Whatta Weekend!

I hope all of you reading this had a great holiday weekend. Carol and I sure did.

Thanks to those of you who commented on last week’s posts and emailed me with good wishes and advice. I’d like to respond to a few of those here.

To Kenju and Nankin: C’mon, ladies! Do you honestly think I’d go camping as in “camping?" In this heat!? MOI!?

“Camping,” in this usage, is a euphemism. The correct term should be “RV-ing.” We pull a hard-sided pop-up trailer behind our Dodge van. This trailer becomes our dwelling. But we DO park it in a space in a campground, so that’s why we call it “camping.”

After parking it, leveling it, and popping it up, we connect the water supply and electricity. The first electrical item we turn on is the air conditioner. Later in the set-up phase we connect the color TV-VCR combination to both the electricity and (if there’s no cable hook-up) (drat it!) to the power-amplified outside TV antenna. Unlike many, we do NOT travel with a portable dish antenna to receive all the DirecTV channels.

Of course, we activate the water heater and the refrigerator. Under the gas range is a combination oven/microwave unit. After moving the cold items from the ice chest into the electric/gas refrigerator, we usually sit back, pop a cold beer, and “rough it” with the best of them.

Oh yes, sleeping is quite comfortable in our king-size bed. Thanks for asking.

At this particular campground and RV park there WERE about a dozen folks staying in tents. In 100+ degree heat. All hardier souls than I.

To Michelle: Although I suppose I’m happy to have provided you with some amusement, I assure you there is no laughter in my mouth when my golf ball caroms off a tree and ends up farther from the hole than before I swung at it.

In fact, if you laughed at that story, on this particular weekend of golf I hit one stroke that would have had you hospitalized, had you seen it. The ball struck a rock, shot straight up, grazed a tree limb deflecting it slightly backward as it continued up into the sky where I lost sight of it momentarily. I next saw it screaming down from the clouds straight at my head! Only by extreme athleticism was I able to avoid an almost certain death blow. The ball whizzed past my ear, slammed into the ground, and rolled just enough to stop about six inches behind where I had struck it.

I thought of my post Friday and my joking comment about hitting a tree and going backwards. I muttered a few choice words under my breath and swatted at it again. This time it missed the rock but hit the same tree. It ended up deep in the trees and weeds and was never seen again. Not one of my better holes.

Once you pick yourself up off the floor (and get your breath back) you may continue reading.

I’ll try to regale you with camping stories tomorrow, if, as Candace says, I can get my groove back.

Meanwhile, I had to look up “euphemism” in the Dictionary of the Moment (DotM). It’s defined as a word that sounds nicer than some other word with similar meaning. The root is the Greek “euphos” which means “mercy.” We also get the word “euphanasia,” often spelled “euthanasia,” which means “young people in China and surrounding areas.”

"Mercy!"