every day, i read the paper, and it invariably makes me kind of depressed. rarely is there good news, something to smile about. always it’s the horrors of the war, plus additional gloomy stuff like today there was even a horrible thing in ann landers – a mother said her four year-old acted out sometimes and nothing she did could get the kid to behave, except when she’d smash one of the child’s toys WITH A HAMMER. and was this an OK thing to do?
i seriously think there should be a very elaborate and strict screening process before people get to be parents, because there are way way way too many of them out there who seem to have little or no basic common sense or intelligence about the whole thing.
however, luckily, i did find one bright article in the paper. this is NATIONAL DRINKING WATER WEEK! i assume everybody will get at least one day off, not to mention the parades and celebrations and speeches and other excitement to revel in our national drinking water. i, personally, have already drunk one whole glass of drinking water, in honor of the week. later mollie and i will go running and both of us will imbibe freely.
so, the weekend. i’m kind of exhausted by the amount of outside work done yesterday, but saturday, you may recall was the GARDEN TRACTOR PULL.
it was full of…garden tractors. kevin’s friend randy’s wife luanne explained that they find old rusted garden tractors and then they totally refurbish them, and then they go to these garden tractor pulls, which seem to be everywhere around the country. in case you live someplace else and are dying to go to one.
not that i’m actually recommending the sport. it’s a little, uh…dull…if you’re not actually competing.
dull for me, anyway. many people were there in their lawn chairs, and they seemed to enjoy it quite a bit.
here’s me and randy in front of the tractor he was going to pull. this isn’t randy’s actual tractor; his lost a bearing or threw an axle or something that morning.
here’s one of the participants competing. they don’t race, but each one pulls a weight down the track, and that big numbered sign you see in the back is actually a measure of the distance each tractor pulls the weight. the thing in back of it is some kind of thing which has a name although i don’t know what it might be, but it has a weight on it and is driven by the guy way in the back. each tractor is weighed before starting, and then an appropriate amount of weight is added to the sled. yes, maybe that’s what the thing is called, a sled. and i’m sure that more information you’ll ever want or need to know about garden tractor-pulling.
most of the pulls are just competitions, but this one was a charity event, for the make-a-wish foundation. they raised a nice amount of money for the cause, plus a little kid sponsored by make-a-wish got to ride one of the tractors. here he is.
the kid’s wish was to be in Nascar, so this seems to have come up a little short in the wish department. but on the other hand, it’s not like they’d have let him drive a car in Nascar, and he did get the thrill of driving a tractor.
plus they gave him a GIGANTIC trophy.
before the event started, kevin and i and some make-a-wish volunteers had to sign people up. it wasn’t cheap to sign up, but the guys were eager to do it. i thought they must be farmers; they looked like farmers, and a lot of them wore john deere t-shirts, but luanne said they weren’t farmers. i should have asked them what they did for a living as i signed them up.
after the signing-up was over, we just sat around and watched for a while, and that’s when i decided that this was probably my first and last garden tractor pull. in addition to not exactly scintillating, it was very very loud. kevin went away for a while and came back with a pair of headphones for blocking the noise.
he offered them to me, but i declined his generous offer. i did notice that there were a few little toddlers and some little babies there, and none of them wore headphones. and some of them were right there next to the track. a group of women right down in front had a couple of babies, and many of the women were chain-smoking and i watched as one of them kept giving their baby mountain dew. once again, my idea for a strict screening process seems obviously direly needed.
there’s going to be another pull next weekend, and one the weekend after that, and they are very very popular among the garden tractor-pulling crowd. people came from as far away as missouri and kentucky.
we won’t be there. we’ll be busy building our boat.
our pontoon boat, that is. mom and dad had a pontoon boat that was 18 years old, and kept getting more and more decrepit, and they finally decided to sell it this year.
and we decided to buy it.
and now it’s in our driveway, and we’re in the process of rehabbing it. it think it’ll look great when we’re through and will last another 18 years. we basically gutted it, keeping only the pontoons and the motor and the frame.
here’s what it looked like when we brought it home.
here’s kevin, as he begins the dismantling process.
as you can see, kevin is doing most of the work here. when i say “we” are fixing up the boat, i really mean kevin, as i do my best to be helpful without hurting myself.
i did use some tools although i usually didn’t know what they were called.
this is what the 18 year-old deck looked like. it’s a miracle nobody stepped through the floor on the boat, and it’s a miracle it didn’t sink. although i guess it wouldn’t sink because of the pontoons, which are fully functioning although very grimy (right now; kevin ordered cleaner that will make them sparkling clean).
kevin ordered marine plywood for the new floor. it had to be special ordered because it’s treated with arsenic and they just don’t sell the arsenic to anybody nowadays. not that somebody would eat the arsenic, but oddly enough, our cat honey was chewing on a piece of the old floorboards.
here’s honey and mollie, both fascinated with the boat-rehabbing process.
we did all this stuff last saturday, completely stripping the boat of the top, the sides, the seats, and the flooring. it was all very well-documented, and more photos are to come.
ok then,
monday morning grace.