Sunday May 22nd. Judgement Day?

Written by Jack van Ommen on May 22nd, 2011

For some it is a reason for ridicule for me and many it is a reminder that it will come and not to be caught with our pants down. It is also
the birthday for my sister, a son in law and a good friend, tomorrow my # 2 grandson and a cruising friend.

It is early in the morning and the boom machine, to keep the cormorants at bay, has just started up. I hear wood pigeons, a cookoo and the
crow colony in the tall Poplars around the holiday camp. In the late evening the Nightingales sing me to sleep. The locust trees are blooming, white flowers like golden chain tree blooms, they give off a wonderful scent, like jasmine.
The cottonwoods are shedding their woolly fluff, the lake I pass on the way to the boat is covered with a thin white sheen like snow.

It has been warm and sunny during the day, cool at night, nearly every day this week, a thunderstorm moves through in the early evening.
It is often accompanied by heavy wind and violent lightning strikes. But it lasts but an hour or so.

I have no electricity this weekend and have done the handwork chores on the boat; peeling the name decals off the hull, a tedious job, scraping the loose paint on the bottom.

Friday night I got little sleep. There was a very noisy party in the club house that lasted till sunrise. I was afraid that the nightingales would have left the area for Bulgaria.

Camelia gave me the weekend off to fend for my own dinner. She went across the Danube for, as she tells it, some gossiping with her Bulgarian teacher friends. Next week she goes to Sweden for a week. Now I go to the early Sunday market in town. I need to replace my angle grinder and get
some groceries and find a wireless connection. I would go and hear what the local orthodox priest has to preach about the rapture, if I could understand him. There is a Bethel Baptist church in town but I’m afraid I’d really be lost there. I’m not sure when I can show you the inside of a church next.

The problem I reported about my #1 boat refinishing tool, the Porter Cable orbital disc sander, turned out to be a 3 amp fuse for the 110 volt transformer. But there is another problem with it. It is out of balance and scary to use. A new one here is a major expense. And 6 inch pads, for which I have a good supply of stick on discs, are tough to find, most are now 5”. This will slow me down, with what I have to work with.

So, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking.

ALPES D’HUEZ challenge: Thanks for those who have responded. The rest of you who waited to find out what May 22nd would bring, open your purses, please!

 

 

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