Thats IT- I'm going to iradicate every stinking one of them !

I just got stung on my left ring finger by a wasp ! As I was trying to pull out one of the poolside chez' from underneath the deck- the little bastard must have been sleeping underneath the cushion and decided to nail me. Man does it hurt, and my finger is getting as swollen as a Sabretts.

Being a lover of all Gods creatures, I've let the wasps and hornets live in peace underneath all the eaves and decks around the house, but man , this is war ! Last summer, I got nailed by one a few millimeters from my eye. That freaked me out as my eyes are how I make my living.

So its time to whip out the Hornet & Wasp cans of Death . Buh Bye !!!

Other news from the Ranch on the Hill.........

Got my yard work done. I used the smaller mower instead of the Honda sit down mini
tractor . Its a good upper body workout, and since I have a scheduled total rest day, its semi- active recovery. It's about 90 F outside with the sun glaring away, so needless to say my tan is ultra dark. Maybe too dark.

I flew solo this weekend as my girls are down in Jersey. I didn't mind too much since it was the last days of my training camp and I was out on the road for the most part.
Talked to C earlier and it looks like they spent the night at my brothers beach house on the Jersey Shore.
Its an amazing place. Right on the water-its hard to believe that there are places that nice in New Jersey. I swam in the ocean there last summer.

While working on the yard I started running through some ideas, mostly about how and when I 'm going to start writing again. Every so often I add on to the short stories that are in conceptual mode...most of which are a combination of fact and fiction, slightly autobiographical. Most of the vignettes take place during my high school years going into early adulthood.

Here's an excerpt:

HE transferred at the start of my sophomore year at Lasalle HS .

Up until then it was the same old group of us boys that basically grew up together . Myself, Cabot, and Calhoun had known each other since the 5th grade and were anxious to meet this surfer kid .

Tom Goodno was his name.

He looked really old for a sophomore. Kind of a cross between Mr.Carter from Welcome Back Carter and Ron Jeremy the porn star, but he was lean ,not fat. A white kid with an afro and a mustache ! The only kid I knew with one.

He was assigned the seat next to me, so we chatted a bit and I invited him to our lunch table.Turns out he was from Temple City, an inland valley town and not one of the coastal towns like we thought. He did surf, but he drove over an hour just to get to his beach.

But it wasn't until the end of that day did we realize how much of an adventure having Tom Goodno for a friend would be. The guy had the baddest set of wheels in the student parking lot. A red and white 1956 Bel Air Coupe.

That car and the fact that he smoked was a harbinger of things to come.