The Not Quite New Orleans Saints

My wife, Sigrid, and I went to IKEA in New Haven, Connecticut yesterday for my son's birthday. That's what I did on the day I played hooky from work, went to IKEA. Yeah, I know, I'm a real gangsta except I'm closer to bug than thug life (and technically, probably most like a night light).

We cheated and skipped I-95 and used Route 80 which takes a lot longer, but it's a day off on the first day of July so what's the rush? Gave me a chance to NOT ride the Chester-Hadlyme Ferry which is fine in my book since I have had a thing about ferries ever since riding a teeny-tiny ferry, not much bigger than my car that was a floatable yo-yo across the Rhein River just about thirty years ago.

Everyone in my house laughs at how I'll drive for three additional hours, like the distance down I-95 in Connecticut and then out onto Long Island 495 rather than take the Cross Sound Ferry but there's good reason to take the land route. I told you about the time, on a previous trip to IKEA, passing a small shop called "Everything and More." Brace yourself because I have an update: they are making the store bigger.

I'm still working on how you can even have an 'and more' after you have an 'everything' and these guys are putting up a new building attached and behind the old one. That sound you heard was my mind boggling. Where's a policeman when you need one? We're breaking the law of conservation of mass and don't even have a permit.

We may have a Papal dispensation since along the way, in Foxon, we passed signs that caused me to work my Google mojo to death for Our Lady of Pompeii Church. Thinking I was pretty familiar with what went on in Pompeii, I was semi-amazed to learn there is an actual shrine (is it sacreligious to wonder if The Lord has a user name and if I should have capitalized User?). And you thought all that was going on was the volcano ('for the financially challenged'?).

Am I thinking that Route 80 is akin to the path Saul took on the road to Damascus in terms of the miracles and wonders on the way through Guilford that has forced the growth of everything to be as vigorous as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes? If so, how much more gooder a miracle is it when a Lekman becomes a Besta Jagra. Screw Natalie and 34th Street, think more like the Generator, First Floor.

-bill kenny