Great to be back in the chair after a nice break from daily blogging. It’s a fun thing to do, but it’s always nice to take a break from time to time. A few odds and ends to get things started:

* Tracey and I had a lovely four days in Bermuda, where we stayed at the Grotto Bay Resort. Highlights of the stay included numerous bowls of the always-wonderful Bermuda Fish Chowder, a nice dinner at the Swizzle Inn, and a lovely day meandering about St. George’s. If there were any lowlights, it would have to be that the auto traffic on the island’s roads has increased significantly since we were last there a decade ago, and our fave place to stay back then, the lovely White Sands, has been turned into a hotel called Grape Bay that no one seemed to have anything good to say about. Time marches on…

* Just so you know that we’re not afraid to show our warts n’ all here at Goodboys Nation weblog, a certain favorite aunt of mine sent me the following e-mail following several days of, er, rather harsh postings about the Boston Red Sox before we left for Bermuda:

Dear Nephew ….. So sorry that after your vow of a couple of weeks ago to never watch our beloved Red Sox again, you are forever barred from watching them……. Too bad you missed a great win last night and the aftermath (waiting for the Yankees to lose, which they did) was terrific. There you go again, cutting off your nose to spite your face. Love and Kisses from a real Red Sox Fan, your favorite aunt.

Yikes. Imagine if she didn’t love me?

* I have to admit I haven’t watched a lot of the Sox since their late-September swoon with the traveling and all, but I’m still skeptical of their chances to go all the way this year and these truths I still hold as self-evident: 1) Doug Mirabelli is the absolute worst catcher in baseball, a surly, overweight pantload who couldn’t hit a fastball thrown by my favorite aunt, let alone a big-league pitcher; 2) Injured or not, Manny Ramirez always finds a way to take an extended vacation from the team every second half, and 3) the best news I heard today was that knuckeballer Tim Wakefield will not see action in the series against the Angels. Forget about Wakefield’s record as a starter, between him and battery-mate Mirabelli, they are a two-man wrecking crew best left to watch the post-season from the sidelines.

* More about this down the line, but if there was ever a more stupid idea than Hillary Clinton’s proposal to give every baby born a $5,000 handout, I haven’t heard of it. And this is the leading Democratic candidate for President? Now if she had characterized it as a reward for overcoming the main hurdle of a woman’s legal right to choose, I’ll bet her supporters would have had a thing or two to say about that…