The Landing at Normandy...

…or a Linguini extended family outing.

They both take just as much planning.

The reason for this is that we don’t do phones. They will tell you it’s because I don’t do phones, but I happen to know that none of the New Jersey Linguinis is particularly comfortable on a phone.

So we e-mail back and forth.

The problem with this is that we all feel obligated to end our e-mails with some cryptic message that ends up sending everything off into an entirely different tangent based on everyone else’s interpretation. (I’m not pointing any fingers, but Dark Garden is particularly guilty of this. He’s constantly ending e-mails with his Kerouac-ian psycho-mystic verbosity which has, on occasion, prompted one of us [me] to actually pick up the phone to call the other [John Boy] just to consult about, “Is he mad at us?”)

Sometimes the other Linguinis will step in and Mrs. Dark Garden will call Dirtman or vice versa and the day will be planned out while the rest of us are shooting e-mails back and forth deciding on a meeting time using only the dialogue from “1776.”

Planning get-togethers these days requires even more communication because there are more Linguinis to keep track of. The West Virginia Linguinis spend most of the spring on the soccer field. Heir 1 climbs out of the basement to work odd hours and Heir 2 earns his gas money on weekends. And John Boy? John Boy scrambles desperately to find something to do before we ask him over (which we Virginia Linguinis can’t really blame him for, since last time we asked him over it was to help us move in three days).

Still, we may pull this off yet. Things are looking up. Mrs. Dark Garden just sent me an e-mail!