Building a Dock

This weekend Sam and I went down to Roseburg to help my parents build a dock. As it turns out, Ben was also passing through town and decided to stay and help. In addition, my grandparents are staying in Roseburg right now so they were also there to pitch in. With 4 guys standing around, I decided that there were enough hands to construct the dock, so I decided to spend Friday working on my parents wildly overgrown yard. With the assistance of my grandmother, I tore up (yes, literally) one very diseased bush, cut the ugliest bush you've ever seen down to stubs, and pruned a number of bushes to half their original size. It was a bit of a massacre, but after all the blood was mopped up, things looked amazingly better.

That night we loaded up the 8x12 raft frame onto my father's trailer and hauled it up to the mountain. How funny that thing looked on the trailer traveling down I-5. From a distance it resembled a hot tub, up close it just looked like a mystery. Once we got it up to the mountain, we then had to figure out how to get the darn thing into the lake. Not an easy task. I think some fairy waved her wand and *poof*, it jumped from the trailer into the water. We tied it up to the side of the lake and let it rest there, in wait for us to return the following day to finish with the decking.


The next morning we woke up to a nice rain. Swell, just what we needed to finish the raft. Being the hard core raft builders that we are, we decided to go up to the mountain anyway to finish the project. When we made it up to the mountain, it was drizzling a bit, but as we worked the clouds parted and gave us sunshine the rest of the day. While Ben and Sam finished on the decking, my father and I started on the path to lead down to the lake.

My mother had made it to the site right about the time my dad started his chain saw. She ran over to my father in horror (he got in a bit of trouble cutting down a few too many tree just the week before) to see what else he was chopping. My dad was very quick to tell her that I had approved and he was leaving alone the "brush" I had told him not to touch. I couldn't help but laugh - it was like he had the excuse waiting for her. So my mom agreed to haul the slash pile we were making in the road. A bit later my grandparents made it up. They chipped right in on the trail blazing. My grandmother was considered the expert scientist for the "granny test" to ensure the grade was steady enough for her to make it down.

Before long, "Tom and Huck" had the decking completed and they were rowing their way over to the trail. The next thing we knew, Ben was taking his shoes off and flying into the water. There were a few squawks and eeps, and he was quickly making his way back to the side of the dock. The sun might have been shining, but that water was still chilly. Unfortunately, his plan wasn't thought through because there is no ladder to the deck (yet) and considering the sides of the dock are over two feet out of water. . .yeah, you get the idea. He ended up having to swim with the raft all the way over to our newly built trail while the rest of us sat around in amusement.

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the dock. We ate lunch on the dock, feed fish off the dock, and basked in the sun. I laid on the dock for quite some time peering over the side watching the fish swim around. What a great view! The fish are getting so used to us that they even swim up right under our noses.

A hard day of work was ended just right with a trip to The Jersey Lilly for Frog Burgers - the perfect reward for the crew. Two rounds gave us twice medication for our sore muscles and twice the chance to toast our new dock.

One more project down. . .the shower house is next!

Pulling Teeth

Today I took off of work early to take Sam to the dentist. It is the day Sam has been dreading for the past several months - he was forced to part with his wisdom.

Once the appointment was finished, I took him home and sat him down with a Popular Science magazine and his pain pills. He sat there for some quite time reading various articles, mentioning now and then how he didn't think the pain pills were working. Then I looked over at him a bit later to see him blinking and just kind of glancing around the room, so I asked what was going on. He replied, "Suddenly the walls in this room got a whole lot more interesting than this magazine." Apparently the drugs do work. He's already skipping around the house again and smiling. That sure didn't take long!

Today I mentioned to my manager that I was playing "mom" since Sam was getting his wisdom teeth pulled. When Colin found this out he started to tell me about his own experience. He said he sat down in the chair, and the dentist came in - arm this size of his thighs (which gave him great confidence that he would be able to yank his teeth out). Afterwards he ended up having to call his parents to come pick him up because he was so out of it. It was also amusing to hear him tell about the pain killers they put him on that basically wiped his memory. He kept making phone calls over and over to the same people telling them the same things each time. Afterwards, he didn't believe people when they said what he had done, but later his phone bill proved that indeed he had!

My personal stories is not a pretty one. I had all fours out at once. They put me out during the surgery, so I vaguely remember my mom helping me stumble to the recovery room. I came out with very black and blue puffy cheeks - quite lovely. If pictures ever surface of that day, I'll hunt down my mom's drip torch. The rest of the day I spent on the couch drooling on myself. A week later my boyfriend at the time asked me when the swelling would go down - yeah, that relationship is over.

Why are stories of pulling teeth so much fun?