Thursday, June 10, 2010

Thursday already?

This week sure is zipping on by!  Just returned from a great morning walk along the Greenbelt.  The Snake River is very high. It's running 23,900 cfs.  Normal is a little below 10,000 cfs.  Somebody needs to clean the glass in front of the city's webcam so you could see it better.  I think I will pursue that today--CLEAN THE GLASS!

It's quite cool out today--temps in the mid-50's.  If you believe the weather people, it's probably going to be even cooler.  No rain in sight---yet. 

Susun set up our cheap croquet set last night and we played 5 games.  She purposely made it conform to the rolling topography of our backyard.  I was down 0-2 but came back to win the series 3-2.  She choked in the final two games and I won easily.  What happened was that I started playing "air guitar" with the croquet mallet and it made her laugh so hard she couldn't concentrate on her shots.  Now that we have learned about the tenets and precepts of Extreme Croquet, you can bet we will be playing EVERYWHERE!  We don't need no grass to enjoy this game.  Rocks will do just fine.  Craters of the Moon Croquet here we come.

Spent lots more time messing with camp stuff yesterday.  Even if we're not actually camping, per se, I can still reap plenty of enjoyment from simply messing with camp gear.  The big project was organizing our "rope box."  Back in our River Daze, people called ropes "hoopie."  I'll never know why.  Sometimes we call it our Hoopie Box.  The big breakthrough yesterday was buying four electrical cord organizers to use for rope instead.  Now we have our ropes color coded by length and type.  Disgustingly Type A, isn't it?  I kind of look at it the same way a fisherman would look at his/her tackle box.  YOu have to have your lures, flies and tackle organized so you can catch fish, right?  Well, the same goes for the arcane infrastructure of camping.  If you get to camp and your hoopie are all in a rat's next mess, what good do hoopie do?

I also used the electric drill to wire-brush the inside of the campstove and gave it a thorough cleaning.  Goodbye, bacon grease!  Next, I did the same thing to the antique flame tender.  Things are getting way too organized out there in the Camp Warehouse.

Yesterday's biggest job was roto-tillling the garden with balky front tine tiller.  Gee, those things are tough to control.  Anyway, the garden is totally tilled and looks real spiff.  Susun's going to plant it today.  She's been a whirling dervish around here since Tuesday.  In two days time she's pretty much transformed the place and it looks tidy, well-kept and like someone actually lives here.  Novel idea, eh?

Today we will mess with the boat some more.  We're making progress on putting all of our boating gear together but more work is needed.  That's about it for this morning.  Have a great day & Cheers, jp

3 comments:

Marti Spudboater said...

Wow Johnny: You've been a Busy Boy today. "Hoopie" sure brings back memories from my first days river rangering on the Rogue River, which is where I first became familiar with that term from Fred McDonald and Steve Romoff. I think they picked it up from when they worked in Grand Canyon with Wayne Ranney, Norm Henderson and Bryan Brown. Only whitewater trash typically over the age of 50 are familiar with the term. And you aren't to type A. Hoopie is worthless if it's not lashed up and organzied some how. Who wants to spend all day untangling when you could be drinking beer and playing croquet?

Maggie said...

Guess that makes me whitewater trash. Memories came flooding back to me after seeing that word again. I must've failed that class, though, as I still can't wind up a garden hose to save my life. I think it's because I'm a left-handed blonde.

Kbred777 said...

Hoopie reminds me of being on various rivers with both John and Susun as a kid. You guys gave me my first canoe paddle! We need to do a trip again sometime - I would like to show Mike what a good river trip is all about!