Vacation day 3 and part of 4

Afraid there isn't just a whole lot to report.  The new tires are on the vehicle.  Afterwards was a shopping trip and eats at Biaggi's.  Part of the shopping netted Scrappy a new toy...

...which brought him about five minutes of elation before he returned to "I'm too old for this" mode.  Capitalizing on this moment of melancholy, it proceeded to rain...

...and when I say, "rained", I mean "cow urinating on the flat rock" raining...

...so hard that even Mr-I'll-go-out-and-lick-water-out-of-the-gutter was dubious about going out...

And this continued most of the evening, culminating in a 4AM cloudburst that put our one plan for Tuesday- a Shoaf Park walk with my lovely niece and her lovely beagle-ette- in danger.  We finally got Accuweather and Weather Underground to agree on a 9 to 10 AM window, which Scrappy was excited to try...

(Insert high pitched excited whining here...)

And so we met on the Great Circle for a leisurely jaunt under merciful skies.

This is Piper

Piper is hunter of some repute, and Raine would let her go after squirrels for the fun of it..

Then we met up with this guy.  Laurie spotted him in a little tree just ahead of us- about three feet off the ground, looking at us from a peek spot behind the tree.  Raine let Piper go, and up the tree he went.  I tried to get a picture of him...and he shook the leaves and drenched me!  Piper wandered off to investigate some geese, and he came all the way down to the ground, ballsy little sod...

...till Piper caught sent of him again, sending him back whence he came...

And he never dropped the acorn he munched from the moment he soaked me!

The rain resumed as soon as we got home, and dampened a trip  to IHOP and associated shopping.  But the thing that REALLY sucks is NOBODY around here had my Golden Monkey!   I e-mailed Victory Brewing, and they said get ahold of the distributor-  Victory's response time every bit as good as their beer.  Nothing from the distributor as of yet, so it looks like Oberon for me for the time being...

GRRR... it's gotta get better!  Just kidding.  It still beats working!

Vacation day 2 plus a monday "message"

Yesterday was a light day on the vacation train.  The day started out as Sundays do... let me walk you through it.


Scrappy wakes up while it's still dark, and he's ready to get a drink and go to the bathroom- a state which, adding taking my meds, I share with him.  Aftrewards, I go to a few selected sites to listen/sing along in spirit to a selection of hymns.  Which gets me in the proper spirit to listen to a sermon from Dennis Miller.  I would say, "current sermon", but actually I am running a couple weeks behind him.  Now you might ask, why do you not just go to church?    That is really between my God and myself, but it is a lot about my earlier experience of a) not being humble/humbled, and b) making a hash of things in my own pride.  Moving on...


This morning in particular was a message from the 1 Corinthians message to the singles in their church.  My first thought was, this was a lesson I needed 45 years ago- though I wonder if I would have listened.  There are a myriad of such lessons that have come to me in the last ten years: lessons about my "need" for control and how stupid that was; my innate self-righteousness and the need to be 'right', which I learned from my father; the attitudes that keep me from grace; and how much different my life would have been/could be if I were more give-related than take-related.  Now at 56, I am not only fighting all these, but their time-ingrained nature.

When I was at that impressionable age, my church gave me rock-solid faith in the EXISTANCE of God, the FACT of Jesus's atoning death, but...  we went to a lot of Saturday night masses, in a church without AC or really good heat, so there was a handful of good-weather weeks that we got a half-listened to sermon, and a LOT of too-hot/too cold weeks where the Priest skipped a sermon just to move things on, because it was the ritual of faith, not its growth, that was "important".  Not to mention 8 years of weekday morning services without a sermon, and the only time we had a priest set foot inside the school to instruct us was a brief period under one particular priest whom our parents thought was a whackjob and soon ran out of the parish.  Anything I had to learn about God beyond simple faith was at His feet alone, with the help of a handful of believing friends.

ANYway, now that you know a little of the why, let me move on.  The next step of Sunday is taking Scrappy to the bark park, praying morning prayers along the way...

"So, who's been here..."

Little dog is friendly, big dog was STILL barking...

The boys at the "bar"

"I think it's time to go to the mailbox and back..."

This guy was having a dove-fight with another and dive-bombed us a couple of times before he decided to pose...

It was dew-y in the extreme...

...which makes the freckles on his nose pop!

Here you can see why I say we live in "the bowl"...

Later came an evening solo walk...

Moonlight over the swamp

Mrs Goldfinch.  

Just in case you like "Moonlight over the river" better

So the remains of old California Road swoop south towards Coliseum Blvd, ending just across from a break in the fence row that separates the river from the field across from Coliseum Parking.  There, I came around the corner to this...





And THAT is a real Sunday blessing... as God takes care of these, He'll take care of you.  Monday is "4 new tires" day, so IDK if I'll have a lot to report...

Vacation day one

Finally it's vacation time, and though Friday actually started it, a 9-hour workday plus a Doctor's appointment supposed to be at 4, checked in at 3:20, got in the exam room at 4:18, and out to the car at 5, took it out of me.  Saturday, though, began with a walk with doggie...

Such color!

That fell right in front of us...

By the time you got to the south end of the trail, it was getting muggy, buggy, and full of socceristas and joggeristas

This is Scrappy in "I don't wanna go home yet" mode.  The minute we crossed the bridge, he went from leading to being drug at half-speed, lol.

And a baby bunny in the yard.

Next was a trip to Salamonie Lake

"I can only find two talk stations that will come in here."
"Try FM."
"Oh, yeah..."
(Note: selection wasn't much better)

Wait, is that a whale sighting?

(I am standing on tiptoe there...)

"Oh, no... it's huge, horrible... EEEEEEEE!!!!!"

Later, later, go to Decatur, eat at the Back 40...

Dr Wuest:  Damn it, Mr Martin, I said better choices, SMALLER PORTIONS!
ME:  And I said, 'Food coma'!

Later, it was time to settle in with a Golden Monkey or two (actually 1 1/3 as it ended up) and watch the race at Bristol.  All was going well, until, in about a three second span, I knocked my precious liquid flying and Kyle Bush knocked my driver, Martin Truex Jr, flying as well.  Neither of us were happy...

MTJ kicks his car.  I blamed Laurie.  Scrappy got beer.

Tune in tomorrow for Sunday (hopefully) fun!