First let me say that I had a GREAT summer. I spent the entire time with my wife and sons. A day here and there I was out with other friends but I always came home to them. The summer began by my sons attending a rodeo-themed vacation Bible school back home near my parents. It was not the typical "rodeo" themed camp that most children attended this summer, even though they did attend that one as well. My sons had the opportunity to ride horses, rope pretend cattle and pay in the dirt and dust for 9 hours each day of that week. We picked them up one day and while we were walking into my parents' house, my youngest son pulled a TOAD out of his pocket and said to us "Look what jumped into my pocket today." "Hot-Jumpy" as he named him was part of our lives for two weeks along with his close relative "Anakin," that my oldest son caught on the last day.
It was truely a "Mayberry" moment!My oldest son attended college this summer. He spent a week at the Prince Frederick campus of the College of Southern Maryland attending a class called "Physics is Phun." In it he learned of Galileo, how mobiles work along with other interesting things. I was the first one to drop him off that day and was amazed at how well he went into the building. Maybe it was a glimpse into the future.
Personally I got bit by the fishing bug pretty hard. I tried every wek to take my sons fishing, whether it was Hutchin's Pond up north or the small pond within Calvert Cliffs State Park. We had a lot fun, even the day that I was casting my youngest son's rod and it broke. He thought it was pretty funny and was happy to find out that Daddy was going to buy him another. Most of the time we were just catching small bluegill from the ponds, but while on vacation on the Outer Banks we were able to catch a couple of pretty big catfish. My sons had never seen one before so they were pretty happy. They also thought it was pretty funny that Daddy only caught turtles on that trip.
I also got to indulge myself this summer into my new hobby. Or maybe it is an obsession - now. GEOCACHING - the act of using a handheld global positioning satelitte receiver to find a hidden "treasures" all around you. I don't know the exact number but I was able to find well over a couple of hundred this summer. It took me to some interesting places, Savage State Park in Western Maryland, Clarion University in Pennsylvania, even right here in Calvert County. I climbed to the top of a little league baseball backstop, climbed down into a tunnel in which I couldn't see my hand two inches in front of my face and even to one of those types of areas that you hear about in TV shows like CSI or Law & Order.
Psycho Urban Cache #10 was located in Fort Armistead Park and boy was it an area that screamed horror movie. It seemed to be an old public works facility that had been abandoned. People, mostly what our world would consider "undesirables" hang out there. We, my group of friends, even came across one in the total dark. It scared the stuffing out of us, but we kept our cool and went on with a search that lasted about an hour. We ended up not finding the cache, but we have a great story though.Oh yeah - I mentioned that my summer ended last evening. I got a chance to catch up with an old friend and see a concert in Baltimore. DREAM THEATER is quickly becoming my favorite group. Most people would consider them to be heavy metal but I call it PROG. Just good music, made by fantastic musicians, who know that a song doesn't have to end after three-and-a-half minutes. They played for two hours, stuff from their new CD, stuff from old CDs as well. It was a great show and a great way to end a summer.
So what did you do this summer?
