Summertime and the livin' is.......Busy!

Well, here we are at the end of July already and in the middle of Coast Guard week in Grand Haven, pretty much the high point of the summer for this town. After the festivities are over this coming Sunday it’s all down hill. The tourist population starts dwindling off as school days get closer and it gets easier to find a spot on the beach again, (not that I ever seem to have a chance these days to just go and sit on a beach) …….won’t be easy this week though cuz we’re having summer weather in spades right now…..high for today is suppose to be 95° and the weatherman (bah, what does he know….) says it’s gonna be hot like this for the next couple days. Personally, I hope he’s right cuz I like the hot weather and all too soon I know I’ll be shoveling that white crap out of the driveway again, so you won’t find me bitchin’ about the heat. I’ll take it when I can get it.

Anyhow this past week has been a busy, busy one. As I mentioned last entry, Jennette arrived Sunday evening with both grandbabies for the week and the week kinda just zoomed by……I didn’t even get the camera out to take any pictures until Thursday night, after the backyard cookout and never even got a shot of Ryan the whole week, what a lousy grandpa I am…….seemed I was either busy outside the house, playing with him or he was asleep per his mother’s regimental schedule.

Tuesday evening me and Chris went up to Quick’s for the cruise-in…..first (and last) time for July. There was a good turnout for the beautiful summer evening and a number of cars I hadn’t seen before including a gorgeous red ’49 Merc with a New York Plate on the front of it. I wandered around the area, shooting pics and towards the end of the evening I got over to talk to the guy with the Merc. Turns out he actually was from New York, used to live in Muskegon and drove the Merc from New York to visit kids still living in this area. I asked him what part of New York he was from and he said Rochester. Well, Rochester is where the ’56 came from so I asked him if he’d heard of the Finger Lakes Classic Chevy club and yes he had so the next logical question was to ask if he knew Jim Boehly (the previous owner) and to my surprise he did! Turns out Jim built computers for the guy’s business. Sometimes the world is a small place and this was just the first of two incidents this week that illustrated that point. Go HERE for all the pics.

After the cruise-in Tuesday night we stayed close to home Wednesday and Thursday and had a little get-together in the backyard Thursday evening…..Tony, Gigi & Josh came by and Ri and Adam were there……we had hamburgs on the grill, baked beans and Wanda’s potato salad. We all sat around for awhile in the backyard, shooting the breeze. It was the first cookout for the year and probably will be the only one at the rate this summer is zooming by……

Friday evening I headed straight up to Whitehall after work, on the bike, for the annual car cruise / parade that they put on every year. I’d never been to the event and wanted to check it out. I didn’t really want to put the car in a start / stop situation for an hour or more….nice way to wear out a clutch, so I decided to be a spectator this year and use the camera instead. I found a nice spot to watch the parade go by at the park between Whitehall and Montague and right at 7:00pm the police escort came around the corner and down the hill, followed for the next hour or so by 240+ cars of all types and styles. There were hot rods and stockers, junkers and classics all with their passengers smiling and waving as they went by. When the last car headed over the bridge into Montague I picked myself up and walked over to the downtown area where they were all parked. By then it was 8:30pm, the crowd was huge, almost like a mini Frankenmuth and I was getting hungry. I walked around for 15/20 minutes and then decided it was too crowded for comfort and I’d rather be on the bike, heading for Pablo’s and dinner. By the time I got home it was a bit after 10:00pm. Chris was working and Wanda was down at Clover with her sister until 11 so I just kicked back for the last hour of the day…….I may just do the Whitehall cruise next year, depending of course on if I can afford the gas to get there and back. It seemed to go pretty smooth from where I was sitting so maybe the clutch wouldn’t suffer too much…..we’ll see I guess. Go HERE for all the pics.

Saturday I went in to work until Noon to try and catch up on some of the stuff that needed to be done yesterday and then came home, grabbed the wife, kid and a couple of dogs and headed up to Whiskey Creek to get some more work done on the site. We were up there by 1:30pm or so and from then until about 6:00pm I ran the chainsaw and pulled on the rake. It was a hot day and the sweat and the bugs were a nuisance, but it felt good to actually get something done with the campsite. By 6 I had a big pile of wood cut and all of what will eventually be the dog pen area, raked up. Next trip up I hope to put up the fencing and stack the wood I cut, closer to the fire pit. So, with a small degree of satisfaction in my progress for the day we headed up to the lodge and had the young lady there make us hamburgs for supper. After burgers at the lodge, we headed for home, arriving about 8:30pm. The rest of the evening was just spent hanging out around the homestead.

Sunday I was up at 6:00am in anticipation for the Grand Haven Cruise-In car show that starts off Coast Guard Festival week. I got downtown just after 7:00am, even before they had the registration tent up and got a good spot right across from the Delite Restaurant. The weather was hot, windy and somewhat cloudy but over the next couple hours it got more cloudy and then it went from cloudy to downright ugly. I’d already been up and down the whole street shooting pics in anticipation of possible bad weather coming, but when the wife called about 10:30am and said a major storm was about 20 minutes out the possible bad weather became a reality. Big black clouds started rolling in and the thunder and lightning was impressive. Some guys, including the convertibles on either side of me, closed up shop and headed for home. I took my display materials down and put ‘em in the trunk, closed the hood and sat in the car while it rained and the wind blew. After maybe 20 minutes worth of real hard rain it tapered off and stragglers started coming back out again even though it continued to rain. I hung around for awhile, hoping it’d clear up, but between the wife’s weather report and the fact I hadn’t ever gotten around to having breakfast during the morning, I decided to close up shop myself. Enough cars had already departed that there wasn’t going to be much of a car show left even if it did clear up. So, I fired the car up and disappointedly headed for home. Go HERE for all the pics.

Before the storm came in though I experienced my second bout of “small world” syndrome for the week when it turned out that the guy next to me with the red Mustang convertible was the son of a former boss of mine. One of the few bosses I ever had that I liked…..he was standing there with his wife, who I never knew, talking to his boy. It took me a minute or two to recognize him because not long after I left the job where he was my boss (24 years ago) he had a stroke that left him quite debilitated. He used to be a big, robust, good-natured guy, but time and the stroke had made him less robust, although he still seemed good-natured. We talked for awhile and although I struggled to understand him we still managed to touch bases on a number of different topics. The conversation came to an end though as they decided to head for dryer ground as the storm was rapidly approaching. Talking to him and seeing the effects that the stroke has had on him was an eye-opening experience and it made me all the more thankful that I’m still pretty much in good enough shape to do whatever I want to do these days.

After getting home and putting the car in the garage I went in the house and made a late breakfast. After sharing pancakes with my 4-legged friends I sat down on the couch to watch a bit of a movie and promptly fell asleep. I missed the whole afternoon and by the time I woke up at 6:30 the sun was once again out and shining down on the land. I thought for a minute about going down to Jeannie’s, but decided instead to just hang out and get some website stuff caught up. Before I knew it, it was 1:00am and time to call it a day and get ready to start another week.

TC