Author: Average Jane

I was a teenager when I discovered hard rock and heavy metal music. I sang it in bands, attended concerts whenever I got the chance, and drove my parents over the edge blasting loud music from the record player in my room.

Like all youthful enthusiasms, my heavy metal fandom subsided a bit as I got distracted by life, but I still listen to a hard rock station in the car on my commutes and occasionally crank up a CD in the living room while I’m doing housework.

The other day I heard a commercial for the Ozzfest tour which contained this nugget of news: the tour includes the original lineup of Judas Priest, back together for the first time in many years. My first thought was, “I’ve gotta get a ticket to that show!”

Nevermind that I saw Judas Priest about ten times in their heyday or that I’d honestly rather be horsewhipped than attend an all-day outdoor event of any kind. Leave aside the fact that my years of concertgoing and lead singing left me with one ear too fried to handle any kind of loud noise. When I heard that commercial, I was nineteen again and all I could think of was that the coolest band my nineteen-year-old self had ever heard was back!

On Friday afternoon, I had a chance to revisit a slice of my heavy metal youth preserved in the form of a new hard rock bar that just opened in our town. Our office closed an hour early and we all went to happy hour there. My twenty-something coworkers looked a bit bemused by the whole experience, but I think everyone over thirty had a moment or two of deja vu drinking cheap beer and oversized shots surrounded by the blare of loud music and the twinkle of chrome.

It was a lot of fun, but later my ear started buzzing unpleasantly and I had to wear an earplug at the coffee shop after dinner to stand the volume of the folk trio playing there. How lame is that?!

Sadly, everyone from the era of the hair bands is now older and forced to contend with loftier goals than “I wanna rock.” I think this was summed up best by something I heard while I was listening to Dee Snider’s House of Hair on the radio yesterday. Who do you suppose was the show’s sponsor for the hour? Harley-Davidson? No. A leather jacket store? No again. Hmmm, an alcoholic beverage or a nightclub? Wrong aaaand wrong. It was Advil.

I was sleeping pretty comfortably on Saturday night until about 2 a.m. I don’t know what woke me up initially, but once I was awake, I became aware of a horrible, horrible sound coming from the tent next to us. I presumed it was snoring, but it was snoring of a magnitude I’d never before experienced – an unholy amalgamation of logging equipment and wild boar. It made me want to race home to my husband, throw myself at his feet and apologize profusely for ever complaining about his loud breathing and mild little snorts that I’d always thought of as snoring until now.

As long as I was up, I figured a trek to the porta-potty was in order. After I returned to the tent, I lay back down and attempted to go back to sleep as the sonic assault continued from five feet away. By then I realized that I had a serious case of heartburn, too, no doubt brought on by the day’s many bottles of beer, hard cider, and miscellaneous fruity carbonated malt beverages combined with my enormous dinner. Oh, and I realize I’ve never mentioned the Jell-o shots. N. brought 100 (yes, one hundred) Jell-o shots of various flavors made with apple vodka, and six of us ate them like jelly beans from the time we got to the campground until the float trip ended and we’d gone through them all. That may have been a factor in my stomach distress.

So I lay there with my severe acid reflux, listening to the snores of a very nice guy whom I wanted to murder in his sleep and, I’ll admit it, I got a little irritated. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I jumped up, unzipped the tent flap, sat in a damp chair next to the dead fire in our dark, foggy campsite, and got myself a bottle of water from my cooler because it was the only thing I could think of that might soothe my stomach. I was sure someone had probably packed antacids, but figured it was bad form to wake everyone up at 2:30 in the morning to ask.

Eventually the water helped a little and I lay back down with wads of toilet paper stuffed in my ears and my pillow wrapped around my head. It must have worked, because the next time I opened my eyes I could see sunlight shining through the tent.

We had a quick breakfast of coffee cake and orange juice before cleaning up the campsite and packing to leave. My niece is a heavy sleeper and her parents finally had to deliberately wake her up (we refer to it as “poking the hornets’ nest”) so we could take down the tent. It didn’t take long to pack all of the vehicles, dispose of our trash and start the drive back.

I was home by early afternoon and I paused only briefly to hang up my wet clothes before proceeding directly to the nail shop for a pedicure to counter the damage to my heels and toenails wrought by the rafting trip. I may be fine with roughing it, but scratch the surface and there’s still a little bit of a princess in there. After the pedicure with its accompanying foot and calf rub, I went home and crashed on the couch for three straight hours. Thus, my weekend of adventure ended like every other weekend.

Now I can’t WAIT to go on my next camping trip…

By the time we piled off the bus after our rafting trip and hiked (or drove, in some cases) back to our campsite, we were all extremely hungry. The men went to get more firewood and my sister and N. set about locating the ingredients for our dinner menu that were scattered between a half-dozen coolers.

I ducked into the tent to change my clothes and when I came back out, I was greeted by gasps of shock at the sight of my oddly-sunburned back. I had applied sunscreen early and often throughout the rafting trip, but had not gotten quite close enough to the edges of the top I was wearing. This left me with angry red lines in half-moons around my shoulder blades and in a slash across the middle of my back. I’d brought sunburn gel just in case something like this happened, and my sister was kind enough to apply it for me.

I then pitched in to help with dinner and I have to take this opportunity to again praise my fabulous Keg-a-Que propane grill. I bought it four or five years ago planning to use it for tailgating, but we haven’t really been tailgating since. Thus, the grill sat unregarded in our garage until this weekend, when I discovered just how great it is. I used the grill to cook a big package of bratwurst and warm up baked beans in an aluminum loaf pan, then turned it over to my sister so she could cook hamburger patties.

I wolfed down two hamburgers in a row, which is a lot of food for me. Then N. remembered that she’d brought corn on the cob, so she shucked the ears, broke them in half, wrapped them in aluminum foil and dropped them in the campfire to cook. Somehow I managed to eat one of those, too. (I don’t recommend that cooking method, incidentally. The one I ate was hot but mostly raw except for where it was charred.) I was stuffed with food by then, but that didn’t stop me from having just one s’more for dessert. After that, I didn’t care whether I ever ate or drank anything again as long as I lived.

After the meal I decided it was time for a shower. I bummed some shampoo, conditioner and quarters from my sister, hiked up the hill to the one source of “indoor” plumbing on the campground, and paid 25 cents for five minutes or so of warm, clean water. It shut off before I was quite finished rinsing the conditioner from my hair, but considering how bleached, sunbaked and frizzy my hair was to begin with, I figured that would probably be a plus.

After my shower, I changed back into the only pajamas (t-shirt and shorts) I’d brought, which made me smell like campfire smoke, just like everybody else. While I was in the tent, I fiddled around with my sleeping mat some more and actually managed to get it to inflate a little bit. I lay down on top of my sleeping bag for a while and realized that I could still feel the motion of the current. It made me want to close my eyes and just go to bed for the night, but it was still early and my niece kept popping her head around the curtain to see what I was doing, so I got back up and rejoined the group.

We were all pretty subdued by our active day, impressive alcohol consumption levels and shark-like feeding frenzy. I didn’t want to be the first person to turn in, but the minute my sister’s friend A. announced that she was going to bed, I immediately leaped up to do the same.

Tomorrow’s final installment: What am I doing up at 3 a.m.?!?

When we finished breakfast on Saturday, it was still quite early, so my brother-in-law and I drove to the campground office to buy some ice and a bottle opener and check the rafting and canoeing schedule for the day. My sister remained at the campsite making sandwiches for the river trip and explaining to my niece that it’s okay to get pieces of grass stuck to your feet when you’re camping.

We were waiting for three more people to join us from the city, but none of our cell phones had normal service and only one worked in “roaming” mode. We finally reached everyone and communicated the 10:30 a.m. start of the rafting and canoeing portion of the day, and everyone found us in plenty of time. While we waited, we reallocated cooler space so that each vessel would have its own supply of provisions. I took advantage of the new bottle opener and drank a couple of my hitherto unopenable beers, as soon as I saw that everyone else was getting a similar head start.

I shared a large, rubber raft with N. and her friend, S. My sister and her family shared another raft, and the other couple rented a canoe. It was beautiful, sunny and not too hot as we started off down the river. We probably hadn’t gone two city blocks before we could tell that our fellow rivergoers were in a festive mood. At each sandbar, big groups stopped and mingled enthusiastically, and there were more than a few Mardi Gras beads in evidence. We felt no immediate compulsion to join in, so we rode the gentle current past the first several stopping points and enjoyed the natural beauty of the river instead.

As we cruised downriver, we saw lots of turtles of various sizes sunning themselves on logs near the banks. The shallows were full of minnows, and we glimpsed a blue heron that was probably very interested in said minnows. The only other wildlife we encountered was a baby water moccasin swimming near us when we stopped for lunch. My brother-in-law tried to grab it, but it was too elusive. Since I’ve heard that baby snakes have stronger venom than their adult counterparts, I imagine that was just as well.

We stopped now and then for bathroom breaks and to exchange personnel. After lunch, N., S. and I took on my niece as a passenger for a while, and the gals taught her to say, “Geee-ross” when algae touched her feet. By this time I’d figured out that the back of the raft was the only effective place from which to paddle, so I perched there attemping to guide us. Still, we crashed into trees and other boats more than once. The river is spring-fed, so the water was fairly cold. I jumped in to retrieve a dropped paddle at one point, but found the experience more refreshing than chilling.

The whole trip downriver lasted about six-and-a-half hours. My raftmates and I managed to drink every single alcoholic beverage in our cooler by the time we were through (and there wasn’t anything in our cooler except alcoholic beverages). Still, we declined to run off with any of the college boys who were hitting on us (despite the fact that we were twice their age – well I was, anyway), we didn’t have any major collisions, and we resisted earning any Mardi Gras beads (although N. and S. talked some guys out of a few strands).

I’m sure the raft rental guys were snickering at us as we stumbled around bagging up our empty bottles before we rode back to camp on the bus, but we didn’t care because we’d had a fantastic time.

Tomorrow’s installment: More outdoor cooking

On Saturday morning at about 5 o’clock, we were sleeping relatively peacefully in the tent when suddenly a noisy bird squawked a couple of times. This, in turn, awakened a member of the Midwestern Rednecked Jackass species that had been camped nearby. It prompted hoarse recitations of the creature’s many and varied cries, beginning with a simple, but loudly echoing, “Yah-hoooooo!” and proceeding through, “I’m DRUNK!”, “Wake up you [expletive deleted]!”, “Whoooooooo!” Then a portable stereo entered the equation and we were treated to an off-key, karaoke-style rendition of Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind.”

From across the tent, I heard my sister say, “You’ve gotta be frickin’ kidding me.”

My brother-in-law looked out of the tent and informed us that the specimen in question had been sleeping (passed out?) in the bed of a pickup truck while his camping buddies slept in tents nearby. We had a brief discussion about how if we’d happened to have access to a high-powered rifle, it might just be possible to pick off the yeller from this distance without revealing the direction from which the shot had come.

My sister, who’d slept poorly all night long thanks to an inadequately inflated air mattress, informed us that there had only been a couple of hours of silence before this from the loud party across the campground, who were now all waking up, making noise, and blithely dropping f-bombs within earshot of my four-year-old niece (who was, luckily, still asleep).

Since it was obvious that our sleeping time was over, we got up and began preparing breakfast. My sister had brought an A/C adapter for the car, along with an electric skillet, and the plan was to cook scrambled eggs in the skillet, fry bacon on a griddle over the campfire, and warm up biscuits and sausage gravy on the propane grill. That plan hit a major snag when the A/C adapter failed to work. We tried it in N.’s car and it still didn’t work. We later discovered that it had blown the fuses for both cars’ cigarette lighters and taken out N.’s radio fuse, to boot.

With the electric skillet out of the picture, we had to get creative. Fortunately, we had extra aluminum loaf pans, so we sprayed one with Pam, filled it with scrambled egg, and set it on the propane grill next to the tin of sausage gravy. The grill warmed up the gravy until it bubbled and baked the eggs nicely. The first attempts at making bacon over the campfire resulted in a few charred pieces, but we got the hang of it after a while. All in all, it was a delicious breakfast, made even better as we basked in our resourcefulness.

Tomorrow’s installment: Rafting down a lazy river

On Friday I left work at 3 o’clock sharp and headed to my sister’s house for my first camping trip ever. All day long, people had called to cancel, so the Friday crowd ended up being me, my sister, her husband, my niece and my sister’s friend, N. I was riding with N., so we packed my stuff into the back seat and trunk of her car and headed down the highway behind my sister’s family.

We reached our campsite before it got dark, and my brother-in-law and I began putting up the fabulous tent my sister and N. had bought for $100 at Costco. The tent came with extremely lengthy instructions that completely failed to enlighten us at a couple of crucial junctures. Just one more diagram would have saved us a lot of wasted effort, but we eventually managed to get the monstrous, 10-person tent up and ready for habitation. It was dark by the time we finished, but I had brought a battery charger/air compressor/flashlight unit, and we used the powerful flashlight as needed.

The tent had one big, main chamber toward the back with its own entrance, and a smaller room at the front with a separate entrance. It came with a curtain that I used to wall off a portion of the big chamber so that I had, in effect, my own bedroom. While others started a campfire, I unrolled the cheapo “self-inflating sleeping mat” I’d purchased. Nothing happened. I pored over the limited wording on the bag for some hints and searched the mat itself for additional instructions. Nothing. It had a valve of sorts at one end, so I goofed around with it for a while, but eventually gave up and just laid my sleeping bag over the flat, wrinkled mat and resigned myself to sleeping more or less directly on the ground.

By then the fire was going, so we roasted hot dogs on metal skewers. Nobody minded that they were all burnt on the outside and lukewarm on the inside. After that, we made s’mores and I quickly discovered that one was plenty. I wanted to drink one of my beers, but I’d foolishly brought Fat Tire, which doesn’t have screw-off tops, and nobody had a bottle opener. Luckily, I’d also brought some hard cider, so I drank one of those.

We sat around the campfire and chatted contentedly for the rest of the evening, enjoying the sounds of the frogs and crickets, punctuated occasionally by the sound of the porta-potty door slamming (we’d chosen a campsite across the road from a convenient pit stop). It was a great first night of camping.

Tomorrow: An early wake-up call

Last night I drove all over town Accomplishing Things. One thing I accomplished was finally trying on enough bras to determine my correct size. I really had to struggle with my short attention span when it came to dragging the fourth batch of bras into the dressing room, but I eventually triumphed and I’m hoping that someday the underwire grooves from all of my previous, too-small bras will fade away.

I also went shopping to get vital camping needs for this weekend, such as the ingredients for s’mores, a sleeping bag (purple!), some cheapo aqua socks for rafting, an LED flashlight, a fire lighter, propane tanks for the Keg-a-Que, bottled water, and some of those new fingertip tooth-cleaning thingys (they sounded perfect for camping).

I got my car about halfway packed last night, then added a cooler (no beer yet, but I’ll get it on the way) and some other vital accessories. There’s a strong possibility that I’ve brought too much stuff. One thing I didn’t remember to pack is my pillow. I’ll have to borrow one before the convoy sets out. I’d also meant to bring my CDs of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, but I forgot to grab them on the way out the door. Sigh.

On Monday I’ll regale you with tales of my wild outdoor adventure (with sanitary facilities conveniently nearby). Have a great weekend!

It’s one of those days, folks! I don’t have time to focus on a single issue, so here are a few things I’ve been thinking about.

• Via J-Walk blog, here’s a great list of the 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve mispronounced one or two of these myself.
• I’ve noticed that the band Tool has a distinctive vocal rhythm on the verses of some of their songs. It occurs to me that it’s the same rhythm as a Yosemite Sam faux-cursing tirade (ratzle fratzit…). Tell me I’m wrong!
• My pumpkin vine is still getting bigger and bigger. It now curves up a nearby yew bush, back down and around a peony bush, and has looped back to its own stem and is advancing on the sidewalk again. It’s covered with blossoms, but I’m afraid it’s pouring more energy into vine lengthening than pumpkin production.
• This weekend I’m going on my very first camping and rafting trip. I’m not really one for roughing it, but I think if I put enough thought into getting just the right type of beer, it’ll all be okay.

Over the past few months, I’ve worked diligently to shed various responsibilities that had become overwhelming. I’ve gotten away from doing two club newsletters (one a 4- to 6-pager, the other a 16- to 24-pager) and I’m considering resigning a board seat. I still have club duties (I’m VP of one club right now and on a committee that will have a big project coming up in the spring), but the day-to-day stuff has been brought under control nicely.

Right now I’m current on paying my bills, my extracurricular work for my dad is within shouting distance of being caught up, and I can look forward to a time when someone could spontaneously call me up and invite me to dinner that night, and I could say, “Sure, my calendar’s open!”

I’m positive that all of this benefits me in my regular work as well. It’s a lot easier for me to be creative and spontaneous in my job when I don’t have tons of extra projects lurking in the “after six” area of my calendar every day.

The only responsibility I’ve taken on lately that I don’t resent at all is this blog. Sure, I worry that it isn’t always completely fascinating every day (take today, for instance!), but as an exercise in daily writing I think it’s been very valuable. Now that I have a little free time, who knows what I could accomplish? I’ll leave my mark on the world yet…or maybe just watch more TV.

Two years ago, I took some of my birthday money and purchased a big, rope hammock. I had an idea that I could hang in on my back deck, or perhaps between an unused fence post and our oak tree. As it turns out, there is NO appropriate place in my entire yard to hang a hammock. Thus, it has stood for more than two years in the closet of our spare bedroom, still in its original box.

Ever since then, I have had the notion that I would like to purchase a hammock stand. You might think this is a most uncomplicated plan, but I’m sorry to say that you’d be wrong.

I really don’t enjoy shopping very much, so all hammock stand buying excursions are limited by my brief attention span. The year I bought the hammock, I saw hammock stands all over the place, but my ingrained cheapness held me back from spending the $99 that most of them cost. Now I’m having a very difficult time finding a hammock stand for sale at all.

This year’s quest began at one of my favorite stores in the world, Cummins Tools. They had lots of nice, cheap hammock stands, but all of them were packaged with hammocks, and I don’t need another hammock.

Wal-Mart’s website listed a $59.95 hammock stand, so I went to The Scary Wal-Mart near my neighborhood (enduring on the way in, one group of idlers several rows away in the parking lot commenting too loudly about my car, and on the way out, one “hey baby” and a wolf whistle). I had run the gauntlet for naught, as this particular Wal-Mart did not have any hammock stands.

I’m now so used to doing all my shopping research online that I’m almost at a loss as to how to proceed. I suppose I’ll have to pick up something called a “phone” and “call” stores’ lawn and garden departments to search, I mean, “ask” if they have any hammock stands in stock. What a concept!