Dock Pictures

Here is what the marina looked like last night.

And here it is this morning.  Rick and crew worked on it until 3:30 am.

Julie’s Birthday

Yesterday, another hot, sunny day, was Julie’s birthday.  To celebrate, Rick took her and their daughter Ari into town for dinner.  They closed the store up an hour early, at 6 pm.  We told them to enjoy their evening off; Julie works the store from 7 am to 7 pm, seven days a week, and Rick does the maintenance often putting in 16 hour days.

Richard and I and Jordan, one of the hired teenagers, sat at the gate in the stifling heat, saying that Rick and Julie really ought to take the night off more often.  And saying that a breeze would be nice; it was overcast, but still well up in the nineties.

Then thunder started rumbling, and a couple of sprinkles fell, and a breeze kicked up.   The breeze picked up dust and blew it everywhere, into our faces and our sodas.  The breeze turned into a fierce wind.  The dust thickened so we could hardly see.  People were scrambling to hold their tents and gazebos up.  I went to take down my internet dish and I heard a loud clunking and banging.  It was the dock breaking loose!!

At first it was hard to see it through all the dust, but it was a real mess.   The wind had blown the whole marina south several yards.  One wing of the dock had separated from the main dock, and the main dock was broken!  The ramp down to the dock was actually flipped onto its side!  Three people had just docked their boat and were walking up the ramp mere moments before it flipped.  In the campground, a large limb broke off one of the juniper trees.  Luckily, no one and no tents or RVs were under it when it fell.  Sheesh!! We were left in charge and things had gone to hell in less than an hour.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Sheriffs were out on the lake.  They were at the far end of the reservoir and were flagged down by a boat that had mechanical problems and needed to be towed in.  So there they were, fighting 3 to 4 foot swells and white caps, towing another boat across the lake (into the wind,  of course) to  the boat ramp at Powder Cove.  Even though the Sheriff’s boat has a canopy, they got drenched.  And the people in the boat being rescued didn’t have a canopy.  After getting the boaters safely ashore, the deputies headed back to the marina.  When they approached, they looked at the docks and said to each other, “That’s not right!”  They tied up to the dock, but there was no way they could put their boat in its slip.

It took us quite a while to reach Rick and Julie because they didn’t have their cell phones with them.  We tried a couple of local restaurants we thought they had gone to, to no avail.  I finally got in touch with Debbie, who is the cafe cook on weekends.  She was working at the bowling alley, which Rick’s brother-in-law runs.  They tracked down Rick and Julie  — they had just finished their salad and the main course was being brought out to them.  They had it put in go-boxes and high-tailed it back up here.  Rick’s dad and uncle came too, to help put the docks back together.

Lots of people, including the Sheriffs,  pulled their boats out of the marina, some onto their trailers, others anchored in front of the campground.

Rick, his dad, uncle, Ari, Jordan, one of the Deputies and several others worked on the docks for hours getting everything sorted out.

In the campground, Richard took a chainsaw to the downed tree limb and it got loaded into the back of pickup truck and hauled up the hill to the burn pile.

This morning, the lake is mirror calm.

Operations

This smile comes to us courtesey of Dottie:

Five surgeons are discussing who were the best patients to operate on. The first surgeon says, ‘I like to see Accountants on my operating table ,because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered.’

The second responds, ‘Yeah, but you should try Electricians! Everything inside them is colour-coded.’

The third surgeon says, ‘No, I really think Librarians are the best; everything inside them is in alphabetical order.’

The fourth surgeon chimes in, ‘You know I like Construction Workers. Those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end, and when the job takes longer than you said it would.’

But the fifth surgeon shut them all up when he observed, ‘You’re all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There’s no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains, and no spine, and there are only two moving parts – the mouth and the asshole – and they are interchangeable.’

What’s New

Things here have been pretty much same-o, same-o.  But since Jeanne wants news, here’s the best I’ve got.

A few nights ago a group of little boys came up to us holding a fat toad.  They asked if ‘bullfrogs like this’ were common here.   We assured them that there were lots of them around.   A little later, when Richard was making a round, a man told him there was a toad in one of the mens toilets.  So he got a stick and helped the toad out of the toilet.   Then,  after another hour,  a man pulled up to the gate and the boys came running up yelling, “Daddy! Daddy!”  They were carrying a five-gallon bucket full of toads.  Richard asked them if they had put a toad in a toilet.  They said no.  But Daddy said they would have a talk about that at the campsite.  No more toads were found in the toilets.

But, in the ladies room, one of the toilets kept overflowing several days in a row.  Rick figured that something must have gotten stuck in it.  He pulled the toilet off the floor and  disassembledit.  After cleaning out the Ew! Ew! Ew!,  he heard something clunking around inside of it.  He looked up into the bottom of it and saw a metallic object that said Verizon on it.    He shook the toilet this way and that like running a marble through a maze and finally got the cell phone to fall out the bowl.  Anybody want a phone?  I didn’t think so.

That’s probably not the sort of thing Jeanne had in mind when she asked for something new.  Sorry ’bout that.

I Was Wrong

I have often said that there are some guys who always look good.

Like Sean Connery.

Then I saw this.

I was sooooooo wrong!!!!!