Labor Day Weekend - Catching Up

I hope your Labor Day weekend was as enjoyable as mine.

Seriously - I really do.

My wife and I invited some friends up to our lake cabin. It's not a very fancy place, but it at least has electricity and indoor plumping. Cell phone reception is sketchy at best, and as for Internet connectivity - fuggedaboutit.

That's one of the things I like about the place.

Anyway, we went up Saturday morning to avoid the crazies on the road Friday night. Saturday night dinner was at Reverend Jim's Dam Pub, a combination hangout for the local cowboys and transient bikers. Somehow, it seems to work. The menu's not fancy, but they do a mean hamburger, and the fries are edible. Plus the beer is cold and the barmaids cute, so what more could a man want?

Our place is on Lake Buchanan. It's suffering terribly from an ongoing multiyear drought. We're on what used to be the waterfront. When full, the lake is 1020 feet above sea level. It's currently around 987 feet. Because the slope of the lake bed is so slight, for every one foot drop in the lake level the water recedes about 10 feet from the shoreline. In other words, the 33 foot drop in water level means that the waterline is now about 330 feet (one football field, plus end zones) away from where it normally is.

It's heartbreaking to walk across the yard and hear the grass crunch underfoot.

Despite the drought, we had a great time. Good company, plenty of good food, cold beer, wine, and margaritas. It was scorching during the day, which didn't bother us because that was nap time. Temperatures dropped quickly when the sun went down, and there was a nice breeze blowing in from what's left of the lake, which cooled us off and keep the skeeters away, so we sat on the deck and enjoyed sundowners (many, many sundowners...).

Monday evening we got a phone call from our daughter, who's just started her first year of college. After one day - ONE DAY - of classes she wants to change her major.

I really don't have a problem with that, because she wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer major. Nothing against those folks, but that's a pretty narrow specialty.  She's now thinking of being a math major. I'm okay with that, because in a year or two when she changes her mind again (she is a female, after all!) it'll be fairly simple to switch to another engineering track, or even something like economics or computer science.

She was also calling because she needed some new items for her dorm room and was short of $$$ (*snort*), and because she was homesick and wanted to come home next weekend.

For comparison purposes, we haven't heard a word from our son who went back to school three weeks ago and has said he won't be back until Thanksgiving.

Bottom line, I'm finally back home and almost recovered from the weekend. In honor of those poor souls who must face the hordes of new students now that the school year has begun, I offer the following.

It's good to be a retired professor...

Hey, at least I didn't teach English.