The Breath Before the Summer Plunge

Summer Camp starts on Monday. I think we're ready. I only worked three days of the set-up week, reserving the last couple of days for a quick trip to Sacramento so Jeanine could see her friend Kim, who was in town from Hawaii. Kim and her husband Dave (who both went to the same high school that Jeanine and I did) were clearing out Kim's mom's house. That was deja vu for us, since we cleared out my dad's apartment in nearby Citrus Heights less than a year ago. I remembered Dave from high school, but didn't really remember Kim. It was fun hanging out with them on the front porch. It was a pleasant way to pass a warm afternoon, with cats underfoot and wasps in the air, disturbed from their nest inside one of the gate posts. There were some impressive Black Widows in the backyard shed too. The next morning, we had an hour to kill before converging on a restaurant to meet with some of Jeanine's other Sacramento-based friends for a balloon jam (no, it's not something one puts on toast, but rather an idea sharing session for balloon artists). As for the hour, we drove aimlessly until I spotted a record store, necessitating a sudden u-turn. We entered and purchased stuff. Eva even bought a couple of records - AC/DC and Edgar Winter, the latter because Eva thinks albinos are cool. She showed her "child of the digital age" ignorance of vinyl when I asked her what AC/DC album she had purchased by responding, "I don't remember, but it has two sides". I like that having two sides is a novelty now. For the record (pun intended), it was "Let There Be Rock".





As for set-up week, the most useful thing I did all week was save a snake's life. While returning a shovel to the garden shed after shoveling out the campfire pit, I spotted a large Gopher snake in the corner, sprawled across the floor like a corpse. Its front end was well entangled in a roll of plastic garden netting, so tightly that sections of it bulged outwards. I was so certain that it was dead that I was surprised that it hissed when I touched it. I found some scissors and took about 15 minutes to cut it out of the roll, and when I finally finished, the front of the snake was still hairy with jutting bits of plastic, making it look like some sort of laboratory experiment gone awry. With the help of a coworker and a pair of fingernail clippers, we finally managed to free the snake from the remaining plastic. After smearing some antibiotic on it, we kept it overnight for observation, and after ensuring that all of the garden netting was safely put out of reach (this is an ongoing issue, but when so many people use things, it's sometimes hard to ensure that everything is consistently put away), we released the snake in the garden. It eventually disappeared down a gopher hole. I'm going to enlarge and laminate a copy of the the photo I took and put it on the wall of the shed as a reminder.

Currently listing to: "Victrola Favorites" 2CD