Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

Antiperspirant is up to no good. Behind its happy-go-lucky holocaust on sticky pits, there is danger. Namely aluminum. Which leaches right into your blood and shrivels your brain cells. So I have put my lingering smells in the hands of your standard old-school deodorant. Not without its own challenges but I would choose stink over drool any day of the week. Cluelessly, I attempted to go about deodoranting with an antiperspiranting approach. Kerry set me straight: The key to successful deodorant use is the reapplication. Keep some in the car. Keep some in your desk drawer. Hide some under the sofa cushions in the homes of your relatives. Wear undershirts.

To: Agency Staff From: Stacey Subject: I'm BACK! Got in at 4:30 am last night after two late flights and one missed connection (arrgh!!). Needless to say, after 35 hours in airplanes or sprinting around airports, combined with some magnificent jet lag, Tom and I are in slug mode today. I'll be in tomorrow. To: Stacey From: Eric Subject: I'm BACK! Barry and I noticed that the Def Leppard/Whitesnake tour kicked off in New Zealand last week – hope you were able to get tickets!

Buscot Station Lodge is the love child of a cozy retreat for backpackers and the aspiring set of a horror film. Check it: An isolated homestead packed with stuffy furniture covered in doilies, a collection of fragile china tea cups, thick oriental rugs and a lot of tiny blood-sucking insects. The proprietor, a deep-voiced sixty-something slow talker heavily into monotoning 24/7 political discourses and snapping at his house boy. The house boy, a skinny Jewish (but not from Israel) high-pitched switch-hitter twinkling about in short short shorts and dark sunglasses asking all the girls what games they played as children and surreptitiously taking time-lapse pictures of his favorite ladies while they ate dinner. People taking really long showers. Rusted scythes and heavy farm machinery strewn around a decrepit garage. The midnight drone of immense harvesters tirelessly circling the farm house. A dormitory above the garage overflowing with pubescent teenage boys in their perpetually damp...

The whole New Zealand experience locks down a simple truth : Humans are wee little cocky ass pantywaists. What kind of idiot fucks are we to presume our tyranny over Mother-Earth? Carelessly polluting, eroding, mining, draining, paving, killing. Papatuanuku will squash us with a glance. She has pulled towering black mountains from the depths of the sea. She has yanked entire continents asunder. She has strewn billions of white-hot stars into the milky way, hurling them across distances our tiny crazy brains cannot comprehend. She reigns at the speed of light; dominates with infinite time. Our entire species is lost in the trace of a single teardrop. Moss and ferns and milky white ice will cover our selfish dead bodies, strewn over the poisoned planet we begat.

We're freshly back from Middle Earth. Land of the Kiwi. In sum, I have never seen anything like it.

After a frenzy of wild activity, I shut my office door and whisked myself away for a two week vacation. Right before I took off, I went into our corporate fridge to empty out my motley assortment of foodstuffs. Unthinkingly, I carried a container of take-out fish back to my office. I tossed it out in the garbage can under my desk. Do you think it will still be there when I get back?

Sethie was a lifty at Mount Baker back in his long-hair days. He and his ski-rat black-diamond daredevil amigos usually rigged out in mismatched skis and duct-taped jackets. It is a universal truth. The more decrepit your equipment looks, the cooler it is when you get out there and show 'em how it's done in prime time. So same goes for backpacking. Sethie was kerkuffled that Tom and I would destroy the family reputation if we showed up at the trailhead with the price tags hanging off our spanking new backpacks and hiking boots. Especially if we had no game. Which is likely since I haven't been backpacking since maybe 1984 and Tom is a nubile camping virgin. Sethie advocated leaving our new gear out in the rain or maybe seeking out mud. Aside from that topline tip, he also recommended: Hanging twist ties off various clips on the backpack exterior. Sethie says twist ties come in handy on the trail, plus they make you look like you know what you're doing. Line all your stu...

As Tom will tell you with minimal, if any, provocation, I have a wee obsession. It involves my indomitable Fujitsu Scansnap 5100M and my firetrap basement. Today, I am scanning old datebooks. Which I save. I have filed them with my tax returns since 1992, the year I came down with the notion that if I ever got audited I would be able to compute mileage based on my meeting schedule and thus justify auto deductions. While I was scanning my fifteen years bustle of undertakings, I had a shocking revelation. I barely remember my life. But riddle me this, children: Do you remember yours? For example, what were you doing in 1996? My datebook is newfangled electronic these days. Maybe I should print it to PDF for archival purposes. Or start to Twitter. Just to lock in the details so I'll have some fact-based events to reminisce about.

Choo is in first grade. He doesn't have a girlfriend. Neither does the kid who sits next to him. Anymore. He used to, but then she broke up with him. She found out he ate food off the floor.

Don't tell anybody, but I have fine-tuned a savvy plan to avoid complete dishevelment in the face of client meetings on East 42nd Street. Natural elements are at play here. It is hot as asphalt in the summer and the city is an encyclopedia of unexpected smells. But during the cursed depths of winter, the avenues are wind tunnels and exposed body parts can frost right off. It is dramatic and dangerous if proper preparations are not undertaken. Plus I like a comfortable shoe for distance situations. So it took years of trial and error refinement, but now I have a foolproof stratagem for swapping footwear and showcasing my farmgirl good looks when I ask the darling customers to show me the money. There are two fancy hotels on either side of 42nd. In the summer, I always go into the Helmsley on the south side of the street. The Ladies Lounge is right under the air conditioning vent. I stand under the vent for five minutes because cool air is blissful when the sidewalk is burning hole...

I just realized a major deficiency in my approach to wintertime germ avoidance. And I'm not talking about the other day when the check-out girl at the Health Shoppe violently sneezed on my credit card. That was an anomaly and I immediately wiped all the splooge off the card when she handed it back to me. I am talking about the hands-free approach I employ in sticky situations, such as strap-hanging in the subway or opening up bathroom doors. I put on gloves. I usually wear leather gloves. Who washes leather gloves? Not me. Upon reflection, this is a problem. There are probably staff infections from 1993 on my leather gloves. I'm considering swabbing the leather gloves with isopropyl alchohol or possibly rubbing alchohol or vodka as the gloves might actually survive the cleaning. Alternatively I could lay them out and dust them with many layers of Lysol disinfectant spray. My new improved germ-avoidance strategy is to nicely ask the cashier at Dunkin Donuts for a box of those wa...

One man's trash is another man's treasure. Except if you run it by Tom who believes in the absoluteness of the garbage classification. But as per me, recently, I have come to fancy myself the One Man and have attracted a lot of Another Men running around out there. Especially on Craigs List. Last fall, I mentioned I was going to advertise our old patio furniture on Craigs List. Because I'm too lazy to play shopkeeper, I told Tom I was just going to give it away to the first taker. Tom was like, "No one is going to want that old furniture. It's ten years old. Let's just throw it away." I perservered. I am no landfill-addict, unlike some of us around here. I put this ad on Craigs List in the "free stuff" section: 60" Round/Octagonal Patio Table and 4 matching arm chairs with cushions. Frankly, they’ve seen better days. Good news is they are no-brainer low maintenance. No need to chain up because you’re afraid somebody might steal them. Also, t...

Frequently Asked Questions for those occasions when your front-desk receptionist tells you that she is "working from home today": Q: Do you have a computer at home? A: No. Q: How do you intend to answer the phone if someone calls our office? A: You're right, that will be tough. Q: And exactly how are you signing for deliveries? A: Ummm. Q: Did you take home anything to do? A: No. Q: So then help me out here. What are you "working" on? A: I meant to say I'm taking a personal day.

The car nestled in the trees off the side of our driveway surprised me. Its windshield glinted in the twilight. At first I thought the neighbors had done some impulse paving and put in a little auxiliary parking spot abutting our property line. But then I realized the car looked suspiciously like Tom's car. It's 10pm, do you know where your car is? Well let me help you out, it is lodged on a tree half way down the hill over there by the Gravel's house.

Outside of lower Manhattan and locations riddled with bagpipes and tartan, I have never seen a man in a skirt. Until yesterday when I i-spied not one, but two men in skirts. In the Episcopalian church community room. I had no idea episcopalians were so fashion forward. Linda invited us to a Fat Tuesday show featuring a band that would have been phenomenal had the very talented standup bass player not been an irascible asshole. I think he had turets syndrome because he randomly peppered the crowd with subnormal zingers. For example, early on when he told a fan her shoes looked like Minnie-Mouse shoes. He called his band's frontman a dick. Then he said "goddamn." In a house of the lord for chrissake. All of this while wearing a skirt. The skirt was a flirty length, black. He paired his skirt with black army boots and black socks. So did the other dude. In a skirt. Down in the crowd swing dancing like he was born to boogie.

I thought it was all over when I dropped the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M in the parking lot at work. My cherished USB peripheral bounced on the asphalt and plastic appendages exploded in a 6' radius. No one was harmed, but curious delivery truck drivers rubbernecked the whole cursed incident. I picked up all the body parts and took them back up to my office. When I was done reassembling, there were several bits left over. Nonetheless, my six pounds of scanner was back in business. Good as new. Ever since the Resurrection of the Scanner, I have become a believer. I scan everything. I jellified some serious upper body strength hauling boxes of pulp-filled paper upstairs from the basement. I ripped off a fingernail yanking out staples. I pilgrimage over to the recycle center with carloads of recently obsolete and very hefty file folders. I digitized five gigs so far and going strong. I am devout.

The only reason I mention the dark green sock dangling off the chandelier in our foyer is that it may be a fire hazard. Tom and/or Sophie managed to perch the sock up there after brunch on Sunday. They took all the socks out of the ski clothes bin in the upstairs hallway and lobbed them one by one over the banister. Their stinky missiles were aimed at Sophie's mommy and me. We were minding our own business downstairs when the maelstrom of fuzzy socks rained down upon us. The sock on the chandelier is the single POW captured during the skirmish. Hopefully it won't ignite the whole house.

Our neighbor across the street, once an ambulance-chasing lawyer, recently metamorphosed himself into a beautiful black-robed judge. The governor appointed him to the bench after some political hobnobbing paid off. The invite was engraved. Lovely. Said to RSVP by January 18, but we only got the invite on the 19th. Oh yes. Fillin' up the room with the B-listers. We certainly weren't imperious enough to not go. Never know when a judge will come in handy. Plus I wanted to nibble on rich hors d'vours with all the lawyers in their lighthearted "not-guilty" embroidered ties and scales of justice cufflinks. It was delightful. Even if the judge's wife did ask us about the plastic rocket hothouse in our front lawn. I will have to take over some of my homegrown tomatos this year.

The somersaults she makes us do in jujitsu class at the YMCA froth my brain juices into a turbulent swirl of the vomitious dizzies. I only do maybe one somersault instead of the required three for warm up. My sensai is on to me. She says to the whole class that if we cheat we're only hurting ourselves but my piece of the mat gets the brunt of her stink eye. One day when I puke all over her foot she'll know I was doing it for her own safety.

After the most logistically advanced night of my music review career involving late-night car services to places named Armonk NY, a La Quinta Inn, and three people from my office who picked me up at an ungodly hour on the way to Connecticut for a full-on business pitch Friday AM, I have successfully returned to tell my tale. Terminal 5 , the new venue on 56th & 11th, is much more solid in the way of structural underpinnings than the ramshackle fire traps in the East Village where the floors undulate after the music starts and the crowd gets bouncy. I'm a fan of cement underfoot... but kinda missed downtown's sleazy old world charm. Two levels of balconies provide ample viewing angles for punctual ticket-holders who capture barstools up front. Linda and I salmoned around under them on the main floor. We sandwiched ourselves about fifteen feet off stage left in between a muscular black dude and some bitch who kept bludgeoning me with her enormous handbag. Louis XIV played a...