What a weekend. Two soccer games, the first sail of the season, the St. Joan of Arc fair, a dinner out to more or less celebrate our anniversary, and flower day at the Eastern Market. One of those weekends when you need another weekend, just to recover.

You don’t need a blow-by-blow, but hear this: I’m terribly disappointed that I didn’t win the Basket of Cheer at the St. Joan of Arc fair — a wheelbarrow full of so many bottles of booze I could have opened a tavern and not restocked for a year. Five bucks seemed a small price for a chance to win this third-place prize (first was a new lawn mower, which I don’t need). Ah, well. I guess Jesus loves me anyway.

The first sail was glorious — stiff breeze straight out of the west, clear skies, a rare day above 70 degrees. I picked up a little split of champagne en route and we all had a drink, plus a bit for the boat and the lake. Kate made a face at her own taste, and we told her about Dom Perignon’s eureka moment when he accidentally made champagne (“I am drinking stars!”). She was unimpressed. I wonder if any of the Dom’s Own was in the Basket of Cheer.

So, bloggage:

HoffaFest 06 — No body yet. We’ll keep you posted.

But many bodies in the Wayne County morgue after some bad heroin comes to town. Gotcha WMD, gotcha WMD!

He climbed Mt. Everest, even though he’s… something. Gay, blind, whatever.

I should say, though, that errors are errors, and then, there are errors: The lead story on Indiana’s NewsCenter Sunday 6:00 P.M. newscast was that former Mayor Ivan Lebamoff “was laid to rest today.” According to Eric Olsen, funeral services had taken place earlier in the day at St. Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church. … Funeral Services will be held on Monday at 11:00 A.M.

Every so often people ask me what’s the big deal if newspapers and TV stations cut staff, so what if fewer people are there? So what if we save money by hiring greenhorns? So what, so what, so what? Well, because sometimes you bury a guy a day early, that’s what. Presumably they spelled his name correctly, though; I’ve tuned in local TV in Fort Wayne to find a former mayor, Win Moses Jr., ID’d in his super as “Wynn Moses.”

(Oh, and speaking of local media and the work it’s been doing lately, Fort Wayne Observed broke the actual news of the former mayor’s death more than four hours before the evening paper did.)

Curse you, John Scalzi, and your infernal link to the Make Your Own Motivational Poster generator.

Between you and those damn videos, I may not get anything done tonight.

Housekeeping note: I put up a few recent clips in pdf format on a new page, The Clip File. It’ll be a work in progress.

This week’s edition of the Grosse Pointe News carries this headline, in 72-point type at the top of Page One:

Nobel laureates opine

I’m sorry I can’t tell you much about the story — I let my subscription lapse, and wouldn’t you know the first missed copy would be one with “opine” out front — but I assume they’re referring to the gathering Jack Lessenberry talks about in this column. He mentions his disgust that neither of the Detroit dailies saw fit to cover this event, although I guess only the most foolish optimist would point out, “But if they had, they wouldn’t have used ‘opine’ in the headline.”

So I won’t.

I used to work with an opiner, that is, a woman who used “opine” instead of “said” in her copy. She was also fond of “averred,” “demurred” and, on one memorable occasion, “ejaculated.” (All over her copy!) I think I’ve talked about her here before, so I’ll spare you my personal opining on the practice. There are editors who claim no word other than “said” will do, and I agree that 99 percent of the time it’s the only choice, although I reserve the right to use “asked” and “added” where it seems appropriate. Like “said,” both are pretty invisible in copy, and in some cases even more so; I’m picky enough to be bothered by reading, “‘At what cost are we willing to continue this war?’ she said.”

At least, that’s my opine-ion. As I am known to aver.

This weekend was one for computer maintenance. I did a big backup to the big LaCie, then beefed up the blogroll here at NN.C, a chore I’ve been putting off forever. I started putting in all my bookmarks, then realized I only visit about one-third of them on a regular basis. So I made that the new criteria for the blogroll — I have to visit regularly. Some I visit less regularly — Laura Lippman’s main site is only updated monthly, but it’s always worth visiting, particularly this month’s update, “Waiting for Lippman.” Ashley Morris, regular commenter here, is getting a lot of traffic as he emerges as the Rudepundit of post-Katrina New Orleans. But the ones I’m visiting are the ones I include. Suggestions for new ones welcome. And read nothing into the order; the server randomly scrambles them with each page reload.

Another housekeeping detail: If something important happens on “The Sopranos” this week, I don’t want to hear about it. We’re having a new floor installed in our family/TV room, and we’ll be getting only non-premium, non-digital cable on our primitive 13-inch bedroom TV, so not a word. I’ll catch up via On Demand later and we can all have a nice chat, but this week? Mum’s the word.

I guess I should add, if blogging gets intermittent in the following week, don’t call 911. I’ll have my hands full keeping the house from falling into full disaster-area status, and the dog out of the polyurethane.

On to the bloggage:

Everyone who goes to Paris remarks on the dogs in restaurants; every establishment seems to have a house pooch, who loafs around the joint while customers fail to freak out over the germs. My sole objection to having dogs in restaurants here is that they’d be American dogs — some overbred, others undertrained, still others wearing Burberry raincoats. Having watched the incredible bad karma spread by a single shithead who decided to bring his macho pit bull onto the playground at Foster Park in Fort Wayne one afternoon — and then put the dog down the slide, wheee, and no I’m not kidding — I kind of lost my trust in my fellow dog owner. (If I’d had a gun, I would have confronted him. If I’d had a cell phone, I would have called the police. Since I had neither, but did have a three-year-old, I opted instead to just leave.)

But even if dogs were allowed in restaurants here, I’d hate for it to be because of these people, examined in the Sunday NYT:

Health care professionals have recommended animals for psychological or emotional support for more than two decades, based on research showing many benefits, including longer lives and less stress for pet owners.

“I had never heard of emotional support animals before,” said Steve Hanson, an owner of 12 restaurants including Blue Fin and Blue Water Grill in Manhattan. “And now all of a sudden in the last several months, we’re hearing this.”

Oh, I only wish it were April Fool’s Day:

One 30-year-old woman, a resident of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., said she does not see a psychotherapist but suffers from anxiety and abandonment issues and learned about emotional-needs dogs from a television show. She ordered a dog vest over the Internet with the words “service dog in training” for one of the several dogs she lives with, even though none are trained as service animals. “Having my dogs with me makes me feel less hostile,” said the woman, who refused to give her name.

“I can fine people or have them put in jail if they don’t let me in a restaurant with my dogs, because they are violating my rights,” she insisted.

It’s a good thing she wasn’t identified, because otherwise she’d be risking about a million pieces of hate mail pointing out exactly why she has abandonment issues. Would you trust this woman to bring a well-trained, well-behaved dog into a restaurant? You think Foofie would like quietly at the feet of her mistress and wait until it was time to go? I don’t. If Foofie starts coming into restaurants, I’m going to start carrying mace.

For Foofie if he comes near my entree. And then, for Foofie’s owner. Put this in your emotional support pipe and smoke it, babe.

Off to Ann Arbor yesterday to do some work. On a book, no less. Not my book, someone else’s book. But still — a book. On the way home, I got a phone call, which offered more work. When I got home, another phone call. Which offered still more work. Hoo-boy, I actually felt like a person with a job yesterday, even if it is one that allows me to watch “The Sopranos” on Monday morning in sweatpants.

Nay, requires me to watch it on Monday morning. Because on Sunday nights? I’m working.

Being a freelancer is all about multiple income streams, don’t you know.

As I did my taxes this year, I estimated that, good-lord-willin’-and-the-creek-don’t-rise, I’m on track to match or exceed my last year’s salary as a columnist. The work I’m doing now is harder but more interesting, riskier but less predictable. There’s more juggling, more cold-sweat financial anxiety, but 97 percent less b.s. That’s gotta be worth something.

I expect I’ll be back to work in an office before too much longer — opportunities are starting to present themselves, and honestly, in this economy, in this business, having one member of a co-prosperity sphere working without a net, from home, doesn’t seem wise. I fully expect spousal health care benefits to either go away or become ruinously expensive within the next few years. But if and when I do go back to an office coffeepot and the rest of it, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I made it work the other way, at least for a while.

Yes, yes — I feel a song coming on — I did it myyyyy waaaaayyyyy.

OK, then.

What are you paying for gas these days? Filled up yesterday in Ann Arbor, at the chest-clutching price of 2.96 a gallon. And it’s only April — I suppose $3.50 in inevitable by midsummer, maybe even as much as $4. I love Detroit’s reaction to these events, which seems to consist mainly of adding to the greenhouse effect by vigorous complaining. Not that there isn’t comic relief:

“It’s not easy, but as soon as gas hit $2.80, I stopped driving my Lincoln Continental,” said Antoine Coleman of New Haven, a hi-lo operator in Detroit.

Now there’s an idea. (And I have no idea what a hi-lo operator is. Do you?)

As for me, warm weather calls for instituting the No-Drive Zone, roughly from Alter to Vernier and Mack to the lake, where I do most of my shopping and errand-running. From now until further notice, if the shopping and errand can be accomplished on a bike, it will. My cargo bags, last year’s Mother’s Day gift, were the best I’ve gotten in a good long time. I’ll keep you posted on how it works out.

The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World. Relax, you’re not on the list. But it’s a stupid list (Osama bin Laden? Richard Simmons?). Of course, it was written by TWO MEN. And it’s not a gay list (it includes Brad Pitt!). The irony is staggering.

Every time I consider getting a BlackBerry, I sit down, take a deep breath and consider: a) I don’t need one; and b) the idea of typing with one’s thumbs is stupid. Jon Carroll asks whether humanity is evolving smaller hands.

This guy says every newspaper editor-in-chief in the country should be writing a weekly column. I guess because newspapers need more columns written by uptight, frightened people who use “impact” as a verb (and “impactful” as an adjective). It’s a rule — the editor’s column is the best-read, and worst-written, column in the paper. No one fixes it because everyone’s afraid to tell the boss he or she can’t write. Once I told our editor he’d used the word “brackish” incorrectly. (He wasn’t writing about the paper, but his backyard fish pond. That’s another thing about editor’s columns: They should be about how we get the paper out, but sooner or later they all fall victim to Columnist’s Complaint and start writing about their backyard fish ponds. Or, worse, they try to make their backyard fish ponds a metaphor for something that happened at the paper that week.) He didn’t say, “Is there time to fix it? Let’s get it correct, then.” He said, “Really? Huh.”

Just so you know: “Brackish” means “slightly salty,” as in the water at the mouth of a river that drain into the ocean. It doesn’t mean “yucky.” And a disclaimer: The editor mentioned above wasn’t a terrible editor. He just wrote a pretty lame column; it’s, like, a rule.

And finally, NN.C’s comments are being spam-bombed. The filter’s catching it all, but so much is coming in that I’m going to the moderation panel and hitting “mark all as spam” and deleting them with a click. If you left a comment and it isn’t showing up, it may well have gotten mass-deleted. E-mail me privately or try again. UPDATE: J.C. installed a plug-in; if you have any problems commenting, let me know.

Two housekeeping items:

First, I’m informed we have a power outage at NN.C’s Atlanta headquarters. “Running on batteries, but who knows how long that’ll last,” I’m told. Clap for the Mac Mini!

Second, Kate and I are off to Chicago tomorrow — on Amtrak! Which I love! — for some M/D bonding and a stop at the American Girl Place. As soon as the kidney broker brings me the cash for mine, we’ll be ready to start shopping.

All by way of saying we may be scarce around here through the weekend. Have a good one, if we don’t see you again.

So I get a new blog playground, and almost immediately have to take a break. Another housekeeping note: I’ll be blogging Sunday, Monday and Tuesday from the North American International Auto Show, for the Free Press. This won’t be NN.C-type blogging, just straight reporting on the series of press conferences that stretch over the three-day press preview. You can see by the schedule it’ll be a bit hectic, so I don’t know how much gas I’ll have left in the tank by the time I get home. From the pacing, I expect I’ll be huffing Simoniz by Tuesday noon, but you never know.

If you’re interested in following the action, go to Freep.com and look around. I’m sure there’ll be a link from the main page.

This is a very cool show. I was last there two years ago, when I was a journalism fellow. The thing about press days is, every booth has a bar and a noshing opportunity, and what a time we had, wandering from Jaguar to Jeep to Porsche, swilling wine as we went. I especially remember the party atmosphere — and frozen daiquiris — at the Mini Cooper booth.

This year, alas, no alcohol for me. Maybe Gatorade.

We have a new look around here. We have a new platform. WordPress. John spent most of yesterday getting it, what’s the word? Yes, “tweaked,” I believe.

What do you think?

Also, comments are going to be a little different, but mostly the same. The first time you comment, I — IIIIIII — will have to approve it. Once you’re approved, you’re in. I hope this will keep the spam down, and make our little community here feel warm and loved.

P.S. It should go without saying that you don’t have to flatter me or agree with me to have your comment approved. Just don’t be selling boner pills, or worse.

Let’s figure it out from here together.

UPDATE: You ask, we deliver (sometimes). “On the Nightstand” has its triumphant return. Check the right rail.

AND: Starting today, posts will be tagged with category keywords. They don’t show (now), but will eventually. I’m hoping they’ll make work easier for my biographers. In case you’re wondering, this post’s tag is “housekeeping.”