Swimming at Skjermo

Yesterday we took the kids on the first swimming trip of the year. (excepting my microscopic foray into Polar Bear Club territory). It's already July, but this is the first time any rational adult has been moved to take them because the weather has been to cold and rainy. But the last 2 days of June saw us with our first heat wave, with temperatures all the way up into the 90's.

That's not impressive by California standards, and usually it's not that impressive out here either, but this time there had been no build up. It climbed 20 degrees from one day to the next and everybody felt it. The first day of the heat wave we were all too busy to go swimming so we made plans to go the next evening.

However, as is typical of our family, we were a day late and a dollar short to the party. By the time we left, the heat wave had broken and a refreshing breeze had picked up. Less inspirational as swimming weather, but we were determined to have our fun anyway.

Around 6:00 at night Montana time, we all piled into the car and headed to the nearby lake that Laura and I had spent time camping at last summer during our brief foray into homelessness. It's a really nice lake and was already filling up with 4th of July traffic, but the people were nice and everyone had a great time.

All we brought for swimming fun was a leaky inner tube, a creaky Grandma/Mom, and a whiny English Springer Spaniel that didn't really want to swim, but didn't really want me swimming without him. In case he had to rescue me or something. Eye-roll! But the friendly lake people had a raft and paddle boat that they shared with the kids. I went for an extremely short trip since Finley found it a very suspicious and dangerous undertaking and was pulling my mom into the lake in order to get to me.




I tried to get a fun photo of the kids jumping with carefree abandon into the lake, but my trigger finger was off, and they absolutely refused to stay suspended in air to give me a better chance. All I got was a series of images of them right before they jumped, right after they went in the water, or in Damon's case, as he sat in the air. I give up on them as models!

I tried to join my mom as she chatted up the nice people loaning the kids their equipment. Finley and I went over there and had introductions all round, but after a moment one of the ladies crinkled her nose up and said, "Where's that skunk smell coming from?" Sigh. Being the mother of Nimrod, the Mighty Skunk Hunter is a lonely life.

If you saw a blinding white flash in the sky last night, it wasn't a UFO, it was the combined whiteness of mine and my mom's pasty legs. I tried to take a picture, but it doesn't do us justice. The camera compensated for the lack of color as if it was sure, in its little computer-chip heart, that there was no biological source known to man for legs of that color and there must be a mistake somewhere.


After a suitable length of time in the eyes of the adults, and like two seconds in the eyes of the kids, we packed up and headed home. It was nice to take a break from the unending round of work that claims my attention so much of the time. I may have to do it again!