Day One-hundred-and-seventy-two: Losing in two states

I was so industrious this morning that my packing was done in plenty of time to lose in cribbage, setback, and pool before I had to get on the road.

Then it was a long drive in the rain. Finally we arrived and went right back out to shop for groceries to use for dinner. My brother in law greeted us on our first arrival and my nieces greeted us on our return from shopping. While my brother in law was out at his football coaches banquet, we prepared and ate some food.

Then after my sister came home from her job, we ate the food we had prepared.

I drank a lot of water so will need to make sure I packed my pajamas in my backpack and know the path to the bathroom.

After dinner we played four games of euchre, men against the women. We went easy on them allowing them to win all four. My brother in law dealt my mother two loaners. Even though my sister was the beneficiary of the scoring that resulted, she accused him of brown nosing.

The games are incidental to the jokes and laughter. Even being the butt of the joke is a good place to be with family. I did notice a "billiard parlor" down the road. I'm going to have to practice so I can surprise my father. (Writing this here will certainly blow the surprise. He is probably my most regular reader.) Oh well, the surprise will then be not following through and having him practice unnecessarily. My Life after Layoff is full of surprises, mostly for me.

Day One-hundred-and-sixty-eight: More Farm Work

The morning was great for sun shine. So much so we took about a mile and a half walk, in the mud. On the walk we decided to do a couple necessary chores to enable the purchase, pick up, and storing of three more [large round] bales of hay for the goats.

This involved moving the three bales already in the shed and driving the ATV to take the hay trailer up to the house and truck. Using the same ATV, we took an old [metal] barrel up to Grandma's former house, or as I like to characterize it, my mother's second house in the mountains. (It's maybe a half mile further up the hollow and is higher.)

Then we two car caravaned to their auto mechanic to get their Elantra's soft brakes checked out. We drove on to Weston in one car to pick up a pair of gold earrings my mother had made from pearls she got in Hawaii last year.

While in Weston, I had my first Veggie Delite from Subway.

Once home again, I had a break through day in pool. I won every game. While I am playing better, (I have had a lot of recent practice in my Life after Layoff.), most of my wins came from my father playing worse. The secret to winning a lot of late day pool is to work him to exhaustion in the morning, which made my hand-eye coordination marginally better.

After pool, more cards. I lost badly in two games of cribbage. One was a skunk and the other had me just one peg past the skunk line. I lost again in gin. I did win the first game but then she whipped me four games in a row.

Oh well, the pool made up for a lot. But what did we watch on TV just before bed? The Trick Shot Championship. I'm still a little dyslexic when it comes to hitting my target ball on the correct side for those almost straight in shots. Besides, as interesting as it was, I'm unlikely to see any of those shot options in a real game. A lot of them involved foreign objects being strategically placed on the table. I know my father wouldn't let me get away with it even if he did admire the skill of the shot.

Day Eighty-one: A wild life in Pacifica

On a morning walk in San Pedro Valley Park, my father spotted this bobcat, proof of my wild Life after Layoff.


Actually, today has been quiet all day, with plenty of food, of course. Tomorrow will be even more food with a little more walking. I hope to go to bed early so I can get up and beat my mother to cleaning up the kitchen. Tomorrow is their last full day of visiting. I don't have anything special planned but making steel cut oatmeal.

Today we played cribbage, watched TV, watched TV, and did I mention watch TV. I also watered my backyard plants and fed my compost pile. The only driving I did was to go walking. All in all, a very lazy day.

A special note on the cribbage, I lost every time, once by skunk. My father won two of the three times, once by skunking both my mother and me in the same game. I had avoided getting skunked the previous game by virtue of scoring first and getting eleven points on that hand and crossing the skunk line by just one point.

Day Twelve: On the Water

I could really tell that I was 300 miles further north and that Summer Solstice wasn't that long ago. This is a long winded way to say that the dawn and the light that wakes me up came earlier. Even being on the north side of the house didn't help.

In my college days I had gotten used to sleeping in a near sensory deprivation chamber with my interior dorm room in the Ohio State Stadium Scholarship dorm. But I have always found it difficult to sleep in the light. Of course, the sounds of roosters coming through the screened but open door may also have had something to do with it. They did not belong to my hosts.

While at the time I did not have access to the Internet and this blog, I did use the time to prepare some notes so I could make this entry later, as I am now doing.

The big activity of the day was rowing (for me) and paddling (for others) in a rowboat and canoe that my son-in-law's father had made. They were excellent crafts. It was a lot of fun. While I wasn't used to rowing and got a couple blisters for my presumption, they didn't break; I didn't get sore; and in no way was there any discomfort to diminish the fun.

After dinner, we appropriately played the card game "Up and Down the River." I had played it before but never so well. Well, never so lucky. I even had a good chance to win the first game but had to bid zero and only got ten points each in the final two hands while my host bid and made two and one; beating me by three points. But my luck wasn't universal. Earlier in the day I was skunked by daughter in cribbage. I guess to truly enjoy the good luck of this Life after Layoff, I'll have to accept a little bad luck in cards. It is well worth it.