Four days in a cabin floating in the remote wilderness. What can I say? It’s hard to get back into the groove of working for a living…

It was the best kind of group outing; everybody did their own thing when they wanted, nobody was required to participate in the hiking/boating extravaganzas if they just wanted to sit and read a book, and it was very laidback. Highly recommend the resort for anyone looking for a great getaway. We made next year’s reservations while we were there…

I have been called both ~ I think they’re opposite sides of the same coin for me. My brain is always looking for the easy way out.

So when you have a Boston Whaler that needs to come out of the water for engine work & you can’t motor it around because of said engine work & you don’t really feel like towing it around to the local ramp on a rainy, crappy day, what do you do?

Well, if you’re me, you call your buddy with a tow truck (those years in the industry had to be good for SOMETHING!) and have him pluck it from the water. Greg always says that I’m like a guy with a hammer ~ every problem starts to look like a nail. Or something like that. Only for me, every problem can be solved with a couple of winches on the back of an International.

STEP ONE: Call buddy and arrange for him to be there at high tide. Which isn’t the high high tide; it’s the low high tide. But since the high high tide is at nearly midnight, you understand that you would probably be pushing the boundaries of friendship if you insisted on that one. Make do with what you have.

STEP TWO: Get the boat rigged so you can lift it over the log which is stuck in the mud. These problems would not exist if you had a good high tide, but you’d also be working by headlamp. It’s always a tradeoff.

STEP THREE: Monitor boat from safe distance as it comes up and over log, fenders at the ready in case of a pendulum swing.

STEP FOUR: Up and over the pilings nice and easy, congratulating yourself on being such a smart individual and once again, affirming the fact that a with a good enough winch, you can move the universe. Or at least the parts you need to haul around with you.

STEP FIVE: Lower onto trailer and get ready to spend the next hour or two pressure washing the barnacles off the bottom of the boat. Damn, but those little things have some amazing Sticky!

So my very dear, crazy, internationally mobile friend is now blogging too! Her brilliance is on display over at Toe in the Thames ~ enjoy!

Took Thing One to the doctor today after he came home early from school febrile and fatigued yesterday. I figured that since we missed a subclinical pneumonia for several months last school year, perhaps I should pay a bit more attention to vague symptoms this time around.

The doctor led us through the usual routine of poking, prodding, and looking, but didn’t find anything terribly disturbing on the physical exam. So it was off to the lab for a blood draw. S2B hopped right up on the chair and answered the tech’s questions. Yes, he’s had blood drawn before. Yes, he’d eaten earlier. Yes, he was fine to go ahead and get it done.

We were four tubes into it when the tech sharply told him to lay his head down. I was behind him, rubbing his back, so I couldn’t see that his face had gone ghost white. She removed the needle and I was putting pressure on the puncture, when his shade turned a lovely green.

At that point she was running for a bag, a towel, anything that would contain the clearly impending vomit storm. But alas, too late.

After the mop-up of S2b, the countertop, and the floor (somehow I lucked out and managed to avoid getting covered), we hauled S2B over to the EKG room where he could lay down and recover from this vagal episode.

This was the point when I lost my halo. Once all was basically under control & my dear firstborn was resting, I began to giggle. And that’s very hard to stifle. So it turned into outright hilarity. At which point, S2b rolled his eyes at me with the long-suffering look of a tortured child who cannot believe that his supposedly “loving” mother would actually have the gall to laugh after an incident such as this.

Then I took a picture.

And asked if I could blog the whole thing.

To the credit of his sense of humor, he said yes.

That’s funny stuff, kid.