The weekend

Apparently my being quite tired and really dragging @ss at work this week wasn't only because of the heat. Thursday night I discovered that I was actually sick. It was just another of those summertime colds but didn't have any severe symptoms (mostly just a scratchy throat) except for extreme fatigue.

Thursday afternoon as my wife was leaving for work, her car suddenly stopped going. Everything seemed to work okay except it wouldn't move. Well, we have this roadside assistance thing as part of our DriveTime deal, so they sent a tow truck all the way out here (we had to cover part of the towing fee, but not all of it) and hauled it in to their place in S.A. (some place on Old Perrin Beitel--which means I'll probably read their meter this coming week while our car is still there). I feared the worst, but it turns out that it's a common problem with the Ford Freestar and DriveTime is going to pay for all of it except a $50 diagnostic fee. So to that I said WHEW! and I've said it several times over the weekend every time I think about it.

Saturday my son and I attended a Cub Scout bird-watching outing at Mitchell Lake. I've been wanting to do this for some time, and I'd like to do it again in cooler weather. The kids got to ID several different birds that they hadn't seen before, and got some hands-on experience with a couple of soft-shelled turtles and one slider turtle. I kept my eyes open for alligators quietly surfacing but never saw any. There were some really big turtles sticking their heads up out there, though. As I said on Dave's blog, on the way there, we hit a bird. My son humorously pointed out the irony of the situation, even though he didn't know to use the actual word "irony." In spite of being extremely fatigued, the walk was much easier than my usual daily trek and a few of the kids learned that what they thought was enough water was not enough water. We had spare water so no one got too thirsty, and I was carrying a jug that I had filled with ice water so I passed out ice cubes for the kids to suck on toward the end of the walk. We spent about 3 hours walking around plus about another hour at the guard shack, where the kids (and myself) also got to see a rat snake that they keep in a box upstairs.

Other than that I have spent most of the weekend taking Alka Seltzer Cold Medicine and sleeping. I felt so bad I went three days without smoking a pipe, but I broke that fast today.