Father Son Camp Out

You can always tell when my life gets crazy because I don't post anything. What a wonderful weekend this has been. Let me start with Friday. This weekend was father and sons campout. We do that every year in May and I really look forward to it. This year was especially exciting for me because I thought I might have both Brandon and Ben home. Brandon wrote his last final Friday morning and Ben was supposed to walk on Friday night. He just finished off three AA degrees and his last semester was straight "A's" while he carried a load of 16 credits and worked part time. He decided to skip walking for his diploma so he could come on the camp out with me. I felt bad that he would miss walking because I felt he deserved it but he assured me that what really mattered would be when he got his Bachelors degree since that is really what counted.

In the end Brandon couldn't make it because Serene had something Saturday morning so it was just Ben, Alex and myself. We packed up Settlers of Catan and headed to William Heise park. We ate dinner at this really good Mexican place "Cotija's" and headed up the mountain. We got there after dark and visited around the fire for a while and when the little boys started heading for bed we fired up the lantern and played Settlers until 2:00AM. Only once did one of the dads get up and ask us when we were going to bed so we did better than I figured we would.

Come time to go to bed and we decided it was a beautiful night so we didn't bother with the tent and we just slept under the very beautiful stars. The moon was bright so we missed out on some of the stars but it was still wonderful sleeping out in the wild.

Saturday morning I woke up to Ben and Alex jumping on me. It was a beautiful morning. We ate breakfast and then the plan was to go give my guns some exercise. I don't get the chance to shoot them much living here in California but since we were so close to the desert I decided it was time. I'd heard that you can just go out in the desert and find a secluded spot and shoot so off we went. When we dropped down out of the mountains into the desert we soon passed a sign that said we were entering a park and "NO SHOOTING". After seeing the sign I figured it would be hard to feign ignorance so we turned around and headed south. We didn't see any signs that way so we found a little trail that headed into a canyon and packed in my 22, 30-06, 30-30, Winchester 12 gauge pump and Bens 22 auto and his 12 gauge side by side. It was a great morning but my shoulder is throbbing a bit still and it is now 48 hours later.

I was particularly happy to see that I haven't lost my touch. I was worried about the shot gun though. Ben and I went shooting once before and I couldn't hit anything with my shot gun. This time I set up a target that wasn't moving and saw that I was shooting high. I then just dropped it down a foot and by the time we left I was shooting about 80% hitting the clay pigeons.

At one point as we were lighting up the canyon a poor unfortunate crow decided to fly by and see what was going on. Ben happened to be shooting at that time and took out the crow. The big fellow didn't feel a thing and dropped like a rock. I was quite surprised to see how BIG those things are up close.

The cactuses (cacti?) out there were vicious. No matter how hard you tried you ended up getting some of them stuck into your body. They would even go through the soles of your shoes. It is Monday and I'm still pulling them out of my body.

After we wore ourselves out we decided to come home and unpack Bens moving truck. I really feel bad about that. Poor Ben and Sharley had to pack up their entire worldly possesions in Arizona all by themselves. When they got here I assured them that I would help but they waited until Saturday (I offered to help on Friday) and Alex had his senior Prom. I had to be there to take pictures so there was Ben and Sharley all by themselves with no help on this end either. I was much relieved however to learn that Patrick Carey did show up to help them out. Thank you Patrick.

I now need to talk about Prom and about the arrival of Brandon and family but since this posting is running on I will continue the account later.

Dixie sent me this cute Dilbert cartoon. I love Dilbert, he is probably my favorite cartoon. You can probably tell why. Thanks Dixie.