If the quality of journalism at the Airdrie City View improved noticeably over the past two weeks, there is a good reason. I wasn’t here.
I spent the last two weeks on my summer vacation.
I use the term ‘vacation’ loosely, because it was more like manual labour summer camp.
The first week was spent preparing my parents’ farm for a family reunion. The second was spent on yard improvements at my house in town.
For pale-skinned Scottish office workers like me, such forays into the great outdoors provide an educational experience.
Here, then, is a list of lessons learned during my summer vacation:
• Don’t bother building lawn furniture out of hay bails. They’re too pokey for the girls to sit on and the horses will eat them.
• Don’t drink and drive on lawn mowers. It’s really bad for the seedling trees.
• When changing a tire on your lawn tractor, get the kids to help you. It’s never too early to train them to be your own personal NASCAR pit crew.
• Don’t ask your uncle where he got that moonshine. You don’t want to know.
• Don’t try to ‘cowboy up’ and eat a hot pepper in front of your cousins. They will make fun of you.
• After a barn dance, don’t drive your truck down a coulee in the rain. Sometimes I drove forwards, and sometimes backwards, and in the morning I had another flat tire to repair.
• Don’t feed your four-year-old daughter rainbow sherbet before bed when camping. She will bounce off the walls, and later she will sing Oh Susannah at the top of her lungs in her sleep.
• Don’t put too much wood in the wood-burning hot tub. One Hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit is not comfortable.
• When getting fitted for a tuxedo for your buddy’s wedding, don’t suck in your gut. Stick it out. Give yourself some wiggle room.
• When mixing cement, don’t add too much water. That makes a mess. Also, don’t add too little water. That makes a mess. Really, even the right amount of water makes a mess. So the lesson is, don’t mix cement.
• If you must mix cement, “Don’t even think you’re washing those clothes in my washing machine, Mister.”
• Four-year-old daughters are good at making handprints in wet cement. Eleven-month-old sons will just try to eat it.
• The most marvellous invention of the past 200 years is not email, cell phones, or even automobiles. It’s iced coffee.
• Paint sprayers are awesome, providing there is a trigger guard. If there isn’t, you can really wreck the siding of your house.
• Four-year-old daughters like the idea of “Daddy and Gracie Painting Company” more than they like actually painting your fence.
• After two weeks of sun burns, fast food, cheap beer and sore backs, sleeping in your own bed rocks!
