The Last Little Frog

Wednesday started off with a visit to my Grandparents' house in Grand Rapids. They've been cleaning their basement, and there was a big pile of old tools and stuff for my dad and I. It was fun to go through them with Grandpa telling stories about everything. He worked at Learjet a long time ago (Learjet is basically the standard for rich peoples' private planes) and so he has some very interesting precision tools.

Then trimmed a few branches with those saws on a stick. They're okay, except they're never long enough, and you get small pieces of trees falling on you all the time, with a few not small pieces of trees thrown in to keep you on your toes, which is difficult to do on a ladder. Which is also always just a little too short.

Then we stopped by a cell phone joint to buy minutes for Dad's cell phone. It's cheaper to buy phone cards than to buy in on a network, apparently. Much cheaper. If you need your phone to check emails and take pictures and open garage doors and make strawberry pie, it doesn't work, but if you want to, I dunno, call someone or something, it works out alright. So apparently all you can buy in cell phone stores are holsters. Lots and lots of holsters. Holsters are the shoes and purses of the future. Women will have a different cell phone holster for every outfit.
God preserve our souls.
That's assuming you can understand the sales representative, of course, which I couldn't. He seemed pretty disoriented and Italian and thought he worked at McDonalds, though it took him a few tries to pronounce that right. Helpful guy though. Pointed us to a gas station...a place that sells refined decomposed dinosaur for combustion in cars...because they sold cell phone minutes. I'm still looking for a good coffee shop that sells plywood in 3'x8' sections.

Then we went home and took the van apart. The brakes are locking up, and for some reason Mom has a problem with driving a car that veers toward the shoulder without warning and smokes and smells like a power grinder attacking a pile of rubber ducks.

I always was good with similes.

Thursday morning was breakfast at a small time farmers' restaurant. We go there a few times a year. Lots of good food. Lots of people talking about cows and tractors and corn. It's cool though 'cause everyone who eats there knows each other, and gladly welcome new people into their little circle.

On the way there we drove down a really cool road that I'm going to have to take pictures on. It's got a pond next to it, some cool big hills, all in the 'dirt road tunnel through green woods' style.

From there we went to the fair. Everyone else claims that we stopped by Travis' pigs in the pig barn, but I can neither confirm nor deny those rumors, as with fairs come animals and with animals come tuna salad, and with tuna salad comes hay, which makes my nose run really watery snot, eyes water, and just this once to make things interesting, my face swell up. Then I got a headache, and felt like I was outside in the snow on a sunny day, everything was glaring...even though the sky was one big mass of clouds. My favorite part was towards the end...actually my favorite part was right AFTER the end. When we were in the car going home and I could see and my nose desolidified.

Then today we vacuumed out the pond. First time using a vacuum on water. You can't do it with any vacuum, gotta have a special wet/dry vacuum, but it's pretty sweet. The frogs didn't think so. One of 'em jumped into the bucket at the bottom of the pond, then as we vacuumed out the water, he realized that he couldn't get back out. Luckily for him, he eats mosquitoes, who eat me. We rescued him. So now the pond water is clear again.

Then the van started smoking and locking up again. It's old and no one loves it any more, what with the sweet nine-seater truck and the convertible. Dad's now blaming the bearing in the front axle.

Over the past few days my sister and I have gotten a song worked out. A Johnny Cash song that's simple, but still interesting to play. Bethany disagreed with some of the lyrics, but that was an easy fix. Now that she's got a pickup for her acoustic guitar, we can come up with some pretty cool sounds playing around with the equalizer and the overdrive on her amplifier. Did a bit of harmonica fiddling. That was about it.

SOTD: Johnny Cash - Hurt
Honorable mention: Elvis Presley - A Little Less Conversation (JXL remix)

FTTDOTD: Stand next to something expensive and then try to twirl a drumstick.