(Please excuse the lack of any serious revision or editing. My Wife has just returned from a week of packing and I’d life to spend some time with her. The intermittent eye moistness isn’t helping things either.)

-Tomorrow (3/15), the Big Valley Ranch closes up shop. Harold and Tina bought the place, roughly 2000 acres back in the mid-60s. Back then, before the opening of the North Cascades Highway, land was mighty cheap.

Wendi is midpoint through her 4th trip to the Ranch since NY’sEve. Xander and I are on our 2nd. Slackers.

But we wanted to be there at The End so we made the trip yesterday. The trip did not have an auspicious start.

And more weeping tonight. Though I feared I already knew the answer, I had to ask. Through tears and clenched teeth, he replied: 

“Some dick took my Lt. Surge Pokemon Card! “

Well, that certainly is dickish behavior. The chain of evidence on this Crime of the Century is a little…. tenuous but he is sure that “Billy” has it. Billy, who only went to M&M for a couple weeks during the summer but who is now back to his (unknown) school. Completely incommunicado.

It was something that ran in the family. We read; to ourselves and each other. This was Mom’s influence. All us of cherish the memories of Mom reading Winnie the Pooh stories to us.

“We’ll be friends forever, won’t we, Pooh?”

“Even longer.”

And I’d wager money that all four of us Hardy Boys; even the ones in their dotage (that is, all of those not me.) could tell you what a Tweedle Beetle fight is called.

The Place: Somewhere in America 

The Time: Very Late on a Saturday Evening

The Actors: Husband and Wife

The Goal: Amour 

The Problem: An Oblivious Teenage Son

It was a failure of imagination. Yes, that describes it well.

You see, my son couldn’t imagine anyone else daring to drive on his Ranch Roads while he raced the Quad around. 

This, despite the fact that he saw me driving down to the nursery to check on some trees. 

I guess I too, lacked imagination. Yes, I was concerned about the possibility of Xander racing around and me driving the same road... 

So I traveled at about 2 MPH with both my headlights and emergency blinkers on. And even considered honking my horn every 5-10 seconds but, you know, talk about overboard. 

Well, I nearly died last Sunday. And, after a few days, I have calmed down enough to put the trauma down onto (virtual) paper.

So, there we were, at the Bs; doing laundry while watching the Seahawks miss. field. goal. after. field. goal. 

Well, it’s Labor Day (the saddest holiday of the year) and I am scrounging around for any reason to avoid going into work so why not do an end of summer write up? It’s a great way to dwell upon the all the interesting happenings of the past two and a half months.

            Summer started (as all proper summers do) with a trip to a local casino to watch an 80s cover-band by the name of Mullet. It was a pleasant evening and my ears have almost stopped ringing.  Of course, Wendi and J (AKA: “The Instigator”) had to get a photo.

Son and father are getting ready to leave for the Library. Son picks up his shoes from the shoe rack, turns them over, exposing some sort of.... organic material in the treads. The exact nature of said material is not known. Careful not to touch what, he assured his father is probably just mud, the boy slips his shoes on and precedes to start to wipe his feet vigorously on the rug just inside the door.

I will try to keep this reasonably short but a favorite writer of mine once told me she had to write about something in order to figure out how she really felt about it. So, my confusion is your...uh...…. gain(?)