Sullivan has already had his first trip to the vet and he checked out great (and the vet confirmed that he actually seems to be full-blood). He’s very well behaved and quite docile, so far for a Labrador puppy, so we are cautiously optimistic that he will be well-behaved. He does definitely enjoy some good play time, though, as any good lab should.
I found myself stalled by a bit of traffic this morning on the way out of the neighborhood…
When I found him, he was in the middle of the road, really blocking both lanes of traffic. By the time I retrieved my camera, he had tired of staring me down and was moving out of the way. These guys sure are a rowdy bunch!
This weekend is quite a busy one for Charleston. As a part of Navy Week taking place here, the Blue Angels put on a show this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon. The things that these crazy pilots can do with planes is nothing short of amazing. I was able to shoot some of the acrobatics, but it definitely made me wish that I had a longer lens (I had to digitally zoom in on the pictures here). I also got a preview of the air show unexpectedly on Wednesday when I took a long lunch break to do a 10k run around the perimeter of Daniel Island. I was peacefully running along the road, when much to my surprise, 4 of the planes buzzed over me close enough that I could read the “U.S. NAVY” log on their wings.
As I made my way downtown to watch the show – I was a bit late leaving – I was able to watch the Blue Angels as they were beginning the show. While I was crossing the Cooper River Bridge, the planes disappeared from my site. But then, suddenly, as I approached the end of the bridge, I heard a loud roar above me, and looked up through the sunroof, to see a flyover, not 30 feet above me. That was a pretty spectacular site, though it fortunately was a brief one, as driving while looking through the sunroof is a terrible idea…
As an aside, I also got stuck in traffic in Mount Pleasant, as I past the Boone Hall Strawberry Festival. If only I had been able to stop and take a picture of the amazingness that ensued there. I guess strawberry picking season is about to start (about which I am thrilled) and to kick it all off, they put on a festival celebrating all that is strawberry. My favorite feature was by far the strawberry Merry-Go-Round…
My garage door and I… we do not get along.
This is what the lift mechanism for my garage door opener looks like. Yesterday, for about seven hours, it instead looked like the bad side of a junk yard - gears, screws, sheet metal scattered everywhere with mechanical grease smeared about in odd patterns.
A couple weeks ago, upon returning home from a grocery trip and with sweet visions of resting on the couch in front of a movie with my wife, I attempted to close the garage door, only to be greeted a noise you might expect from a chainsaw and a still opened garage door. Now, I am certainly not a mechanic, but I had a strong inclination that this 
After a bit of research on the internet, I found that, since some genius thought it wise to use plastic (maybe clay) gears spinning at hundreds of rotations per minutes to drive heavy garage doors, there is quite a number of places that deal aftermarket garage door parts. I placed an order for a new set of gears, knowing that I could just pop the new one right on and save myself hundreds by not hiring a garage door man.
Then, the package landed on my doorstep (rather quickly, I might add – those internet people are fast) and the “easy fix-it plan in my head” became an actuality. In the plan in my head, I was going to open the unit, pull one old gear off and pop one new gear on. In real life, I removed pretty much every part, scattered them across the floor and rebuilt the unit from the ground up. In the plan in my head, the whole project was to take about 30 minutes. I real life, I worked through the entirety of my Saturday afternoon and evening, missing two fun social engagements. In the play in my head, I wasn’t going to blow the circuit breaker, slam the garage door against the ground, or create any sort of general havoc. In real life, well, you know. But, alas, I finally worked the garage door opener into submission and, at least for now, it operates smoothly. And, as a bonus, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about how one works.
This wasn’t my first misadventure with that garage door. When Ashley and I first bought our house, one of two major items that we required to be fixed was an area of wood rot over the top of our door. Several days and several thousand dollars later (fortunately, not out of our pocket), the door was fixed, we closed on the house, and we began moving into the house.
The first time I pulled into the garage, I made it about halfway in, when suddenly my car halted to a stop. As this happened I heard a bam, followed by a pop, and then a crash. I looked up in agony, as I realized that the bike I had so nicely mounted on my roof attacked on our newly repaired garage door opening, denting the newly applied flashing and squeezing fresh caulk from the seam like toothpaste. The bike was certainly not a winner in the fight either. The popping noise turned out the be the bike’s seat being ripped from the bike and launched somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 feet. I was not a happy camper… Ashley, however, got quite the show from the porch and looking back on it, I wish we somehow knew to catch it on camera – I’m sure it would make quite the YouTube video. Fortunately, there was no serious damage, we were able to get everything fixed back up with minimal hassle.
I think I have learned my lesson, though. A garage door is not my friend.
Then a beautiful thing happened -- I met a girl, she won my heart, and I asked her to be my wife (she accepted). Ashley and I are approaching a year and a half of marriage and it has been a most wonderful adventure, though perhaps a slightly different one than that about which I set out to write. My beautiful wife shares my love of the outdoors and a good adventure, so we embark on those sorts of adventures as we can, but I learned that many of the best and greatest adventures are of the "every day" variety-- the joys of learning to love and support each other, set up a home together, and the list goes on...
So I was browsing Flickr and came across the pictures from the trip that Jeremy, Jonathan, Chris, and I took one weekend in January of this year (yeah, it was cold).
We loaded up several dry bags with dry clothes, sleeping bags, food, a backpacking stove, and other necessities and stuffed them into and tied them on top of the 2 tandem kayaks and put off by the Folly Beach Pier around 10 o'clock on Friday night. Jeremy and Chris were in one kayak, Jonathan and I were in the other one. We paddled north towards Morris Island, staying just beyond the breakers until we reached the north point of Folly, where we had to swing way out into the ocean to avoid getting rolled where the waves were crashing on sandbars.
As we approached Morris Island we began to look out for an area that Jeremy and I had previously scouted out where the waves had over time washed away the walls surrounding an old rice field, creating a grass ledge right above the beach. Eventually we spotted an area that looked to be potentially the right spot and paddled in toward the beach. Unfortunately, when you tie numerous dry bags across the cords that are used to raise and lower the rudder, that task becomes much more difficult -- as I attempted the process, a wave caught the side of the boat and rolled Jonathan and I up onto the beach. Mind you... the air temperature at this time was about 40 degrees. Thank goodness for wet suits!
Well, we were able to gather ourselves up and began to walk (or run to keep warm) up and down the beach in an attempt to find a place where we could climb up to the ledge... with no success. So we piled back in the kayaks and continued to paddle north along the beach. Once again, we landed and continued the search. Finally, Jeremy came up with the bright idea to run up the beach with one of the glow sticks we had tied to our life jackets until he found our perfect camping spot. We got back in the kayaks one last time and continued our final trek, this time using the glow stick as a beacon.
By this point, it was shortly after midnight and we had travelled 7 or 8 miles from our starting point. Needless to say, we were hungry and tired, yet very satisfied with our journey. Jeremy and I began to unload the boats, starting with Jonathan's tent that we had also stuffed in one of the hulls, and Chris and Jonathan took the tent up the ledge and began setting it up. Once we had gotten all of our gear on the ledge, we pulled the kayaks up, as well -- a good thing since the next morning we discovered a high tide with the waves crashing against the cliff walls.
I then broke out my brand new backpacking stove (the instruction manual since I'd never used it) and began to prepare both the best and worst chicken and rice dish ever. And then, it was bedtime... because it was so cold, we really didn't mind that there were 4 guys in a 3 man tent.
The next morning, I woke up at sunrise and Jeremy soon followed suit. Since Jonathan and Chris are a bit more of late sleepers than we are, we took off to explore the island without them. By the time we returned, they were working on waking up, so we got out the oatmeal, granola bars, and hot chocolate. We then all took off to make an attempt at exploring the old rice paddy.
As we progessed, we began to hear loud cracking noises in the distance, but discarded them as someone pounding a hammer over on James Island. However, the farther we got, the noises grew louder and louder and we began to notice shotgun shells scattered on the ground... not a good combination. About this time, we simultaneously make the decision to get the heck out of Dodge and hear the loudest crack yet, followed by the noise of bird shot raining down around us. About half a mile later, we stopped, caught our breaths and expressed amongst ourselves our disapproval with the rednecks hunting for quail on the Island.
After that whole debacle, it was getting to be late morning, so we determined that is was probably time to start packing up to head back to the mainland. And no, the coming of daylight didn't bring any new warmth to the January air. So we packed everything up, put our wetsuits back on, and set out to sea. Now that it was daylight, we wanted to get some picutres with the Morris Island Light, so took a brief detour past it, snapped and few photos, and continued on south towards the pier.
As we got nearer and nearer to home, the more we realized how cold that we were, even with the wetsuits. Fingers and toes began to grow numb, earlobes started to freeze, but we kept on trooping. Finally, we came to the pier, pulled the boats out of the water, and took everything up to the cars, immediately followed by a heat blasting session to thaw our chilly bodies, as we basked in the excitement of having successfully completed an awesome adventure!
