Category: Daily Life

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!

There’s nothing like working a six-day week (which doesn’t even count all the prep work and “real job” work in the previous weeks) to make a full day off seem like heaven. Yesterday I slept late, put in the bare minimum of effort it took to sustain my vital functions for the day, and reveled in the fact that nobody was expecting me to do anything or be anywhere all day long.

I spent a lot of quality time with the cats while I caught up on a week’s worth of TiVo’ed offerings. My husband and I discussed going to a movie, but ended up watching the first three episodes of The 4400 instead. It was a lovely treat that nicely addressed our lingering X-Files withdrawal syndrome. I can’t wait to see what happens next Sunday.

Before bed, I read the first chapter of the new Laurie Notaro book, I Love Everyone (and Other Atrocious Lies), which I bought two weeks ago but hadn’t even taken out of the bag until now. I love her writing – it always makes me laugh out loud while I’m reading. If you haven’t read her book The Idiot Girls’ Action Adventure Club, I highly recommend it, too. I’ve probably read the essay, “Candy Apple Freakshow” a dozen times, and it still makes tears stream from my eyes with laughter every time I revisit it.

Last week actually went like clockwork compared to the other seminars we’ve done, and I was glad to be able to relax a bit and have fun with it. However, I think it’s best that this week will feature significantly less beer in the evenings and significantly later wakeup times in the morning. I have to think of what’s best for the blog!

There are only two days left of the seminar! Everything’s still going very smoothly (knock on wood again, just in case).

Last night there was a social event for the attendees, and I decided to do a little shopping on my way home so that I could dispel the image of my functional, yet ugly, cargo shorts from earlier in the day. I bought a cute, two-layer top (silky aqua tank with a sheer, multi-colored, long-sleeved outer layer). I paired it with some denim capri pants and black sandals. The minute I showed up at the party, my dad said, “Is that your Britney Spears outfit?” Ha ha.

I asked him if he was saying that my outfit was inappropriate for my advanced age, but his friend told me, “Don’t listen to him,” which seemed like good advice.

I do have a little trouble deciding whether certain outfits are really cute or just make me look like I’ve trying in vain to recapture my lost youth. I’m glad I have a sister and lots of girlfriends to guide me most of the time.