So I haven't blogged for a while. And a I got a nasty comment from one of my two readers telling me that I need to start back and that I can't blame it on God. That's not exactly how he said it, but it's close. I haven't had so much to do that I haven't had time. It's more that I've always got a little something to do which I'm always putting off and so I can't blog when there's something else that needs to be done but can be put off a bit longer. I call it "procrastination as art."
I finally got most of those little somethings done and so now I can blog freely for a few days.
Today I'm going to talk about what we did yesterday. But it starts on Friday, or maybe sooner. I work for a small biotech company in Durham. Like most such organizations, we don't make any money. We do something much more interesting. We create value. Recently, we created some more value and so, to celebrate, each employee got a little gift. This past Friday afternoon, we had a small happy hour and everyone got the same gift, some flexible remuneration and a lovely group photo. They said that we shouldn't use it (the money) to pay bills but to do something nice for ourselves.
I came home and told my wife about it and, of course, she had an idea. "Why don't we go to Jordan Lake and rent a motor boat and ride around the lake?" She had already done her homework. There was this place, a marina, that rents motor boats and we could go tomorrow and it would be a lot of fun.
So I called the next morning and reserved a boat for us from 1:30 to 6:30 PM. We loaded up some drinks and snacks and took off for the lake. It was a beautiful day. It was in the mid to high 70's and there were a few fluffy white clouds in the sky. When we got there I went in and read all the rules. The rule book that you had to read had lots of pictures and at the bottom of each page it said "NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" We paid up and off we went. Here's a picture of a boat like the one we rented.
Of course, I had to drive. We took off slowly but pretty soon we got the hang of it and sped up a bit. The first thing we did was head south under Highway 64 and started looking for something interesting to do. "Let's go up the Haw river." But instead of going up the Haw we took off a bit further to the east and went into a little nook as you can see on the map charting our progress.
There were a lot of tree stumps off to one side of the nook and so we went fairly gingerly and stayed in the middle away from the stumps. This path eventually stopped and obviously didn't lead where we had wanted to go. So we got out the big water-proof map that they give you so you don't lose their boat and realized that we went the wrong way. We turned around and took off to where we needed to go. My wife had a bit of trouble figuring out the map and kept looking for a bridge that we should go under to get to the river mouth. Eventually, we figured out that the road that she was looking for was now under water and it all made sense.
Given that I was driving most of the time, we didn't get a lot of pictures. Here's Whitney, sitting up front, enjoying the ride. She's always liked to ride in boats from the first time we put her on a boat at age 2.
And here's our intrepid river boat pilot manning the stern.
So we eventually figured out the map and went a few miles up the Haw river and then came back through the lake and up to the more northern parts where there a few more stumps and trees off to the sides. After about three hours of this, the clouds got a little thicker and it was actually cold when the sun went behind the clouds. So we headed back taking one more little side trip under a bridge before heading back to the marina. Before we left, we went back in to pay for the gas we used. I happened to look on a map on the wall and saw that our trip into the first nook was in a strictly forbidden zone,"NO EXCEPTIONS!" "NO EXCUSES!" Luckily, we didn't hit anything in there and damage the boat. That would have chewed up the rest of my little gift and a lot more.
So that's what we did yesterday. We ain't gonna do nothing much today.
Bye!
