This was supposed to be a story about a fun (but fairly unremarkable) camping trip to the Pismo Dunes.

 

 

  

It was supposed to be about going out on the quads with Marv, Connie, and Big Jeff and having a blast, and then going out again with Connie, her sister, and two of her kids, and having an even better time. It was about the kids kicking my ass, but beating the both of them at a drag race. It was about learning that I can keep up with the eleven year old, but not the thirteen year old.

 

 

  

It was about watching guys jump over a ridge, and seeing one flip his bike and get seriously hurt and medevac’d out.

 

 

  

It was about drinking tequila and dancing in the sand and discovering a hole in the trailer roof right over my bed in the middle of the night.

 

 

  

But then I got home and farted around with pictures for a while.

But then I got home and farted around with pictures for a while.And got a phone call.

Can we borrow your truck? Marv’s died, and we’re still at the beach.

So around 8 o’clock last night, after I’d been home and showered for a couple of hours, the entire Marvin family dragged in in the daughter’s new car, minus a truck and trailer. Marv borrowed his neighbor’s great big fancy King Ranch dually Ford (lottery gods, by the way, this is what I want) and hooked it up to his flatbed trailer.

With a four-hour minimum one-way trip, I figured they’d need relief drivers as much as the actual truck, and I’d had more rest time, so I grabbed my camera and a sweatshirt. I drove my truck down while Connie kept me awake and Marv’s son-in-law kept him awake in the dually.

Between road construction, wandering detours, and finding a damn adaptor for the trailer lights, we rolled back into Pismo at 3 AM. A bored deputy followed us for a while, probably wondering what we were going to steal with that empty car trailer (we probably had 100K of equipment right there with us—why would we be stealing anything?)

We got down onto the beach. The contrast from the off-road highway of earlier afternoon to the drizzly emptiness of early morning was startling. There was hardly anyone left on the beach, and those that were, were sound asleep. Perfectly sensible of them; it was five hours past my bedtime too.

We parked the expensive borrowed rig down on the hard sand where it wouldn’t get stuck and aired down my tires for traction. I yanked out Marv’s truck with no problems at all, but was a little confounded by how they expected to get it onto the flatbed with no winch. We couldn’t unhitch the dually, because I’d just drag the trailer.

So, somehow, Marv had me pull from the side and paralleling the dually while he steered his truck up onto the flatbed ramps. This was complicated by the fact that the sideways pull in the sand kept trying to aim my back end at the dually’s fenders and the tow strap kept catching on the flatbed’s fenders. Not to mention that Marv’s truck was aired down as well, so when it hit the ramps, the tires just kind of smooshed into them instead of rolling nicely up.

Here, I drew you a fancy diagram.

I didn’t know that it was nearly impossible to load a truck that way, so I went right ahead and did it.

 

 

  

 

 

  

Then it was on to get the trailer, which seemed to have sunk slightly into a pit of quicksand over the weekend.

Then it was on to get the trailer, which seemed to have sunk slightly into a pit of quicksand over the weekend.I hooked up to it. And I pulled. And I spun the tires. And I poured sand into my open windows. And I did not budge the trailer.

So I backed up, and that was more successful, but there was another truck in the way, so backing it all the way down the beach (in the dark!) was not going to be an option. Fortunately, one of the kids of the party had stayed the night, so Marv woke his ass up at 3:30 to pull me and the trailer out. He hitched up his big yellow Ford, and after a couple of false starts and yanks to the side, out we both went to the beach, full throttle and rooster-tails of sand the whole way. I bet the people trying to sleep were pleased!

Look! Another bad drawing!

Finally, we were out on the hard sand, and proceeded uneventfully to the pavement, where we aired my tires back up, got some snacks, and had a potty break before we hit the road.

And then I learned that a 27-foot trailer that’s nosed down over your hitch is a whole different ball game to tow than my lightweight little 22-foot trailer. There’s an awful lot of tail to wag that dog, and we had to keep it pretty slow and easy. I hadn’t realized that Connie doesn’t know how to pull a trailer, so I was doing all of the driving home too, and Marv didn’t want to let someone else drive a borrowed truck, so he did too. Our company kept us both awake, but we still saw the sun come up less than halfway into the drive home.

We rolled in around 8:30 this morning. I was still so wired from my dinner of Pepsi, ice cream, and a pocket full of those little peanut-butter-filled pretzel thingys that I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I’d wanted to (which I did, really.) But both Marv and I had to work, so I ran home, brushed my fuzzy teeth, and stumbled on in to the office. About an hour later, it hit me, and I came home and crashed after having been awake for 27 hours, and driving for 13 of them. Three hours later, I was back in the office, merely tired but no longer falling to pieces. But you can bet that I’m going to bed early tonight!

So, in summary; trips to Pismo:good.

Breaking down in Pismo: not good.

Helping your buddy out when he needs it: good.

Getting to rib him about the Dodge rescuing the Ford: priceless!

My custody schedule is such that the parent who has them drops them off at school or camp or whatever on Friday morning, and then the other parent picks them up when they are done. Usually this has the added side benefit of minimizing my interaction with that jackass, but the jackass switched things all up this summer for his own convenience. He’s having his wife, who’s a teacher, watch the kids during most of the summer, and laid it on thick to me about the importance of dropping them off and picking them up on time to minimize the inconvenience to her. I don’t know who he thinks he’s talking to, because I’m the one who’s chronically punctual, and she has yet to even be home when I’ve gone to pick them up at my alloted time, but that’s the kind of asshole he is.

He couched the change in terms of making it better for the kids, and it’s true; they were getting a little bored at their old after-school care. But they’re bored at his place too, and he lied. The only reason he wanted to switch was to save money. I have enough money; I can send my kid to karate school and pick him up when it’s convenient to me. I’m not the one who went and saddled myself with a fucking McMansion and a mortgage payment to go with it.

And for the month that his wife is back at work but the kids are still out of school, that just meant that they had to go somewhere new and just as far for me to travel. Seamus likes it well enough, but John’s not very sports-oriented, and is bored silly at this new place.

So when I found out about Space Camp, I jumped on the opportunity. Sure, it cost three times as much as regular day camp, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that would interest John, and trust me, that kid needs all of the social interaction he can get. Only trouble is, it gets out at 3 and I don’t get off work until 5.

No big deal; I’m picking him up and running him home. He’s old enough to stay home for a couple of hours. And so, I planned my camping trip (months ago!) to leave at noon on Friday, after I dropped them both off.

Jackass only thinks just now to casually drop that neither he nor his wife will be able to pick up the kids until 5 on that day. And he’s not even at work; he’s off doing some jackass thing. As if his vacation is so much more important than mine that he can blow off his parental responsibilities just like that. Because, of course, I have no life and will be glad to stay late.

Never mind that that puts me down at Pismo well after dark, and I’ll have to navigate the beach by myself. Never mind that he’s the one violating the custody agreement. And when I got ticked at him, he had the nerve to throw it in my face that I couldn’t pick Seamus up at the pool at 4 one day last week (on an hour’s notice no less.) Sorry, but I’m pretty sure actually working for a living trumps farting around with racecars or what-the-fuck-ever he’s doing. I have two jobs, asshole. I can’t drop everytihng to get a kid your wife is supposed to be watching. Y’all should have planned that one better between yourselves.

I may end up taking John from Space Camp down to the other camp, paying them extra, and still getting on the road late. God, I’m so pissed that my blood pressure is going through the roof. I’m entirely ashamed that I ever married such a prick, much less reproduced with him. I’d feel much better if my children didn’t have such a dominant dickhead gene.

SUCH a jackass!

Being as it was only 110° today, after dinner, I decided to go out and work on getting the trailer ready to go on Friday.

I started filling up the clean water, and then I wandered inside.

I checked that the fridge was working—almost stuck my damp hand to the metal shelf in the freezer—yup, it’s working.

I poured the green stuff into the toilet, and then tried to run the water to wash it down. Duh, dummy, the pump’s off.

So I went to turn the pump on, and nothing. No light at the switch, no ominous gurgle, no “bzzzt;” nothing.

“This is not good,” I thought.

I tried to use my brain, but it was really hot in there (maybe 120°?) and it had shorted out.

I thought, “Oh, you idiot, of course it doesn’t work! There’s still not enough water in the tank!” And I went outside to pull some weeds and cool off while the tank filled.

But then I went back inside, and still there was nothing. Pictures of pump replacements were roiling through the inside of my head where my brain used to be. I have rather vivid memories of fixing the pump in the old trailer, but I don’t even know where this one is.

So I started looking for it. I opened every damn cupboard, pulled off every velcroed access panel, and looked thoughtfully around as if it were something I’d misplaced. No pump.

“Ah-HA!” the light bulb went on. I still had the manuals, and it only took me three tries to find those. I sat on the steps in the sun to read them, because it was cooler.

No plumbing schematic, but it did mention something about a fuse. But while I was looking for the pump access, I also hadn’t found anything that resembled a fuse panel, although I did find a remote-controlled front loader and a mosquito coil.

I looked around again, this time really hard. And the gods of Home Improvement, RV Division, took pity on me and lo, the light did shine above my head and the panel did become apparent. Yeah, right in front of me, below the fridge.

So I read the fuse list and yanked out a couple. I hollered at the kids that I’d be right back and to not kill or maim each other while I was gone, and headed down to the hardware store for replacements. I thought I’d be canny and buy several of each size to have on hand, but I forgot that the town had already done rolled up the streets, and the hardware store was closed.

Craaap. If I left it until tomorrow, surely Murphy would have his way with me, and it would actually be the pump gone bad, not a fuse, and I’d have one less day to fix it before the trip. Fortunately, my luck seems to be corrugated today, and the auto-parts store was still open. I bought my assortment, the kid behind the counter who is also my across-the-street neighbor promised to use his discount for me on my brake pads (but probably only because he hadn’t seen me fish out the original fuses from my bra, where I’d stashed them when I left the house without a pocket to my name), and I was off like a prom dress.

Woohoo! It was the fuse. The pump’s all worky now, and I can continue my usual preparations of overpacking and overcooking. Pasta salad for twenty, anyone?

It’s hot everywhere, I know. And I live in a place where it’s perfectly normal to have some summer days over 110°. But there’ve been what?—ten or so in a row now? And it’s not cooling down at night either.

That’s fine for the people with air conditioners. Sure, their power bills are going to be huge, and their units are really struggling to get their houses down to 80° or so.

But all I’ve got is a swamp cooler. Normally, in this dry climate, that works just fine. Even when it gets up there, it’s OK because it cools back down at night. But it’s been hot at night too, and knocking the temperature down by 20 degrees or so might be perfectly comfortable when it’s only 100° outside, but when it’s 110° and above, it’s not so good. And of course, the cooler makes it extremely humid in the house, to the point where the smoke alarms are going off and all of the doors are sticking shut. Is 90° and 100% humidity inside really all that much better than 110° and somewhat drier outside? I posit that it’s not.

In fact, I took the kids to a movie specifically to bask in the A/C and then suggested that they have a water gun fight out back in the shade. I was feeling so sick from the heat that I couldn’t imagine that they felt fine sitting in the front room, which is the most stifling but also where the TV is. I shipped them off to their father’s on Sunday, who has an A/C and also friends with pools.

I then proceeded to make myself sick doing a backflow job in 100° before 10 AM, and then went home to further bake. I spent most of the day starfished on my bed under the best ceiling fan, wearing as little clothing as possible and rotating through four ice packs on my head. The cat laid with me, but I couldn’t stand for him to touch me. He was hot enough that he gladly let me dribble ice water on his tummy, and the dog grudgingly allowed me to hose him off every couple of hours.

It was too hot to nap, although we’re not sleeping well either; it’s only slightly cool between the hours of 3 and 5 AM, and then it starts to heat back up. I had to move the kitten indoors at night because to lock him in the laundry room would be cruel and unusual, so we have the thrill of having an overheated litter box to smell too.

I couldn’t wait to go to work, where it’s slightly cooler. The kids are each at their appropriate day camp, so they can cool off too. Besides, my internet’s out at home.

And it’s supposed to continue for the rest of the week.

Someone on my message board posed the interesting question asking who on the board had a good life growing up. So many people, even those well-off, had challenging childhoods. I answered there, but I find myself thinking on the subject more and more, and it was getting too long for a message board post.

Well, not me. I had it great, and I know it. We lived in a small enough town that I could ride my bike to elementary school, and the Junior High was even closer. I got along with my sister (for the most part) and I had friends my age all through the neighborhood. 

My Mom stayed home with me and my sister when we were very young, then worked the same hours as the school for a number of years after that. We were latchkey kids, but we were old enough to deal with it. A little time to ourselves was nice, as well as the trust involved in getting to be home alone. Later, she went to work in the evenings, which is why I learned to cook, but it was always big fun rather than a tedious chore.

I don’t remember ever seeing my parents fighting. We were well into middle-class—my dad was a big saver, so we didn’t go on fancy vacations with hotels and planes much (altohugh I do remember a great trip to Disneyland, which stands out partially because of it’s uniqueness), but we went camping for one or two weeks every year, without fail. They drove us all over the West. Some years we had a boat or a camping trailer; some years it was camping out of tents, but I grew up seeing most of the best parts of California.

We had a lot of freedom, compared to what my children are allowed. My friends and I could take our dogs and just take off for the day during the summer, and we couldn’t have been much more than ten. There was an empty field a few blocks over (that’s covered with million-dollar houses now) that we’d spend hours in, completely unsupervised. We belonged to a community pool, and we could ride our bikes there in the summer. The neighbor kids all treated all of the moms as interchangeable. Summers especially were fabulous. Unstructured play time for children seems almost like a thing of the past now.

Mom grew a garden, and was totally permissive in letting us have odd pets. Besides the usual cats and dogs, we had all of the small mammals, chickens, ducks, and the odd tarantula or two. Every year, we’d hatch out butterflies, tomato hornworms, preying mantises, pollywogs; you name it. When the third grade hatched eggs as a science project, we were the kids who got to take the chicks home, although we lived in town. I raised a number of baby animals on bottles, including a memorable pair of field mice. Not a lot of moms would put up with that in the house! But Mom’s the one who started me on kitchen science; she handed down the whole philosophy of being responsible for knowing where your food comes from.

My sister and I were both encouraged to go to work after school at a young age, but we weren’t forced to by any means. I started volunteering for a vet at the age of fourteen, because that’s what I wanted to go into, and my folks were totally supportive of this. With the money from that job, I bought my first car, and Dad spent hours helping me fix it up.

My Dad’s thriftiness paid off for him when he paid a thirty-year mortgage off in seventeen years and sent both me and my sister to four years of college each. If I didn’t have that degree, I’d be nowhere near the success that I am today, even though I’m not actually working in my degree field. Dad understood that it’s the paper and effort that counts more than the major, and didn’t discourage me from following my dream. He knew that a course of study that kept me interested would pay off much more than one that would stifle me, and he was right.

The best part, I think, was that Dad always treated my sister and I as if we had every right and ability do do absolutely anything that we wanted with our lives, and I grew up in the borderline of the time when that wasn’t always the case for girls. They never assumed that we would just get married and go on to be mothers and little else; they always took it for granted that we would want a complete education and power over our own lives. They weren’t disappointed when each of us did get married and have children, but they wanted that not to be our only option, and they gave us the skills to back that up. I think Dad’s rather proud that I own my own business now, even if it’s small. He sure supported Mom when she had her businesses.

I may not always succeed in following the model they laid for us; I’m not the money-manager that Dad would like me to be, but I’ve done the best I can in the situation that I have to deal with. I like who I am and where I came from, and that’s all due to them; thanks, Mom and Dad!

Internet dating is an awful lot like shopping for a vehicle.

You have a pretty good idea of what you want, so you sit down at the computer and start to comparison shop. Right away you go to the used-car site and start to click off your requirements, narrowing down the search.

Click – I want a truck

Click – four-wheel drive

Click – in decent condition

Click – and I’d like this brand

Click – with this mileage range

Click – and, if at all possible, I’d like air conditioning

Click – and a CD player

And then you sit back and see what sorted out of all of that, and is available locally.

Sometimes the site laughs at you, “Are you crazy?! There ain’t nothing like that around here unless you’re willing to fork over some serious dough!” So you go back and uncheck a parameter or two that you weren’t all that serious about anyway, because dude, you need a vehicle. This walking shit’s getting old, and maybe you don’t need a CD player as much as you thought you did.

So then you’ve got a list of used trucks available and local dealerships. Some of them you can eliminate right off the bat. No, I don’t want a 1993 Honda. Why are you trying to sell me a station wagon? That’s not what I’m looking for. Mister, just take your Lincoln and walk away. Do I look like a luxury SUV sort of person? No, I thought not.

But hey, here’s a nice-looking two-wheel drive truck; I should go down and look at that one.

And you get to the dealership and you walk around the vehicle. You’re justifying the purchase in your mind a little, because you’re getting tired of taking the bus and you haven’t seen what you really want anyway and you’re getting sort of tired of smelling different used cars and wondering what in the world the stain on that seat is. Was that … blood? You wonder. Ew.

But this one is pretty dang nice for a two-wheel drive truck. It doesn’t have any obvious dents. It’s an older model, but it seems to still run. Maybe it’s sat in the showroom for a while. Maybe it was sold at auction under a lemon law recall. Eventually you sit in it a little and start to get sort of a feel for what kind of vehicle it actually is.

And you get to thinking, “I wanted a four-wheel drive. Could I be happy with a two-wheel drive?” And the answer is no, not really. Which is sort of helped when you find out that it’s for sale because it was confiscated in a drug bust. No, definitely not the sort of car I need to get into.

Sometimes you do run across one that superficially looks like what you want, and you take it for a test drive. Wonderful things, those test drives. Take a long enough test drive, and you can tell if you’ve got a truck you can live with or if this one’s got a knock in the motor that you can hear coming for miles and the transmission’s starting to slip. You’ve already been burned by bad trannys before, so after getting the dealer’s hopes up, you take it back with a firm, “No, thanks.”

Every once in a while the mechanical problems aren’t immediately evident, and you go home with the truck you think you’ll drive until it falls apart. You never knew that it had been in a major accident; sure, there were extensive repairs, but you never can bend a frame all the way back into true without leaving some structural weaknesses. Sometimes they’re flaws you can live with, and you go on and keep it until it does fall apart, at which point you’re just back at square one, shopping for the holy grail of the automotive world yet again.

You see women who’ve had the same car for years and years, after all. It’s got to be possible, even if they have ended up having to rebuild the motor three times and have done some major body work. Sure, a classic low rider wasn’t what they intended to spend the rest of their lives with, but that’s what the car they bought evolved into over the years. You don’t want a classic low rider, or a top-fuel dragster, or even a motorcycle. You just want a regular four-wheel drive pickup truck. You see them on the road everywhere; is it so foolish to think that maybe there’s one out there for you? It sure seems that way these days.

And no, this guy didn’t get a test drive. Perfectly nice shopping experience, just not the truck for me.

Because I just got my State certification as a small business!

There were quite a few hoops through which to jump, but if I want to have anything to do with Federal or State contracts, this is going to be invaluable. A woman-owned, certified small business gets two chunks of 5% preference each in the bid process, and at this size, I need to take any advantage that I can get.

It’s not like I’m going to be rushing out bidding on million-dollar contracts, but I want to do more work for the County. The CHP contacted me about doing their tests last year, but my ducks weren’t in a row yet. And I’m eyeballing the federal prison—I bet they have backflow preventer or two and I’m already cleared to work at their facility through my day job.

But things are always a-changing around here. My partner going to Iraq is throwing a wrench in the works on our main operator contract. We’d hoped that we could just swap us out as prime and subcontractor, but it looks like that would involve the whole works going out for bid again, and who knows if we’d win it or not? So we’re keeping him as prime, but when he’s gone, I’ll actually do all of the work. We haven’t discussed what this is going to do as far as my billing rate to him, but it’s going to be bumped.

That is, if they keep us on at all. They have some big nebulous plan in place to run the water system a little more thoroughly (as they should—we’ve been telling them so for years) and now it looks like they’re going to have to do their own wastewater pretreatment before it gets to the City plant downstream. They can either contract out all of that work, or do as Big Jeff suggests and just hire someone to do it all. Of course, he has himself in mind for that position (if it’s only one) but I warned him that I want it too. He has more experience in some areas, but I have more training in others, which is why we work well together as a business team. We both need a job, but I think we can face the competition and remain friends. Meanwhile, the County isn’t writing us a new contract for the year, but extending us on a month-to-month basis. I know how these things work, and I predict that we’ll be essentially contractless but doing the work for approximately 17 months. Fine by me; it gives me time to go get those two certs that Jeff has and I don’t, and that will even up the playing field considerably.

So, in a couple of hours, I’m off to celebrate in the form of a blind date with a complete stranger. Yes, another internet guy; we’re meeting for dinner and cutting through the bullshit. We’ve already agreed that if we click, we click; if we don’t, no hard feelings. Takes the pressure off, although I am getting just a little bit blasé about the whole online dating thing. I barely even get nervous any more.

 

The girls and I went to a concert in the park last night, and it was fantastic.

How bad could it be with Chris Cagle playing anyway? I really like him. At one point, he sang a song that he said he wouldn’t record because it was too personal, and he had me just a little teared up (and y’all know I’m not a teary sort.) I believe the lyrics were something along the lines of:

When you love somebody so deeply, you know they’ll never leave
and then they do…

Yeah, that hit a little too close to home.

But the company was outstanding. It was just three of us (Marci and Danielle and me) because the other two women that we’d hoped could come, couldn’t. I tried to give the extra two tickets away to several friends, but with only an hour’s notice, I didn’t have any takers. At five dollars a pop, it wasn’t a big loss; I’d bought an extra ticket in the first place just so I could bring Seamus if his dad couldn’t take him (John’s at camp.)

The venue was great too. It was in a beautiful park in north Fresno, so it was small but not too terribly crowded. Everyone brought lawn chairs or blankets and seating was a free-for-all. It was exactly the sort of concert to which you’d bring your kids, and there were a lot of kids and families there. I walked up close to the stage to take a few pictures, but I didn’t want to bother the people sitting there, so I stuck to the sides. I’ll add them when I get them out of the camera.

The music was fantastic. He didn’t play my favorite boat song, but that was OK. He did play a few non-country songs and some things that he hadn’t recorded yet, as well as plenty of his older stuff. It was a good balance; you got the feeling that he was just a guy hanging out in your living room playing whatever he felt like, although I’m sure it was more choreographed than that. But he’d stop every couple of songs and talk to the audience and answer questions. It was a very mellow evening, and very nice. I’d go to another one even if it wasn’t one of my favorite singers.

Or, My descent into complete and utter pointlessness.

There’s a great big ol’ grass fire upwind of me. The smoke’s flowing over my town and then just sort of stopping there. Seriously, the town five miles to the south has clear skies. It’s colored the sunlight a bilious sort of yellow. The contrast to normal light is so great that things that are normally white in full-spectrum sunlight are showing up as a sort of a blue/ultraviolet sort of color. It’s kind of neat to see, but perhaps flipping my polarized sunglasses on and off to watch the effects might not be such a good idea while I’m driving.

But aside from the nifty optical illusions, this crud in the air is really hard on us asthmatics. I never had much in the way of allergies until the last few years, but this week, even my normal daily nose pill isn’t doing squat. And, of course, it takes me two days of stumbling around with a blinding headache to put cause to effect and just give in and take the big guns already.

On Tuesday, it was so bad it was making me want to puke, so I gave in and went home. I took two Benadryl and crashed for an hour or three (with an evil kitten sleeping on me) and that started to take the edge off. By the next day, I was OK, but it’s starting to creep back up on me. I took a preemptive dose this morning, but Benadryl really knocks me out so I only took half. So now I have the allergy headache and I want to crawl under my desk and take a nap.

I may be able to get away with going home for a while in the middle of the day; it’s a slow day, but I hate to burn up my very limited leave time on actually being sick. And tonight’s Girls’ Night Out, with a concert in the park and new friends to hang out with. I don’t really feel like being a zombie for that, but showing up with bed-head and pillow marks on my face isn’t a great plan either. And since I’m driving, I’m sure the rest of them really don’t want me drugged up either.

What to do, what to do? (I’m probably going for the nap.)

 

I suppose I should update and reassure people that I’m not being all depressed and hiding under a blanket or anything. I’m fine! There was no heartbreak involved in this, just a little disappointment and no small amount of annoyance at seeing him all over the online dating site already. I don’t know that I’m even capable of getting to the point where heartbreak is a possibility these days. Whatever, dude!

Besides, I’d pretty much already written him off for non-communication at least three times in the—what? Three months?—that we dated, and the most recent time was very recently indeed. Which is why I was online surfing other men to see him on there in the first place.

I turned my profile back on, although as usual, I will probably flip it on and off as the whim takes me. And I’ve got friends that I was sure to notify that I was single again so they could spread the word, and I’m actually sort of looking forward to dating again. I don’t want a roller coaster, but I’m getting better at spotting those types ahead of time and heading them off at the pass.

There’s still time to salvage some fun for the summer. And I already bought a fishing license, so if I can find one willing to teach me to fish, I’m golden.

So if any of you all have single (male!) friends (preferably in their 40s, but that’s negotiable) that like to hunt, fish, camp, go four-wheelin’, rodeo, and/or cowboy, send ‘em my way!