Dear Parent:

The boat season is over and I am downsizing the fleet. My flotilla will now consist of a kayak, a canoe and a Sunfish sailboat.

The man at the Mobil station leaned in the window to talk as my car was filling with gas.

As I write this, some of my wealthier friends are diving into deep lagoons in the Caribbean or are marveling at the luminous twilight in the south of France.

It wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t even have faxing, and people in a real big hurry used a typewriter. That’s how things were when I started doing this column so I can tell you for sure: back then you could never write certain things in the paper.

You know it’s August when, on making your bed in the morning, you find a spider or two and carefully brush them away so they can have a nice day too.

The study shows that more than a third of the UK population is engaging in search-and-rescue missions within their own nasal cavities at least five times a day.

Peter Chianca

At Large

Wash your hands with soap and hot water repeatedly in the course of your day. Use friction and spend a good 20 seconds, because the health you keep may be your own.

The Web site Myheritage.com has developed an online program to show us that, no matter how plain we may think we look, somewhere out there we all have a celebrity doppelganger.

I receive a lot of e-mail from readers who would like to see more “good” news in the newspaper instead of crime, corruption and calamity.

It was a full 20 years ago that a sixth grade teacher asked me to talk to her class about careers in journalism and I can still picture the layout of the classroom and the way the kids were rigged out with those green-tinted eye-shades you see in every old play or movie about a newsroom.

I’m referring of course to Garra Rufa, the fish used in hip Chinese spas to nibble dead skin cells off of soaking patrons.

Peter Chianca

The New England Agricultural Statistics Service report is issued every Monday through October and contains information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and New England farmers. For more information or to request a full report, please contact 603-224-9639 or nass-nh@nass.usda.gov. The following is an excerpt from Vol. 28, No.13.

For who has not made errors in judgment, or gone out too far, or thrashed or lost strength in the mounting tide of waters?

I’m thinking it might be better to slowly wean Tim off the comic book violence and instead foster his latest cultural obsession — the Boston Red Sox.

Peter Chianca

    At Large

American Saints Day fell last week and I must have been thinking I was a saint myself. But pride goeth before a fall, which I learned when I offered to accompany a friend on a shopping trip.

Just because we voice some legitimate concerns about important issues is no reason to label us ‘whiners.’ I, for one, have a long list of pressing societal problems that I’m concerned about.

Peter Chianca

    At Large

The butterfly effect of the atmosphere states that the mere fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon Rainforest can have substantial effects on the total weather of the planet.

People just want to tell you their story; it’s the sweetest thing I know about the human race.