When my aunt told me I had to wear a mask to a masquerade ball she was throwing on Saturday, there was really only one option.

Beware, evildoers!

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How did I spend my 9/11? By celebrating the invasion. The British Invasion.

When it was announced that Herman's Hermits were coming to town, Mom bought tickets. (She thinks lead singer Peter Noone is cute.) She needed a companion, and I was recruited. She said I'd be the youngest person in the room. She was right with the possible exception of Mr. Noone himself, who clearly really, really enjoys performing to a live audience. He was charming, funny, and a talented impressionist in addition to sounding pretty much the same as he did sixty years ago.

Now, I did a little research. I was familiar with many of Herman's Hermits' hits, and I knew that the backing band for Noone in Newnan consisted of none of the other original Hermits (some of whom still perform as such in Europe). So this was really Peter Noone and "a band that they call Herman's Hermits for promotional reasons." But that doesn't really matter as much as it might for some other long-running acts because almost all of the original Hermits' songs were themselves covers of previous recordings. (Not so uncommon for many acts of the era. Even the Beatles started with covers.) You go to a Peter Noone show to hear Peter sing songs that you associate with Peter Noone, and that's exactly what we got.

For future reference, this was the set list. The asterisks identify songs first recorded by Herman's Hermits.

• I'm Into Something Good
• What a Wonderful World
• Love Potion No. 9
• Ring of Fire (impersonating Johnny Cash)
• Dandy
• A Must to Avoid*
• Leaning on the Lamp Post
• Daydream Believer
• Sea Cruise
• Listen People*
• Barbara Ann (chorus only, as "New, New-nan")
• Bennie and the Jets (chorus only, impersonating Elton John)
• Start Me Up (intro only, impersonating Mick Jagger)
• Just a Little Bit Better
• Silhouettes
• The End of the World
• Jezebel
• Can't You Hear My Heartbeat*
• Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter (false start first line as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer)
• I'm Henry the VIII, I Am
• There's a Kind of Hush

As I said, I did a little research. You'll notice that the final song is There's a Kind of Hush (which was performed tonight with a synthesized horn section). As it happens, that's the same song that Noone sang to close their act exactly 55 years ago, September 11, 1970, (with real horns) when Herman's Hermits played for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. If it was good enough for the Queen Mum, it's good enough for my Mom.

Full disclosure: One Herman's Hermits song I was not familiar with was A Must to Avoid, and my malfunctioning ears thought I heard Peter singing "A Muscular Boy." Which probably means the crowd wasn't that much older than me.

The Ed Sullivan Show, June 6, 1965

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Earlier this week, my father asked to borrow my copy of Scrabble. Technically, he didn't ask to borrow my copy; he asked to borrow his copy which he claimed that I kept when he abandoned it during one of his moves. If I did such a thing, I would think that would make it my copy now, but none of that is really the point.

As it turns out, I had four copies of Scrabble in our games closet, two copyright dated 1953, one 1989, and one 1999. I assume these once belonged to my mother, my father, and my long lost brother. That accounts for the '53 and '99 boards. Is the '89 board mine? I don't recall ever owning my own Scrabble board. Am I a chronic Scrabble kleptomaniac?

More importantly, while investigating the contents of the four sets, I discovered that all have the correct number of 100 tiles, all except for the oldest. It has 100 tiles, but not the correct 100. It is missing one O₁ and one X₈. In their place it has instead two tiles that must have come from yet another old set (one N₁ and one Z₁₀) that have been crossed through with pencil and O₁ and X₈ penciled on the other side. It sure looks like my handwriting, but that can't be right, can it? (An amnesiac Scrabble graphomaniac?)

Now my problem is that my broken brain is bothered by the fact that I own one incomplete Scrabble set. I have a terrible compulsion to go online and buy one vintage O₁ and one vintage X₈. That would be stupid. I have three perfect good Scrabble sets, and even the bad one is playable. No one in my house has even opened a Scrabble box in at least a decade. (No offense to Scrabble. It's a great game. But most of our board games were played by me and my brother, and as I said: "long lost.") If only I could stop thinking about it. I've become a psychoneurotic Scrabble monomaniac!

Some kids have monsters under their beds keeping them awake at night. I now have two tiny wooden tiles in my gaming closet. Damn Dad and his desire to play word games.

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Dad, reading my t-shirt: "I don't get it."

I tried to explain.

Dad, confused: "They made a whole band of dogs?"

Honestly, I'm still not sure if he was just fucking with me.

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Immediately after I say I'm running to the store to buy milk, Mom asks, "What are you going to bring back for dinner tonight?"

"I've made dinner for the past two weeks," I say. "So the question should be what do *you* want to make us for dinner?"

Mom didn't even pause before replying, "I guess we're going out to eat tonight."

By which, it has now been revealed, she meant that I was to order take-out. So now, in addition to my trip to the grocery store, I'm also making a detour to the local barbecue joint.

Me and my big mouth.

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A quick catch-up with my family:

In order to take over the accounting for our rental property, I needed to get the password to our accounting software from my mother. She pulled out a pen and wrote a twenty-five character string on a pink square Post-It. When I commented that it was a little long for a passphrase, she corrected that she hadn't given me the password itself but the mnemonic she uses to remember the password. She proceeded to explain to me what each element represented. However, when I tried to type in the password later, it was denied. Turns out that Mom had mis-remembered her own mnemonic.

My nearly octogenarian father, who suffers from arthritis and COPD so badly that he cannot easily walk to his own mailbox and back, has decided that he wants to take a trip to a beach so that he can watch girls in bikinis. But he won't go back to Panama City, where he used to live, because "they're all assholes," and he won't go to the closest beach, Tybee Island, because "it doesn't have an amusement park." So instead he's planning a trip to Nashville, TN, because "they've got plenty of bars."

My mother's sister's sister-in-law lives behind us, and my aunt frequently visits her to use her swimming pool. Which means my aunt frequently visits our house and uses it as her personal pool house. When I came home from the store the other day, I walked in from the garage to find her standing naked in my kitchen, she screamed, "I thought you would knock first!"

Not so long ago, partially in memory of my father's mother who always said "you have to write letters to get letters," I hand wrote a letter to my father's sister, who lives in Alabama. She eventually replied with an SMS text message and explained that she was much too busy to sit still long enough to write reply letters. But she strongly encouraged me to drive the four hours to her house for a visit when I had the time.

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I was eating lunch while reading the latest Consumer Reports magazine when I suddenly realized that I wasn't reading the Consumer Reports anymore. I was reading the same line over and over because the sentences had stopped making any sense. My first thought was that the article's author must have been having a terrible day because the words were all wrong for constructing a complete thought. But on closer inspection, the words weren't wrong, my ability to recognize them was.

Naturally, I assumed this sudden onset aphasia was a symptom that I was having a stroke. Mom, however, was pretty certain that it was just an oncoming migraine. Mom is usually right about such things, so I did not call 911.

My migraines usually start with tunnel vision and limb numbness, and sure enough, they both came along eventually. After a long rest in front of the TV (playing Olivia Newton-John's Xandau and the final round of a terrible U.S. Open), I awoke feeling, well, "better" isn't the right word, but maybe "relieved" at having moved firmly into the acute headache stage of migraine progression. (As if "relieved" and "acute headache" ever belong in the same sentence.)

The worst part of a migraine is the fact that when one strikes, I have no choice but to do literally nothing for many hours except lie still and wait for it to pass. Sometimes I can sleep through them. Sometimes not. In today's case, it has been 9 hours, and I'm still not 100% (nausea is always among the longest-lingering symptoms for me), but at least I'm mostly functional again. (I'm typing all this, so evidently my brain's Wernicke's area and other language centers are back online. Hooray! I mean, I am typing real words, right? You can read this? Please say you can read this.)

Just to be on the safe side, I'll wait until tomorrow to try reading any more Consumer Reports. That magazine is dangerous.

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Our house guests hadn't been gone for a whole 24 hours before Mom decided that she needed a vacation and headed to Florida, leaving me behind to take care of the dogs. For how long? She wouldn't say.

Which is fine. She needed it. I can't speak for anyone else, but getting our house ready for guests is hard work.

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You might think I'm kidding, but I really did just take this off the refrigerator:

Yes, those are cowboy boots with little jets in the heels. And no, there never was a time in my life when I wasn't obsessed with comic book super heroes.

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When I left the neighborhood this morning at 8 AM to take Dad for cataract surgery, there was a fleet of Georgia Power trucks restricting traffic at the entrance to my neighborhood. When I passed back by the neighborhood with Dad in the car 30 minutes later, they were still there. When we came back by 4 hours later, they were still there. I made a mental note to come home by way of the neighborhood's other entrance (which is technically an entrance to the adjacent development, but we share a connecting street on the back side).

But then, on the final leg of this trip, while thinking about where I was going to turn, I drove past the dental office about a mile up the street and got to thinking about how the young hygienist I recently saw at a different dentist's office talked so much that maybe hygienist schools teach students to always be agreeable to clients and prattle to distract them from the scraping and what a funny word "prattle" is and what its etymology might be and how rarely we use the word "prattle" except in the context of hygienists who talk too much and the They Might Be Giants song "Lucky Ball & Chain" except the word repeated in the chorus of that song is actually "rattling"... and then I turned into my regular neighborhood entrance where I usually do and saw the muddy tire tracks on the road and belatedly realized that I had intended to turn elsewhere.

The good news is that the Georgia Power trucks had already left.

The bad news is that I probably shouldn't be allowed to drive a car.

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