Labor Day update

I got to go sailing, today. I was actually covering the Labor Day Regatta at Dayton Yacht Harbor, and they let me go along on the boat of the race chairman. He was short two crew members, anyway, so he was glad to have me on board.

He and his wife both put me to work with the raising and lowering of sails, getting the spinnaker up and down. They both told me that I did the job better than the two crew members they had on the previous day, who were both experienced sailers. They said that having me along really helped out.

We sailed around Cromwell, Wildhorse and Malita Islands. Our boat came in third place. We'd have come in better than that, but we lost some ground when a faulty latch came loose a couple of times.

The race took over three hours, so I was late getting to the Labor Day meal at Dave and Melissa's house. Still, the race was a lot of fun and the meal turned out pretty good, too. I will probably be doing race coverage again, for other boat races.

My laptop is finally up and running. It was a fight, but it now runs better than it ever has. I had to totally disable the Window's Automatic updates, which was seriously messing my system up. For some reason, my computer does not like the updates. As an alternative, I found a copy of XP with service pack 2 built in, so I installed that in place of the three XP CDs that came with my computers. (one of which was destroyed in the wreck of March 2004 and was replaced with the one I presently use).

The children are becoming more and more fun. Josiah loves to laugh.

Alana is adorable and develops more personality every day. She's very sweet. Her walk, her character, her likes and dislikes are all girl.

Elijah is... well, Elijah is Elijah. He has been the inspiration for a lot of stories, retold in countless conversations. The other day, he told me that he'd found a live grasshopper.

"You found a live grasshopper?" I asked, pretending to be surprised.

"Yeah," he replied, "it's kinda dead."

Oh, yeah. I also discovered Vanilla Rootbeer. They sell Frosty's brand at the local Pamida, in the brown glass bottles. It's like having a rootbeer float in a bottle. Awesome!

We're trying to finalize the loan from Rural Development, for our house in Kokanee Bend. We love the place, because it has a great femced-in backyard with a playhouse for the kids.and plenty of room for expansion. Hopefully, we'll be able to get some extra money for the improvements we want to do. We'll make some calls, tomorrow, to start getting some estimates on the work.

Gotta go, for now. God bless and don't be strangers, any of you.

Jacob