DeYank

For the last two weeks my eldest daughter and three of her four kids have been visiting us from Texas.  One of them is spending the summer over in Germany with her German Grandmother. It has been crowded, but not overly so.  We have been enjoying a little milder weather than before.  Temperatures down in the high 70's and low 80's mostly every day.  This makes it easy to go out and do things.  I really want to take the eldest grandkid out and show her how to drive a stick shift pickup.  I seem to never find the time to do so but maybe today.  It is also hard to find somewhere I can do that without having a load of traffic about.  There are a couple of large parking lots near strip malls so maybe we will head over there.

True four-wheeling is difficult to find now in this part of the country.  If we still lived in Colorado there would be loads of places to go.  I'd be up in the mountains every weekend.  There is one place about a hundred miles away where the Ohio Power Company has been strip mining.  They rip off the topslil in an area about a square mile and extract the coal from seams under it.  Then, with care, they replace the topsoil and replant everything from wildflowers to trees.  This process leaves loads of little lakes which they stock with fish.  To get from one lake to another, everyone jumps into their four-wheelers and creates "roads" to travel on.  Some of these roads have to be seen to be believed.  Mostly they are just dirt tracks leading through bogs and little streams and such.  A true four-wheeling test of willpower.  Last time I was down there I had to use my winch twice to navigate a stream and a bog.  The latter winching was what caused me to put a nice coating of mud on TOP of the cab.  What fun!

We have also started playing dominoes again.  It's a great way to spend two or three hours just chatting and whatnot.  With so many of us we usually play with the double-12 set and this gives us 13 rounds (from 12's down to 0's)  Note to myself:  I really need to get started on making those racks to hold the dominoes instead of relying on just standing them on edge.  One bump on the table and they all fall over (Dominoe Theory??).

I see that the UK is still floundering (no pun intended) underwater.  I trust that this is not usual for summer over there?  Normally, the weather that we have here gets over there in about 7 to 10 days.  I wonder what is shortstopping it and causing such terrible conditions.  Chippy seems to be a regular chronicler of the 40 days of rain.  Has anyone started building an Ark?

 Gotta go.

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Posted by: DeYank    in: My entries