Relative Something

Things started out smoothly enough for a Saturday at the lake. I lingered in bed watching stage 8 of the Tour until breakfast was announced and afterward, I was doing a bit of reading as Cyndie and her mom were getting ready to take kids to Wilderness Walk in town to see some animals. What could go wrong? Well, the 5-year-old boy could disappear.

First, I notice his name being called, then soon after, Cyndie is seeking my help to find a missing child. My first question was whether all the bathrooms had been checked (yes) and then whether she had checked with the family with kids his age (she got no answer to a phone call there). I would walk down to their place. But that allowed plenty of time for others to get pretty stressed and I am amazed how quickly minds race to worst-case scenarios. Even with my intuition that he was just playing at the neighbors, my mind went immediately to thinking of the fact of the parents leaving us with their children and a tragedy under this situation would be a really tragic tragedy. But I found the boy playing with the kids there, safe and sound and happy as could be. I did my best to prepare him for the wrath he was about to face. He claimed to me to have told Gramma where he was going, but in the end, his story had some holes in it. The lesson appears to be well-learned about properly reporting his intentions on wandering anywhere on his own here.

When they returned from their excursion to pet animals, I joined them down at the beach where I found some shade to work on my sculpture. We were having a great time visiting with friends there and I’m sure it was over an hour when Cyndie ran up to get boat keys and returned to whisper something to me. Either I could take the kids out in the boat or I could go up and work on cleaning up the flood she discovered in the basement. When she got up there she found the washing machine was overflowing and there was about 2 inches of water on the floor in the laundry room and it had seeped in the carpet through most of the basement back rooms and inside the doorway of both bedrooms. We had a full fledged disaster on our hands.

I got a start on the cleanup immediately and then realized I shouldn’t waste any more time and needed to alert her parents and figure out the ultimate fix to the situation. The guy next door had just purchased a new wet/dry shop vac and I procured it and got to work. It filled fast and when I opened the plug to drain it, there was so much pressure it was not all going down the drain and I scrambled to control my flood within a flood. When I got ready to get back to vacuuming, the drain plug for the shop vac was nowhere to be found. Why does this kind of thing happen? Seriously, I don’t care about anything else at this point, I just want to know why the drain plug needs to disappear and totally interrupt the one thing that was working well to help us solve our flood dilemma.

There was a bunch of laundry on the floor by the drain and Cyndie was rushing to get it up off the floor as I was suddenly struggling to contain my mini disaster of water draining from the vacuum at a pretty high pressure. My hope and my assumption was that in her haste to get everything picked up off the floor, she accidentally scooped up that drain cap. We went through the baskets of that laundry multiple times, to no avail. My only other thought is that it somehow was swept down the drain, which had been left uncovered to allow for a drain hose from the dehumidifier. I have no idea how, because I was sitting there watching the water go down that drain, and can’t believe I wouldn’t have noticed if something went down the drain.

I just borrowed this thing from the neighbor. It was brand new. How am I going to face them with this knucklehead problem? How could it disappear? We needed to remove a lot of water still! How could this be happening!? Where could it be!!?? What do I do now? I spotted a little foam ball. I grabbed it, stuffed it in the hole and turned on the vacuum. It worked, for a while anyway. I heard a THWUP! and looked to see it was missing. I rushed to get back to the drain and eventually found the ball had been sucked inside the tub of the vacuum. I was worried it would pop out under the pressure of the water collecting in the tank, but instead, needed to leave more of the ball on the outside to keep it from getting sucked in. It worked enough to allow me to pull many gallons of water out of the carpet. But there is no way I am returning this with a toy ball stuck in the drain. How did I lose that cover and where in the heck did it go!!?

I just don’t understand.

After dark, I stepped out on the ground-level deck to bring in a couple of things we had out drying and was met by a very brave little raccoon that was happily helping to clean up bird seed that had spilled. In all my years of being up here, I have never stepped out and seen a raccoon an arm’s length from me, just going about eating as if I wasn’t there. It was a very atypical day.

It is strange to see the world class bike racers working the mountain stages of the Tour de France. Some of them are able to make it look deceivingly easy, while others so vividly reveal their limitations of climbing ability and almost look like they are suddenly riding in sand. It is really a spectacle to watch; if you can endure the frequent and prolonged onslaught of commercials throughout the broadcast. The network must realise how annoying it is, because they offer a half-hour commercial-free at the end of the stage. Unfortunately, it still isn’t enough to overcome the annoyance of the interruptions before and after that.

Only occasionally do the riders appear to be working to catch their breath as they ride so incredibly hard at the high elevations. I look at it and am reminded of how I struggled to breathe up above the tree line, and I wasn’t exerting myself anywhere near the level these guys are. It boggles my mind.

The announcers more than once commented on the incredible beauty of the mountains, and as they pan back to reveal the landscape from the helicopter view, I was thrown back to being in the Himalayas and how that felt. Mountains certainly do seem to have a universal allure. At the same time that they are intimidating to bicycle on, they are also very rewarding, as their beauty unfolds in the extreme from the vantage point of a bicycle seat.

Granted, during the act of trying to race up them, it is harder to focus on how beautiful they are, but I’m pretty sure it still finds a way to seep in somehow. And there is always the joy when you are at the top and have finished all the work of having to ride up them.

My mountain this weekend is less daunting. I am at the lake offering Cyndie and her mother moral support in their task of caring for Ben and Sara’s 3 kids while the happy couple are off celebrating an anniversary in Duluth. Even if it seems like hard work at times, it comes with such wonderful rewards that any difficulty is usually quickly offset.

I’m also sneaking some time of my own to play with my little wood sculpture. Still workin’ the shape. Beck stopped by to check on my progress and offer his approval.

“Smoooth.”

No two persons experience the same reality. I understand that the guy speeding up to get around me, and honking his horn as he rushed to his exit onto the cloverleaf, thought I was all wrong to be accelerating to freeway speed to enter traffic instead of stopping to allow him to exit without slowing down, but it is difficult for me to feel in the wrong. Wouldn’t he want to be slowing down in order to exit while I am speeding up to enter? In the grand scheme of things, does that mean we are both right? He will be telling someone about me being wrong to do what I did, just as I want to say he is wrong for what he did.

If I ran the world, everything would glide along like clockwork. As it was, we reached a stalemate at the end of the distance between clovers, where I slammed on the brakes and he got across in front of me to slam on his brakes into the exit circle and I had to then use the shoulder to accelerate and enter traffic.

Maybe he had been watching the Tour de France and was in a racing frame of mind and couldn’t bring himself to consider slowing down to merge. One of the tricks I use in attempt to clear the angst that such a conflict creates is to imagine that his reality included a genuine emergency, because if so, wouldn’t I be more than happy to pause to let him rush by? Still, I feel some regret, wondering why I missed reading the situation more quickly and sensing his need before I got myself pinned down on the flat with no momentum to safely merge.

Is it unfair to hope that he is regretting not noticing I was quickly accelerating to enter traffic and he could easily slide in behind me as he slowed to exit, executing the fine art of the merge? I guess I don’t get to define his reality.

Today is the first mountain stage of this year’s Tour de France! I’m going to put that squarely into my reality. Join me there.

How many of you are watching the Tour de France this month? I’ve heard from several people who aren’t normally inclined to watch sports on television, that they are watching broadcasts of this race. I’ve not seen this much television for a long time. I think I’ve got every commercial memorized already, ad nauseum. Versus Channel does a great job of broadcasting this race to the US audience, inbetween the commercials. In the morning, it is shown live as it happens, and then rerun throughout the day, culminating in a 3-hour prime time feature that is edited to capture the most important highlights of the race with the addition of informative stories and interviews with racers and managers.

I particularly enjoyed the review of the history of the race; how it started as a way to sell more newspapers back in 1903. This version says some of the roads of France got paved as improvements for the race as it became a bigger spectacle. It amazes me how big an event it grows to become, drawing the world’s attention and inspiring the amazing technological advances to equipment and training improvements for athletes. Imagine what it would be like for the 60 racers who competed before anyone had heard of this event, to see what it has become today.

It brings to mind similar thoughts I’ve had about the machine that is the National Football League, NFL, in the US. Of course, it applies to all sports, in the way a simple game that was probably more of a club level of competition catches on as a spectator sport and eventually becomes a corporate juggernaut worth millions of dollars. It begins to take on a life of its own and nothing is out of the question to gain an advantage or sell more interest.

This year, in the Tour de France, they plan to control 2 of the stage races in a throwback to the days before technology took over and disallow use of radios between riders and the managers in the team cars. I like it. I must admit that I am torn between the two worlds. I appreciate the intensity of the present level of competion and am in awe of the amount of information being processed in that car and how it translates to performance of the riders. But I also want to see how it will play out, racing like they used to in the days before the radios.

Whenever I can, I’ll be watching the morning live broadcasts to catch the excitement as it happens. Will you?

We are free of that oppressive king and no longer suffer taxation without representation, so celebration is in order. Our tradition is to don the colors of the day, representing the teams we will compete for in the 4th of July games: red for the bats team and blue for the mice. It’s bats versus mice in an all-out battle of racing, tossing balloons, and kicking shoes. The funny thing about this exercise of forming teams is that we never get around to keeping score and there is no team victory to be had. It appears to be important at first, but once the activities get started, everyone gets lost in the thrill of competing and forgets to make any final accounting of the results. I suppose it may have something to do with the fact that prizes tend to be distributed to all participants endlessly throughout the day. My favorite was the popsicle. I went back for a second one.

Waiting eagerly for the "fish-pond" to open beyond the tub of ammunition for the water balloon toss.

No tricks: this year contestants had to pass their balloon to the person next to them after each catch.

After the games, we meet at the lodge to feast. Appetizers out front before heading inside for the main course of chicken and ribs

Kicking shoes... pretty much requires some form of trickery