Possumblog

Anyway, as I was saying...

...it's been much too busy around here this morning, but at least I did get to take a nice lunch break and go eat with Pam the Liberal. Oddly enough, not a bit of politics this time, other than of the office sort. Good food, too--at at the meat-n-three over at the AmSouth Regions-Harbert food court--where I was pleasantly surprised to see behind the cash register the lady who sometimes works over at the Chinese place. She's so nice. Different hair today, too--sort of a chestnutty-with-highlights. Must be her winter look.

ANYway, got me some green beans and squash and chicken and some good conversation. And then had to get back out in the wind.

Good night a'living, I don't see how people in places like Chicago and Buffalo live there. It's not that cold today, but the wind is howling and somehow managing to come from every direction simultaneously. I don't mind it being chilly, but I can't stand cold wind. Makes me cry.

It was cold this weekend, too. There was some wind, but I think it was only getting up its strength for today. Nice place, though. Just a short jaunt from home, we stayed at a place called Camp Rushton. Bright sunny days on both Saturday and Sunday, and the only slightly off-putting things were that it seemed to be awfully damp for there not to have been any rain lately, and I would have preferred a wood privy seat instead of steel.

The boys had a fire building class and a lost-man drill after we set up camp, and managed to cook beef stew for supper Saturday night and eggs and bacon and grits for breakfast Sunday. All that food-buying I did was for naught, however--turns out the boys had cribbed the adult menu, and it had a bunch of stuff on there that was already part of the stuff they keep in the troop's chuckboxes--salt, pepper, sugar, mustard, ketchup, and junk like that. However, I didn't know this, so I wound up buying a lot of stuff that wasn't needed. Second, I bought for four people in Jonathan's patrol. Only two of his group showed up.

BUT, I figure now that we've got that stuff, we can keep it in a box in the garage. I've long wanted to have an emergency supply box that we could load up in the van, but never did get around to getting everything together in one handy location. I've had tons of stuff, but it has always been scattered to the far corners of the house, and to have gotten it all together quickly would have been difficult to do.

Turned in about 10:30 Saturday, and aside from the two previously mentioned dashes to the outhouse in the middle of the night, I stayed acceptably warm. Of course, that changed when I poked a body part out of the sleeping bag. The little heater I got worked nicely as a sock warmer, though, and kept the chill bumps at bay as I got my clothes on. It'll also make toast! YAY TOAST!

Going back to the subject of cooking, it was a good experience for Jonathan, who'd apparently never peeled a potato before. I handed him a potato peeler and went back to what I was doing, then turned around to see him holding the blade and taking tiny little nicks out of the potato skin. He now knows how to peel a potato. Heaven help him.

As for other diversions, we did listen to the Auburn-Alabama game (and kudos to Miss Wendy for her very close prediction) but it was hard to do. The boys have attention spans honed by years of video games, and it's hard to get them to just shut up and listen to something, so they yammered for a long time then dispersed and went off wandering around. Which was fine by me--at last I could finally listen to the thing. Sounds like it was another typical game for both sides--Alabama running up and down the field and not being able to score enough points, Auburn managing to score enough even though they shouldn't have been able to, at least on paper. Chalk it up to good coaching and players who keep their wits, I think. In any event, thanks from the Auburn family to the University of Alabama for spending so much money on their new facilities--they seemed to have made the Tigers' stay much nicer and more pleasant. But please, bottles go in the trash. Quit messing up our--I mean YOUR--stadium.

Anywho, we had breakfast Sunday, then a short devotional in front of the fire, and then it was time to hit the road--the Scoutmaster made the call to break up early because it was so cold and windy.

Back to the Scout house, unload, then to home, lunch picnic-style with the girls on a blanket spread on the den floor, then unload the van. Sure was easier when help was available--Boy was so glad to be home that he couldn't be dragged from the den to unpack much of anything.

Go upstairs and scrub off the smoke, get ready for church, then to Arby's for supper, where the Korean or Chinese manager was a whirlwind of incoherent efficiency. He made sure everyone was on top of things and the food was served hot and fast through the use of a barely intelligible stream-of-consciousness patter that sounded like some sort of cross between Shecky Greene and a propaganda film. Whatever works, I suppose.

Home, kids to bed, me to bed, where whatever I ate from Arby's gave me explosive gas as well as lurid, feature-length Technicolor dreams. There was one part there where I was trying to outrun someone who was poking along one of the convoluted sidestreets around here, and I took a wrong turn and wound up going up an alley beside a parking garage where someone had parked three beat-up American Motors cars--a Javelin, a Gremlin, and an Ambassador sedan--all with identical red, white, and blue livery. Now, AMC did have a program back at the turn of the '70s when they would deliver cars for racers with this sort of paint scheme, but I hardly think an Ambassador was part of the program. But in my dream, I thought, "Hey, I bet these things are RARE!" After I reached a dead-end, I went inside the parking deck and spent hours rummaging through a series of stores that had all sorts of weird, off-beat, military surplus stuff for sale, and then found myself in some kind of concourse where Robert Goulet walked by wearing a hideously bright red and white track suit that had "Design Review Committee" emblazoned on the front and back. I thought, "Hey, that's Robert Goulet, and I never knew he was on the Design Review Committee!" He walked back by later and had on big black aviator shades, which I figured were to keep people from noticing him.

Sometime later, I found myself at a lake, and there was this absolutely gigantic AMC Rebel there. Yes, I know--it's very peculiar that I kept dreaming of American Motors cars. Anyway, this one was like a supersized one--there was someone else there and I was trying to show them how wide it was, and when I looked in the side window, it was like looking from the front of a bus to the back it was so wide. The explanation was simple, however. It was actually a boat. Made by welding two Rebels side to side to create one double-wide homemade car-boat.

Then, we went to a football game, which I thought would be problematic since someone had dumped huge piles of dirt and rocks in big mounds all over the field. No one else seemed to think anything amiss, however.

Through it all, I kept embarrassing myself with loud, rumbling, thunderous, gaseous discharges, but again, no one seemed to mind in any parts of the various dreams. It was not until this morning that I realized that was the one part of the whole dream experience that was actually happening throughout the night. I figure none of the kids or Reba complained because they'd been rendered unconscious.

Anyway, I suppose it'll be awhile before I ever order another one of Arby's corned beef reuben sandwiches with a side of jalapenos.

So, that was pretty much it for the weekend. I do have a few photos (of the campout), but as usual, I forgot to bring my camera in today, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at November 20, 2006 12:51 PM