memorial day

So on sunday I went for a run, and as I was feeling a cramp I decided to walk and inspect the small graveyard that was on the side of the road. I like graveyards, something about them is so interesting and soothing to me, soothing might be an odd word but I never feel stressed when I walk around a cemetary, maybe I'm a touch ghoulish. So anyway a few things were striking to me, first that these good minnesota methodists were pretty long-lived, most seemed to die in late seventies at least, and saw a lot that were high eighties and nineties. Most be something in the air. The other thing was the large percentage of monuments that mentioned military service and veteran status. Only one of the men had died during war years, but it was very interesting to me that among the few things people mentioned on a tombstone; birth, death, parent, marriage date, that almost all the graves that had veteran markers put in for memorial day also had something on the monument itself about their service, generally just war, what branch of service, and what rank they held. It got me to thinking that the people who went overseas to fight for the US sacrificed quite a lot and saw things that I don't think anyone can really imagine without having been there themselves. It really defined and shaped their lives, something that they were proud of and definitely worthy of respect and thanks. Anyway, it was a pretty alright cemetary.

On M. day ten of us drove up the creek a ways with some canoes and canoed our way back down. This was very entertaining to me. There is a fellow named Said here who grew up in East Africa, Sudan for a time I think and elsewhere, anyway he had never been in a canoe before. The way things fell out was that he was paddling in the rear of the canoe I was in. The creek was fairly narrow and was quite entertaining as initially we proceded to hit each bank after the other for a time as Said got the hang of it. We also were grounded on numerous sand bars on the trip, at which one of us would get out and in water that might be touching the middle of our calves push the canoe through. We were on it about 2 hrs. Was fun just spending a sunny warm day alternately floating on and pushing a canoe down the ol' creek.

In nature news, or rather unnatural news, I forgot to mention that about a week and half ago I was at a place here they call the gates of hell because of the innumerable saplings there that are hard to walk through, poke you in the face, and are filled with bugs and saw something out of the blair witch movie. I looked up and saw a muskrat (could only tell because of the tail) that was completely eviscerated and hanging from a tree by its foot that was caught in the notch of a branch and the trunk. Was quite scary. Either a raptor dropped it as it flew overhead or somebody put it there. I'm still a little freaked out about it.

Recently I've been reading the early correspondence of hunter s thompson. Its pretty entertaining reading and i've gotten as far as his time in the air force and early experiences in new york city. His application letters to newspapers are also very funny to me, in one of them he pretends to be a drug dealer on madison ave that was beaten by a policeman because the policeman didn't see the article that the city wasn't arresting drug dealers there anymore. In another he writes to the san juan paper and tells them all that is wrong with american journalism and why he is the antidote. The letter in response to this was hilarious and hunter took it less than kindly. Oh well, good book, makes me want to read some of his "real" work some time.

In summer ulty tourney news: I plan on attending the one day thing in madison. Hopefully will be much fun. however, I think I will have to miss Poultry days as the expense and distance is rather large in light of the fact that I will be attending Mars over 4th of july weekend. Oh yeah! and then definitely the tourney in blaine, assuming the jobbers come, and possibly sandblast. All in all, hopefully a fun summer of coed ultimate, just what i wanted.