It’s time for random thoughts from the boneyard. Sometimes things pile up on me and I have thoughts going every which way with none of them dominating. Like I tell our 12-year-old daughter Caitlin when she can’t sleep at night, it’s because you are thinking of too many things. Take a mental broom and sweep them all out and then you can get to sleep.

So I’m going to take a broom and sweep these things out in the boneyard so maybe I can rest a little.

Just wondering what it is about these Moshers. My sister, Minerva, the oldest in the family, will be 80 in July and she continues to wage battle with emphysema, a result of her smoking those dreadful cigarettes all her life. She has overcome cancer as well and is as feisty as always, and takes care of her extended family – most of who depend on her – without complaint.

My oldest brother, Ray, will be 79 in October and he and his buddy, Buzz, who is a few years older, still go out in the woods around their little village in New York state and chop up fallen trees in Buzz’s thousands of acres in the surrounding hillsides and fill their woodsheds with cords of wood.

Ray has a routine. It’s called the 4 o’clock meeting. That’s when he and Buzz, beat from their day in the woods, head out to the country club and quench their considerable thirst with a beer or two, and sometimes a Manhattan or two.

Of course they solve all the world’s problems in those meetings. Otherwise, what is the use of having them?

My next oldest brother, Ronnie, is 75, is a retired high school football-basketball-golf coach and athletic director who continues to coach basketball during the season and work as a house painter the rest of the time. That is, of course, when he’s not golfing somewhere. He is the ultra competitor, which is why he has coached for most of his life. He once won a masters age world horseshoe champion and can figure out how to make a competitive game out of anything, including matchsticks. The last time I talked to him he was around $650,000 to the good in make-believe money in on-line poker.

I called his home in upstate New York the other day and his wife said he was outside chopping up a tree he had cut down. Which is what I expected. He has to be doing something all the time.

I remember Ronnie best for cheating me in football board games we would play. I would catch him cheating, but he would win the arguments because he was much bigger than I was. His word was God, and I was just a peon.

To this day, he denies cheating me.

But he did.

The brother next to me is Dave, who will be 72 in November. He still works as senior engineer for Martin-Grumman in Baltimore. He’s been there since the world was created. I keep hearing he’s going to retire (his company would love for him to do just that), but he’s still there.

So we all work, work, work. It’s in our blood. Our father never took a day off work. He worked for Mobil for 37 years, and then had his own business until his health began to fail him. Never did he miss a second of work, sometimes doubling up by taking somebody else’s shift.

When dad wasn’t working for a paycheck, he was working around the house, or helping somebody else with something. Look up work in the dictionary and you will run across L.H. Mosher’s name.

Dad grew up on a farm and that is what he, his brothers and his parents did from the dawning of day to the dusk of night – work.

And they loved it.

Especially now with so many bad things going on with our economy and in the world, both politically and militarily, it is important to remember that there are good things happening all the time. The media gets wrapped up in negative stories, sometimes for months on end, and I wish it wasn’t so. We need happy, feel-good stories.

So here goes:

I feel good that a filly, Rachel Alexandra, won the Belmont Stakes. First time it happened in 85 years at the Belmont. Her victory does bring up great sadness for me, because I remember 1975 when the great Ruffian, who may have been better than Secretariat, lost her life while in a match race with that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, Foolish Pleasure. Ruffian was ahead when her right foreleg snapped and she had to be put down.

Did you know that Ruffian was never behind in any of her 11 races at a call point? She won her 10 races by an average of over 8 lengths.

Amazing.

This spring around here produced what may have been the best high school athletic season I’ve seen. We had many teams – more than I’ve ever seen – in baseball softball, tennis, lacrosse, soccer and track and field going deep into the postseason. It was a remarkable achievement, one that I didn’t see beforehand.

So give all those athletes a big hand. They deserve it.

I realize there are some of you out there who will disagree, but I think it’s wonderful that we don’t have a president named Bush. As I have said before, George W. Bush was the worse president I have lived under, and I stretch back to 1940. Carter wasn’t very good, Ike liked to play golf, and we all know what happened to Richard Nixon. But Bush wins hands down over them as the worse of the worse.

The only bad thing is that Dick Cheney shows up on TV shows once in a while. I don’t think many people are listening to him, however. So that is good.

I guess you could consider this a feel-good story. Ken Griffey Jr. is back in Mariners uniform. He is old, however. At the age of 39, Ken can’t do the things he did in his first 11 years with the Mariners.

That actually is a stupid statement. The things he did back then were Hall of Fame material. I never seen a centerfielder make the plays that Griffey did. Maybe Willie Mays. But he was incredible with the glove, and nobody should expect to see that again from him.

Griffey was so good that late in his first career with the Mariners he was playing in another of what was a long session of bad games in another bad Mariners’ season and I didn’t give him an error on a ball he should have had. I was the official scorer and he nonchalanted a ball in shallow center. The ball took a hop and bounced off his glove and I remember thinking, I’m not going to give him an error in this meaningless game in this meaningless season. I didn’t. And nobody complained that I didn’t.

But Griffey didn’t miss much with his glove.

He’s such a joy to be around and I’m sure he brings that to this year’s team. He is fun around the clubhouse, but when it comes time to step between the lines, he’s all business.

Unfortunately, he’s over the hill and I’m pretty sure he won’t be much of an offensive threat this season.

However, I will always remember the show he put on for us writers before games. And I’ll always think of him in his car late at night in downtown Seattle looking over at me as our cars waited side-by-side for a red light to turn to green. He motioned for us to have a drag race in what was almost a deserted street.

I just laughed back. No way would I be able to beat him with my beater and him in his souped-up luxury car, whatever it was that I couldn’t afford. So when the light changed, he drove off. The last I saw was that big smile.

I hope this month brings you a ton of smiles and good times.

You are loved.