After a hot morning of mowing.....

...there's nothing like an afternoon at the lake.


[7 pm] There's a reason frozen pizza was put here on earth: for mothers who have taken eight offspring to the lake. "Jack's" may be at the bottom of the frozen food chain, but hey, it works for ME.

The showers that appeared on the radar this morning had dissipated. The mowing was finished. The air was hot and muggy. Our snorkles, plastic floaties and rings acquired "on clearance" were waiting patiently in the closet. All the "Afternoon at the Lake" stars had suddenly come into alignment.

We packed a lunch cooler, stopped for pop and ice and finally arrived at an empty beach. It was ours. ALL OURS! The next half hour I spent applying sun screen and trying to blow up plastic floats. There seemed to be a fatal flaw in the make-up of said devices, for I had to take a sharp knife and poke a hole into the air-blowing thing-a-ma-jigger. Three times. But I blew them up, and only got a little light-headed.

THEN came the best part: unfolding my lawn chair, popping the tab on a diet cherry Coke, and putting on my earphones to the transistor radio. We were 20 miles closer to my favorite big band station, and the reception was SUPERB.

I can think of worse ways to spend an afternoon.

The rest of my time was taken up with constantly counting heads, and evaluating who had just bobbed underwater, how old they were, and estimating a reasonable time for them to reemerge.

We went, they swam, I survived.

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