Notes from Maine - 2025/03/02

I went ghost hunting last night. Albert (dog) and I were working in the living room—something we rarely do. I was working on a big electronics project and Albert was working on herding his friend. He has this squeaky raccoon toy that he likes to track down and bring to a person. We call it Albert’s friend. Albert squeaks the friend a few times, puts the friend either on the floor at your feet or on your knee, and then Albert hides on the other side of the coffee table, staring at friend between the slats of the table.

My role in this game is to tell Albert to SIT-STAY and then go hide the friend somewhere in the house. In Albert’s dream scenario, this game continues until the end of time. I do a decent job of ignoring Albert and the friend. Some might think it’s mean to ignore a dog who is trying so hard to initiate play. But I know Albert pretty well and he seems to enjoy the anticipation part of the game as much as the hiding/seeking part of the game. He likes to stare vigilantly, daring the friend to move. His attention is unbreakable. 

I committed a felony last week, hiding the friend when Albert was outside. He came in and immediately sensed that something was amiss. Albert hunted, room after room, trying to find where the friend had gone. The one place he never looked was the washing machine. After an hour or so, when the friend was washed and dried, it took Albert a few hours before he could accept the new scent (or lack of scent) of the friend. We’re back to normal now.

Anyway, while Albert was herding I was working on electronics. I’m doing a con-sign-ment. My friend (not THE friend) has an arcade and he wanted an animated backlight for a big wall sign. I enjoy making animated lighting, so that’s what I was doing. It’s coming along well—I should be able to get the programming done tonight. 

I kept hearing noises behind me, from the front of the house. Beyond the kitchen, there’s a whole part of the house that Albert and I don’t use. There’s a dining room, en suite bedroom, and then a few bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. We used to live up there, and we might again someday, but for now that area is uninhabited. That’s where the noise was coming from. It was not a subtle noise. It sounded like something was being moved. I grabbed the flashlight.

There are tons of overhead lights in the front part of the house. It dates back to the early 19th Century, but since then the whole space has been renovated and it has up-to-date wiring. I could have flicked on light switches as I looked for the source of the noise, but where’s the fun in that? In those ghost shows they always work with candles or flashlights. Everyone knows that overhead lights mask ghost activity. You need a limited light source in order to track a ghost down. 

Albert stayed in the kitchen with his friend. It’s best to hunt ghosts alone, I’ve found. I moved from room to room, looking behind curtains and under furniture. I ran the water briefly in the bathrooms. Whenever I visit unused portions of the house, I like to run the water for a moment so the traps don’t dry out. Aside from the boxes and boxes of sheets in the blue room, I didn’t find anything amiss. I have a lot of bedsheets. In an effort to organize them, we sorted them all into individual storage boxes. Those boxes are currently sitting on the bed in the blue bedroom. I haven’t decided which closet they should live in. 

I suppose the noise could have come from the wind? It was a little windy last night. It really didn’t sound like wind though. It sounded furniture being moved. Have you ever heard of “phrogging”? The term is about ten years old, from what I can find. It’s a word coined to describe someone living in a house without the owner’s knowledge. It’s like a form of squatting, except in this case the person phrogging is living in the house while the owner is also living there. You might come home unexpectedly and find an attic door open, or food left out on the counter. Albert would tell me if someone was phrogging in the front part of the house, I’m certain of that, but it’s fun to think about. When I’m outside, I like to study the front windows for movement. Someone might be hiding in the shadows, waiting for their opportunity in the light. Since I never leave the house, phrogging here would be really dumb. There’s never anything good in the refrigerator either. I keep mostly raw fruits and vegetables in there. That food requires prep. 

Making my shopping list the other day, I had the urge to add all kinds of “pantry” food. With lots of storage space in the kitchen, I could buy cans of soup, pasta, bread and pancake mixes, jars of sauces, and crackers. I have decent willpower but it wouldn’t stand up to that kind of pressure. When I’m getting hungry for lunch, I need salad to be my most palatable option. If I have a bunch of convenience food lying around, ready for indulgence, I’m going to take the easy way out at some point. It’s easier to avoid those foods if they’re not even in the house. This isn’t a vanity issue. When I eat poorly, my body barely works. I have a lot of daily chores to do (like shoveling out the horse stalls, or hiding Albert’s friend roughly 1,000 times per hour) and I can’t afford to have every single joint sore because I had mac & cheese for lunch. Maybe that sounds like an exaggeration, but I’ve made a pretty comprehensive study of the matter. Tons of people function just fine on mac & cheese but I don’t (even though I find it delicious), so it’s easier to not even keep it in the house. I just feel bad for the poor phrogger who is living in the front part of the house. They’re probably sick to death of finding only rabbit food in the fridge. Maybe that’s why they were moving the furniture around last night—they were searching for a secret stash of junk food.