The Dog Days of Summer.

Friday morning I wake up and get ready for the trip to the river. Garrett, Brandt, Russell, and a few others are joining me at the river. Around 8 am I get Amber and we head to work. I had to work for a few hours before heading to the river. Amber quietly puts up with sitting at work as I do some medial tasks waiting for the hours to melt off the clock. Finally 10 am rolls around and I am out the door, I gas up the boat and then I am off to Safeway to meet the others. Brandt and Garrett show up about the same time as Russell, everyone gets supplies from the store and then we head to Boyer Park to launch. Launching went quickly and away we went to the dunes. There were only about 4 or 5 people there, so we set up our area with chairs, a grill, coolers and other important items, like Amber's food. This was my first trip to the river with Amber. I coxed her to get into the water and when that failed I helped her in. She started swimming. We all went to shore. She looked like a wet muskrat. Then I played with the tennis ball with her. She, I was told, loves to play with a tennis ball. So I threw it in the water, and she would get it, and bring it back. This went on through out the day. We would hide the tennis ball from time to time since we were getting tired of throwing the ball, and she had no sign of slowing down.

At about 1:20 Brandt and I went to the Boyer Park Marina to pick up some people who said they would be down at 1:30. My friend Kristine was one of them. While going through the dike I saw a nice boat, and it looked like Chief was in it. I yelled "Steve". He looked over and waved back. How cool was that. Steve was there with his brand new boat. I went up and talked to him. I told him we were at the Dunes. He said he was headed that way too. I got back to the boat and waited for Kristine for about 30 minutes. When she did not show up, we all left and went back to the Dunes. We hung out on the shore for a while playing with Amber, chatting with each other, and talking with Chief.

Then I broke out the video camera. The battery was bad. I had been charging it for two days and it did not hold the charge. So, I brought along the AC adapter and an inverter for the boat. I was hoping it would work, and sure enough it did! So, we were able to video tape the boating experience. Brandt was the first one on the tube. He rolled right away, but managed to stay on the tube. That happened twice. Then he sat in it backwards. That made it harder to throw him out. But on one corner I threw him hard core. He rolled, cart wheeled, and thrashed on the water. It was pretty spectacular.

Chief took Garrett, Brandt, Russell and I out on his boat. He has a 3 man tube. We got in that. What a heck of a trip that was. Holy smokes! On one corner we were going pretty good. Garrett to my right and Brandt to my left. Garrett had on red swimming trunks and a red life jacket. All of a sudden he was there and then we was gone. I followed suit and Brandt followed me. Chief had knocked us all off. We got back on and went at it some more. It was a blast. Then we would switch out trading locations on the tube and people. We were out there for about one hour. I then invited Chief to go on my tube. So, I took him for a ride. I was pretty easy on him, and we had him get air on a few jumps. We packed up and left around 7:30. While loading the boat at the docks, I was listening to the Mariner's game. They were playing against Kansas City. In the top of the 9th, trailing 3 to 1, then Mariner's staged a comeback with Ichiro hitting a game winning grand slam. That was great.

Russell rode with me to the river, so we went to Colfax to drop off my boat and then on to Pullman to Russell's for dinner. He fixed chicken and spaghetti. It was good. I was so tired afterwards that I just drove to my office and slept there for most of the night.