• Dinner tonight was deep fried meat on a stick with a couple pieces of Boo’s funnel cake for dessert.  Our entertainment was dirt track racing and some dude on a guitar singing Johnny Cash and David Allan Coe.
  • If that ain’t country, I’ll kiss your ass.
• The difference between the state fair in Louisville and a county fair about 20 miles from home is that when I left the county fair, I still had faith in humanity and still loved my family.
• I took Boo on his first ferris wheel ride tonight.  Little buddy was a bit nervous at first, but by the time we got off, he’d stopped threatening to throw up.  I’ll call that a win.
• After all these years, I’m glad to know that my “I will kill you with my mind” stare works.
• Few college kids can say that their father made them scrambled eggs with cheese and pieces of steak before going to work, but mine can.
• Irish Woman has been trying very hard to cut down on the carbs and junk in our diet, and for the most part, it’s going well.  The other day, though, after a rather stressful day at work, I had to drive through a burger joint and get a couple of rich, salty, greasy cheeseburgers.  It was either that or play bumper cars on the freeway.

• If his most famous act were to occur nowadays, John Wilkes Booth could probably plead not guilty due to Lincoln Anxiety Disorder.
• If folks are worried about 3D printing of firearms, then they’ll love the documentation and instructions the government is just giving out for free.
• All of the folks screeching in the news lately really just need an old woman, her hair up in curlers and a lit cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth, to point a gnarled old finger at them and growl, “Don’t start shit, won’t be shit.”
• Speaking of smoking, it appears that folks who live in federally funded housing projects are being told to not smoke in their homes and to walk a few feet away from buildings before lighting their coffin nails.  So, basically, they’re being given the same rules that folks living in military barracks have had to live under since about 1992.  My heart bleeds.  No, really.
• Maybe I’m a heartless goon…  No, scratch that.  I am a heartless goon.

• Apparently, “Plotting out and practicing the untimely demise of my fellow human beings” was not the answer someone was looking for when they asked me what I did in the Army.
• The traffic around us flows in such a way that the shortest route to Boo’s school takes about twice as long as the back roads.
  • Cue the Kentucky highway department putting in a ten-minute detour along the longer route that takes me into the next county.
  • Still better than the freeway.
• If my desk calendar is telling the truth, I have something work-related to do just about every day in August.
  • It’s gotten to the point that I set alarms so that I remember to eat lunch.
• My commute is starting to become my favorite time of day.  It’s probably because I can roll down the windows, blast angry music, and scream at the top of my lungs until I feel better.

• It would appear that sleep deprivation and over-scheduling is how Irish Woman and I live now.
• The bad news is that I didn’t win the Mustang raffle at the church picnic.
  • The good news is that I won’t have to make the choice of finally owning a Mustang in my late forties or taking the cash.
• Boo did some good works by handing out ice cream to the folks who were eating chicken dinners at the picnic.  More than a few folks noticed that several young ladies his age were clustered around the ice cream cooler during his tenure.
  • Irish Woman was unavailable for comment.
• Irish Woman has relearned that Guinness makes me goofy.
• I’m not going to say that the weather during the drive home on Friday evening was rough.  I’m just going to say that I’ve never had my truck powerwashed so thoroughly before and leave it at that.
• We’ve reached that sweet, sweet part of the summer where we’re ordering school uniforms and taking inventory on our pencils and notebooks.
• I’d like to thank LawDog for the fact that my youngest son can now quote the Baghavad Ghita and Melville, as well as call an ambulance “the big white taxi”.

I won’t go into details, but today was not a good day.  It was the kind of day where the little voice in my head told me “I’m glad that’s over” when I started getting ready for bed.  Ever have one of those days?

But it wasn’t That Day.

We all have That Day.  It’s the day when we look back and wonder how we got through it.  It might have been stressful, or even deadly.  It’s the day that lays opposite The Best Day in our spectrum of experience.  All other days are measured against those two days.

That Day is the one that wakes you up in the middle of the night.  It’s the one that drags you back to relive it when you see or smell or hear something that reminds you of That Day.  It’s the one that every parent wants to shield their child from.

Everybody I know has had That Day, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not a part of the human experience.  Perhaps the reason that folks who get freaked out over relatively minor stuff get on my nerves so much is that to them That Day was something that a lot of us just call ‘Tuesday’.

Anyway, here’s hoping that That Day is behind all of you.

At least today wasn’t That Day.

• When we all get together to take a trip on the big silver sky taxi, we, by definition, all have somewhere to be.
  • Taking fifteen minutes to find your seat, stow your things, sit down, make friends with the folks around you, strap in, unstrap in, retrieve your electronic thingie, binkie, and blankie, and then strap back in, is a black-letter law justification for keelhauling.
• The row and seat numbers are in an easily deduced pattern.  Also, the airline has gone to the trouble and expense to put up little signs to help out those who never passed that part of kindergarten.  Please, for the sake of our sanity and your own safety, learn to use them.
• Sitting/laying down in the main walkway of a gate seating area in order to do stretching/yoga/walrus-in-rut impersonations for half an hour may or may not help your bad back.  It will definitely make me wish your bones would start to spontaneously snap into small, easily digested pieces.
• If you are giving your pre-teen children a sugary coffee drink five minutes before getting on a small aircraft, I hope that, someday, your children put you into a substandard nursing home built on an abandoned graveyard.
  • Now, I may not be the best parent on Earth, Lord knows.  But I’m pretty sure that letting little Susie and Bobby watch “The Purge” during a flight might not be the best decision you could have made.
• If the first-class passengers aren’t routinely asked to remove their shoes, belt, electronics, and dignity when going through airport screening, then there’s probably no good reason for everyone else to do it.
• Showing up to your job serving coffee to folks in an airport on a Sunday morning when you either dropped acid right before work or you’re still coming down from the night before is not cool.
  • Seriously, her pupils were the same shape, size, and color as a shot of espresso.
  • She was, of course, pleasant.  Most stoned folks are.  She just wasn’t very efficient.
  • It took her five minutes to take my order for a coffee, large, one each, then about another three to find the cup, then find the coffee, then fill the cup, then remember to turn around and hand it to me.  I had to remind her to swipe my credit card before handing it back to me.
• If it takes two flight attendants, a quarter pound of bacon grease, a come-along, and rhythmic drumming by the co-pilot to get your My Little Pony carry-on into the overhead bin, then maybe you should have let your mommy pack for you.
• Riding your motorcycles four abreast, thereby taking up both lanes of traffic, does not make you rebels without a cause.  It makes you a bunch of douchebags.
• I’m guilty of forgetting that Nissan put their gas tanks on the wrong side of the car, thereby causing me to have to pull out of a fueling area in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and turn around at 1:30 AM on a Sunday night.
  • Pointing this out and laughing at me does not help the situation.
  • From the look on your wife’s face, she thought you were an asshole, too.
• There are fewer things I want to hear after getting home from a long trip than hearing Irish Woman ask “Honey, do you know where my camera is?”
  • In related news, the hotel, airline, and rental car company all had “I lost my stuff” links on their websites.

• Our plan to land in Minneapolis on a Sunday evening, drive for a few hundred miles, sleep for a couple of hours, then finish the drive to my home town looked good on paper.
• If you’re going to design a hotel that has intense spotlights shining on the front of the building, please make sure that the curtains in the rooms near said spotlights will:
  • a) Shut out all of the blindingly bright, white light so that guests can sleep
  • b) Close more than 25% of the width of the windows
• I expect to receive, any day now, a letter from the FAA and the North Dakota Highway Patrol asking us to either put wings on our rental car or slow the heck down.
• Apparently, having a hot flash while trying to get across the Minneapolis airport was not part of Irish Woman’s plans.  However, the beautiful ladies at the Hertz desk accomodated her by getting us to our car as quickly as possible and pointing every fan they could find in her direction.
• You know your son is tired when he won’t wake up to go get pizza and ice cream.
• I now have a firm agreement from Irish Woman to move back to North Dakota as soon as I can find a way to guarantee that her bourbon will not turn to slush, parts of her anatomy will not freeze solid and snap off, and Boo has finished school.
• After a week of being to see the horizon as a faraway line, Kentucky feels almost claustrophobic.

• Only mad dogs and Cub Scouts go out in the noon day sun.
• It’s amazing how quickly a ten year old boy’s minor scrape escalates to “I think I’m going to die!” when a teenage girl asks him if he’s OK.
• Apparently, to ten year old boys, a couple of raccoons checking the trash can at 1 in the morning sounds like a herd of ravenous bears.
• I’d like to thank Irish Woman for the new cot, because I’m officially too bloody old to sleep on the ground if there’s any other option.
• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  If you give a Cub / Boy Scout a pack, he will acquire enough gadgets to fill it.
• Boys who spent half the night yelling and hooting at each other had to be convinced to shout commands during a flag ceremony.

• There are few things in life more relaxing than sitting on a porch swing, listening to a hard rain fall on a lake, and reading a good book.
• Either teenagers or raccoons raided the cooler we left on the cabin porch last night, because I awoke to find all of our beer gone.
  • I have a mental image of a couple of fuzzy masked bandits sitting up against a tree, a pile of empty Leinenkugel bottles at their feet, just talking about how great life is.
• Canned, iced coffee just isn’t a very good substitute for fresh brewed.
  • But, in the words of one of my grandmothers, it’s better than nothing.
• For a weekend at the lake where we tried to not haul a bunch of our camping stuff there and back, we sure seemed to haul a lot of stuff there and back.
• Irish Woman and I have decided that we really like the little two room cabins at the state park we visited. If we were going to construct something like it for ourselves, though, we’d add a bathroom and a kitchen.
  • I don’t mind cooking outside, but the 15 minute walk, in the dark, to get to the restroom was less than optimal.
  • I know, I know, bear, woods, whatever.
• At the end of these weekends, when everyone is trying to get out of the campground at the same time, I always wonder if the temperature and chemistry of the lake changes as a couple hundred coolers are either drained or emptied into it.

When someone wants to protest the government, whether we agree with them or not, this we’ll defend.

When a citizen wants to vote, no matter for whom or what, this we’ll defend.

When a mother wants to buy a gun to protect her children, this we’ll defend.

When someone wants to worship, or chooses not to, this we’ll defend.

When someone wants to write, or sing, or draw, or paint, or dance, whether it be for the joy of it or to send a message to the rest of us, this we’ll defend.

When our people want to live in peace, in security, in freedom, this we’ll defend.

Today is the 243th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army.   It’s been made up of larger than life heroes and ordinary folk.  Our ranks have included Douglas MacArthur, Andrew Jackson, Audie Murphy, and Nathan Hale.  They have also included the quiet men and women who go to do their duty and then come back to build up that which they have defended.  Our places have names like Valley Forge, Omaha Beach, Pusan, Ia Drang, and Antietam.  They also have names like Grafenwohr, Camp Red Cloud, Hood, Riley, Carson, and Lewis, and all the other cold, hot, dusty, wet, and whatever-else they-can-throw-at-us places around the world where quiet professionals train and prepare.

To my brothers and sisters around the world, I’ll be raising a toast tonight.  If you can, please join me.

Rakkasan

Garryowen

Climb To Glory

Iron Soldiers!

Toujours Pret

Always Out Front

This We’ll Defend