adventures of a canoelover

My mechanic has his shop around the corner from the Hummer/Cadillac dealer. As you might guess, it’s a ghost town without the tumbleweeds. I can’t think of a single sane person who is in the market for a 12 mpg vehicle.

When I drove past, I noticed that all the vehicles had little American flags on them. I don’t see these little flags anywhere else around town—Ford, Chrysler, Toyota, Mazda…no flags. But the Hummer/Cadillac dealer has flags galore.

There is, of course, the mother of all flags flying over the dealership, a flag the size of a football field, which is, to be honest, gorgeous. It flies 24/7 except on football Saturdays, when the giant Wisconsin W flag flies (after all, one must have priorities). It apparently has spawned thousands of little flags that have attached themselves to these gas-sucking symbols of affluenza.

It is embarrassing. Hey world, not all of us Americans are conspicuously consumptive pigs who think putting a fifty-cent flag on a $50,000 vehicle makes you patriotic.

Of course, even as I write this, the Senate fiddles while Rome burns.

This was fun…I saw this winged creature and took it for a moth because of the body shape, but it is most assuredly not a moth. It’s a Silver-spotted Skipper (Epargyreus clarus), the largest of the normally little skippers, which is why it took me so long to identify it.

He was shy so it took a while to sneak up on him. I got pretty close. You can’t see the silver spot unless you get a side view.

If you know Megan, no words are necessary. If you don’t know Megan, then it can’t be explained in a blog posting. Suffice it to say that Megan will be ordering several cases of this if it’s still in stock.

Yes, friends. Canned bacon. Ten year shelf life. 40-50 pieces per can. Just heat and eat.

From our friends at MRE Depot. While I am intrigued, I am not sure I am $109.95 worth of intrigued.

…except when you’re in the middle of the red and yellow stripe. And you have been for a few days now. And you’re trying to film a DVD on kayak fishing.

As of February 2008, white law requires an Obama 08 bumper sticker to be placed on the back of every Prius. Though these stickers reach peak effectiveness during an election year, it is acceptable to leave this sticker on the car until the next election regardless of whether or not the candidate actually won. If it’s a disputed election like in 2000, the sticker can be left on for the life of the car.

If a white person does not feel like supporting a candidate, they will likely select a bumper sticker that tells other people what to do. Some popular ones include telling people to Coexist and to stop eating meat.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/05/21/100-bumper-stickers/

There’s some good paddling to be had on the Lower Wisconsin. Sadly, there won’t be much good camping as the sandbars will all be under water.

Strange how my affect often follows the same trend as the water levels…

After the last “heavy” posting, as one of my friends called it, I felt that I should put some yin in there with the yang.

I bought six fart machines.

Sam, who is staying with us for a week or so, had a conversation last night with Stephanie that went something like this:

Sam: “So what’s it like being married to a man who buys fart machines in bulk?”

Stephanie: “Actually…he bought them for me.” (Stephanie teaches middle school.)

Sam: “I retract the question.”

So this morning Sam tells me about the conversation and asks me, “So what’s it like being married a woman who wants fart machines in bulk? My answer: “It’s a helluva lot of fun.”

I really feel sorry for the kids in her classes today, It’s going to be total carnage. The fifteen farts are all good stuff, really different from each other. Gourmet farts. I don’t know who the fart model was, but they were quite talented. The addition of the sub-woofer to the unit (I am not kidding) makes them resonate nicely.

So as you see, I am not always Mr. Philosophical.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

P.S. Yes, I gave one to Weidman. Against my better judgement. Nancy hates it that I gave him one, which is probably behind my subconscious desire to do it.

For the longest time I attributed this quote to the great Benjamin Disraeli, as it got stuck in my head that way and frankly, it’s the sort of thing he’d say. So the man who brought us Cats also brought us this little nugget of wisdom. To be fair, it was Andrew Lloyd Webber, not T.S. who mangled a perfectly good little book on silly cats into a Broadway spectacle. But I digress.

I have known a fair number of people who wanted to be important, and frankly I’m dealing with a few of them now. They are totally unconcerned for being effective, but simply want to hold power so that they can fill some sinkhole in their psyche that can’t be filled by anything else. It’s a false premise anyway, as those who seek power inevitably lose it in some manner or another.

The other sort of difficult person is someone who needs to interact only with important people (or more correctly, people they think are important). So the sales reps who skip the staff (the people who potentially sell their stuff), the sales managers (the people who direct the people to potentially sell their stuff), and skip “right to the top” are deluded, misguided souls. They somehow think that they can short-circuit the process by cutting out the people who run it. I might sign the checks, but if the salespeople don’t sell the product, those checks are worth as much as a Schrute Buck.

I’d like to ask the inhabitants of the world to consider this question—would you rather be effective or important?

The answer you give yourself is most telling.

“The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.”
— Benjamin Disraeli

Now that’s a true fact.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Jim Fietzer, storyteller and friend, moved to Chattanooga a few years ago and I don’t see him enough. The last time I saw him we went paddling and stopped to get pie and hot cocoa on the way home, and we were throughly chilled. I set the camera down and took this timed picture of us. Jim is flirting with the waitress, but in a southernly gentleman sort of way that made her feel appreciated.

That’s because Jim has a talent for making people feel good, like everyone would be interested in their lives, if they just had more details. Probably because Jim believes this with all his heart.

Then I left the camera on the counter. I had to go back and get it and we just barely made it before they left for the day. They were happy to open the door after they were closed because it was Jim, and they were delighted to see that friendly guy once again.

Anyway…I miss Jim. He’s loony. The good kind of loony.

Today was especially Mondayesque. Don’t know why, maybe it’s a lack of time off and a gorgeous morning combined with the knowledge that I was destined to sit at a desk most of the day and do all the stuff that business owners have to do but would rather not.

Sam Crowley is in town, doing some contract work for Rutabaga, teaching future folks how to be instructors. Pretty cool, as Sam and I were in the same ACA IDW* course back in 1995 in Bayfield. Sam went on to be an IT (Instructor Trainer) and teaches all over the Midwest. The shame is that we see Sam at least twice a year, he stays at our house, and yet we have paddled together exactly once since 13 years ago.

Today we fixed that. I took off from work early, and Sam and I drove up to the Wisconsin Dells. Known as the place “Where Nature and Fun Collide” (no kidding), the Dells are best know for this, but there is some lovely scenery—and it goes unnoticed by most of the folks who visit. Only kayaks can slip into these holes in the limestone.

We only paddled an hour and a half, but it was 90 minutes more than I would have paddled otherwise. The Dells have some lovely grottoes and rock formations, and the early greens that are so bright The tour boats were mostly pleasant and polite, giving us a wide berth. One huge jet boat was emblazoned with huge red letters across the side—THE WISCONSIN DELLS EXPERIENCE. That’s funny, because their experience could have been had in any body of water, including but not limited to the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District holding ponds. It was all about the speed and splashing and stuff.

Anyway, the jet boats created some nice tasty wakes when they blasted by us. They didn’t even slow down the second time they passed us, a nice compliment in a certain way, and we got to surf in the wakes they left behind.

I think we had a Wisconsin Dells experience. Maybe I’m a snob but I think our experience was of a better quality.

*For those who are not familiar with the alphabet soup that is the American Canoe Association, IDW stands for Instructor Development Workshop.