Labor Day Weekend Stuff

My daughter kayaking on Friday night as my uncle and I fished.



Thanks to Arianna Huffington for saying what I’ve thought about the Larry Craig case. Check out her column. Like Huffington, there’s a lot to Craig’s politics that I don’t like, I just have to shake my head at the details of his crime. I never knew that tapping one’s foot was a signal for gay sex, and it seems to be silly evidence for a case. I can picture the DA telling the judge, “Your honor, he kept tapping his feet and we all know that white guys with rhythm must be gay…” All I know now is that I’m going to be paranoid the next time I’m in an airport bathroom and will make darn sure I keep my feet firmly planted on the floor.

Labor Day weekend was a blast. My uncle and cousin (she’s just a couple years older than my daughter), as I wrote about Sunday. L and I went fishing Friday night and caught a pretty good mess of bass and bluegills. Our daughters got to try out a friend’s kayak and had a good time. After we got back from the game on Saturday, we were beat and spent most of the rest of the weekend lounging around as much as possible. We were bone tired. They flew out yesterday morning.

Yesterday afternoon, I was scheduled to be videotaped on a piece of property that I have a hand in developing. I don’t really like talking into a camera and all those different “takes” drives me nuts. But I got through most of it fine. The last clip was planned to be shot on the top of a hill at the back of the property. I’ve driven up there several times, but this time the field hadn’t been brush-hogged and the grass was high. I didn’t see a boulder that I scrapped. This is mostly sandy soil and the boulder rolled up and lodged under the truck, between the motor and the back axle. I was stuck and worst yet, in dress clothes. Luckily, I keep a small shovel and a blanket in the back of the truck. We got to work jacking the truck up and finding stuff to block it up (I wasn’t going to crawl under with just a jack on sandy soil) and after about an hour was able to dig around the boulder enough so that it dropped back down and I could drive out. Then, when I got back to the highway, there was the great racket when I started to speed up. I again crawled under the truck. A light metal heat reflector from the exhaust had been bent and was resting against the universal joint (where the drive shaft connects to the transmission), which meant that the faster I went, the more noise it made. I was able to pull the reflector away and it appears nothing more is harmed, but I’m going to have to take it to a mechanic and have it put up on a lift to make sure that I’ve not missed anything. Needless to say, we didn’t do any more filming.

Keep in prayers the folks down in Central America as they endure the wrath of a hurricane. It was two years ago that I was in Honduras for a near miss, as I wrote about in my blog at that time.