least virtually) next week with two new ones. Until then, have a great weekend and if you happen to go for a bike ride, please, unclip your foot BEFORE you stop.

Andy and John