Here are some of the things I have done in the last few days.

I took a ride delivering a sailboat upriver and got caught in a vale of dogwoods so thick it looked like flurries.

I drove the family communal one ton stake bed Chevy truck out to the very small town where my inlaws live. circumstances dictated that I drive the stuck down the center of town, climb out of the truck wearing grease-stained clothes and walk into the combination gas station/subshop/grocery store. I am not sure if I can convey to you just how white trash I looked at that moment.

I brought the old chevy astro van that my father in law gave my wife(she promptly failed to take into account the small item of having to put back the oil that leaked and wound up with bits of crankshaft all over the road) in to the garage that one of my little brother's friends just purchased. Since the incident with the crankshaft the van has had another engine installed, but it's never run. Because I was constantly travelling while this was going on I was never close to the details and never really put the effort into figuring out what the problem was that I should have. Well, the hard unfortunate truth is that my brother's friend not only figured it out in less than twenty minutes when three other mechanics failed he did it whilst continuing to run all the paying customers through the shop. Frank's da man. I mean it. If you live in the area he has the old sunoco station just south of the 290 on Niagara Falls Blvd.

I became involved in the barter economy. See it works like this. My brother(who is a detail obsessed gunsmith who needs a shop) builds a very nice "AT&T" rifle for Frank out of parts that Frank pays for. Frank gets an incredibly accurate long range bolt action rifle for the price of raw materials. I provide a bunch of free semi-skilled labor to my brother while he builds some furniture on contract. My brother eventuall collects severall thousand dollars for the furniture. I get my van fixed for the price of the parts. Nobody spends as much money as it really costs (except the furniture buyer who is actually getting a price only couple hundred dollars less than they would have paid elsewhere). I got a running van for the price of the parts and access to a really nice shop when I need it for the other vehicles. none of this ever exists in the money economy. so I with the assistance of some other people enriched all of our lives while reducing the GNP proportionately.

I took my two younger boys to the hot dog stand on the canal that I very occasionally went to whe I was a kid.