in the name of research

Jeremy is in Pennsylvania tonight to visit some family and friends post-Fantasy Football draft (I'm still struggling to understand this one, but maybe it will come some day). That leaves me alone here at the homestead on a rainy night that has left me with an appalling lack of motivation. There is a lot of quilting I need to get to, so I'm sure I'll start that soon, but in the meantime I am scanning the channels in the hopes that something interesting might be on to serve as some good background for all that industrious crafting I'm about to tackle. So far, the television programmers are not helping me out.
One of the things I'm sorting of hoping to find is a show called American Loggers. Why, you ask, would I want to watch a show about the logging industry on a Saturday night when most people would be doing, I don't know, anything else? No, I am not looking for a career change (although I have kind of always wanted to work outdoors...what, you say? I'm accident prone and probably shouldn't use chainsaws at all, let alone forty feet in the air? Naysayer).
See, my senior year in high school, our teacher had us do this awesome assignment where we had to imitate the style of the author we were reading (Salman Rushdie) in our own short story. In case you've never read any Rushdie (I pity you and simultaneously recommend Midnight's Children), he writes absolutely gorgeous prose and has really mastered the art of magical realism, so he's a lot of fun to imitate. Anyway, when I started my assignment, I somehow, and I really don't know how, decided my story would be about an early 20th century Canadian logging family in which each male in the family business went through a right of passage in which he (accidentally) lost a limb as a result of work, so that it was sort of a point of pride for each man to have passed this milestone. The narrator of the story, Francis (maybe named after my eighth grade boyfriend?) was a son in the fifth generation of the family who was sort of an insecure outcast because of 1) his sort of feminine name (sorry, former boyfriend) and 2) the fact that all of his appendages were still fully intact. Again, I have no idea where this concept came from, and please don't be frightened. Steven King is a productive, respectable, and fully functioning member of society, and he writes about way scarier stuff.
My friend Anne has always supported the idea of turning this story into a novel (if you're reading this, Anne, maybe some day I'll get to it?), but the biggest obstacle is that fact that I'm not exactly familiar with the whole community and profession on which this story is based - hence the desire to watch American Loggers. Oooh, or, does anyone know a Canadian logging family I could go hang out with for awhile who will teach me the ins and outs of the business? No? Hmmm. I guess the novel goes on the back burner for awhile. Don't steal my idea, though, because of course you're just itching to.

So, American Loggers is not on, which leaves Meet the Parents as my only option. Ah, the exquisite awkwardness.

On a totally unrelated side note, this is the song I have been thinking about all weekend (song of the weekend this time!): "Twice as Hard" by the Black Crowes