The Beat goes on

In this case, that's the steady beat of rain on the roof.  Yes, it's raining once again and progged to continue raining until The Second Coming--of sunshine, that is.  People here will greet the coming of summer sunshine with a lot of pent up cabin fever, fervor, frenzy.  It reminds me of a Bill Murray line in our fave movie Ground Hog Day, "It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be gray and this winter's going to last the rest of your LIFE."  (Slightly paraphrased)  We can't even imagine camping in this type of weather--it makes last year's inclement spell look like a walk in the park.  It might even snow here in Idaho Falls over the Memorial Day weekend.

The river continues to rise and is at a new high for this runoff season: 28,700 cfs.  From the looks of what's coming down from above, it's going higher and will probably squeeze past 30,000 real soon--maybe even today.  People are pretty buzzy about it here and some folks who are connected to higher swamis than we say the river will run high, hard and fast until late July or maybe even August.

Luckily, the Weather Angels gave us a balmy day yesterday--just nice enough to make the debut of Alive After Five a wonderful and most welcome event.  We took a lot of photos and will post them up later.  It was great to see so many people out partying in the streets.

Susun went to her workout and then logged four hours at the Habitat for Humanity Restore.  I milled around town trying hard to remember what it was that I was milling around for.  I also engaged in a lot of geeky, nerdy stuff relating to reloading, GPS, HAM radio, the food shopping blog, fishing tackle and other things I can't remember.  My name was in this morning's newspaper.  No, it wasn't on the police blotter.  I was mentioned in the outdoor column with a fishing question.  Imagine that. The Editor even printed the word "Friend" before my name.  It's always nice to be a Friend of The Editor.

All this airborne water coming down to earth is causing the grass to grow insane.   It's borderline out of control.  There's not much we can do about it when it's this wet and windy.  It looks like we will be under house arrest and confined to quarters here for the Memorial Day weekend.

Some local LBRs might be interested in our food shopping blog.  You can click here to read it.

OK, let's end this post with a story.  I have been agonizing for quite some time about whether to sell off Grand Pa's pistol.  I wrote a REALLY long blog post about it on a different blog and then conducted a poll of my shooting buddies.  The vote was split 2-2 so I cast the tie-breaker and decided to sell the pistol on KSL Classifieds in Salt Lake City.  It's legal to list the pistol for sale there.  OK, in the ad I referenced the blog posting and encouraged people to read it.

While I was playing chess Tuesday evening the cell phone rang.  It's a no-no to answer a cell phone while playing chess so I waited until I was sitting out in the parking lot to return the call while rain poured down on the truck.  I reached a guy named Pat in Salt Lake City.  He's a homicide detective by day and an avid gun collector the rest of the time. His voice reminded me of Ed Asner's.  Well, he wasn't the least bit bashful and he launched off on giving me a stern Fatherly lecture about the "un-wisdom" of selling that pistol.  He was very persuasive and persistent.  I told him I was touched that a he would care enough to make such an impassioned plea to a complete and total stranger.  I told him that if he left a written synopsis of his sermon on the blog, I would remove the pistol listing immediately and follow his advice.  Lo and behold, he actually followed through and did so yesterday about dinner time.  I kept my promise and removed the pistol from potential sale.  You can real the whole long story by clicking here.  Be sure to read all the comments because that's where it gets real interesting.  Anyway, THANKS, Pat!  Now I guess I have to get busy and find the right shadow box and begin a craft project to display the pistol properly.  The fact that a total stranger would care about my angst over this pistol had an emotional impact on me.   I sent Pat a special email thank you last night and woke up this morning to a reply.  Pat said, "Thank you for the comments it makes this old boy feel good."  Pat's intervention added greatly to the story of this pistol and now there's no way I could even think of selling it.

Have a great day and Many Cheers!  jp