The Poop Deck

The Ol’ Gal has cancer! Well, maybe not in the true sense of the word. But some sort of wood rot has made itself unavoidably evident.
Continue Reading »

My dad had a Larson Playboy, 14 footer. Whitish with red trim and a 75 hp Johnson.
For some reason we/he decided we would go upstream from our cabin at the 61 mile marker on the Lake of the Ozarks. This was way back before the Truman Damn was imagined.

Dad thought he was able to navigate the lake and up above where we were, the river channel was a serious issue…like shallows and mud just a foot under the surface of the lake was a matter of a few feet left or right of the original Osage river. Just past upstream/river of the Buffalo, one of us kids noticed and told Dad that there was something funny coming up in our wake. Dad stopped the boat!
Using a paddle, he stuck it over the side and it stuck just inches under the surface of the water. So he figured…since we didn’t hit anything underwater to that point, he would just turn around 360 degrees and go back the way we came in to that point. Make sense to me…you?

Well, we must have gotten off a degree or so and clobbered a log or some solid object and we were dead in the water. We had totalled our motors lower unit.

Fortunately, someone saw us trying to paddle upstream and towed us to a fledgling marina and offered to drive Dad back to our cabin so he could drive back with the trailer and take us and the wounded boat back home…at least to the cabin.

Meanwhile, mom, my sister and brother and I were still at the place we had our boat pulled up to and no food or water. No nothin!

This nice man there, walked up to us with a tray of Pepsi in 8oz. bottles, cold and swetting. Ice cold out of the “coke box” as it were…
Nothing has ever tasted so good in my life! I was a Vess Cream Soda kid until then. I have love Pepsi over Coke ever since then.
However, a Rum and Coke is much better than a Rum and Pepsi.
But I will always prefer a Pepsi when I can.

I just thought I would offer some quirky observations. A rambling, if you will, of stuff.
I thought I would do a search on AOL for “Poop Deck”, just to see if my blog showed up in my life time. AOL search brought up 5,121 pages. At 15 links per page. That is 76,815 links if my Radio Shack calculator is working correctly.
I looked at the top 25 pages, and my blog didn’t show up. So I didn’t make the top twenty-five.

Then, I Googled Poop Deck,
Continue Reading »

Day dreaming as boys have been known to do and the fact that I have been having a hard time concentrating on my work at work, I have been doing some number crunching and web surfing and figured out about how much my Ol’Gal would cost today brand new.
Continue Reading »

Did I mention that I was a DJ? (That’s a Disc Jocky for those of you in Chanute)
Yep! I was a DJ on the side from mid 1980’s to very early 1990’s. If you met me now you would probably say to yourself, “this guy actually DJ’d? Like people actually hired him to play music at their important event for their friends and families?”
Continue Reading »

My Dad has a younger sister. Her name is Margarete Yvonne Lorenz. I, and some of you know her as “Auntie” or Margie. She turned 80 last November.

This post is just to give a current status on her, but there is so much more to the story.
Continue Reading »

It dawned on me over the last three days or maybe more that in just 3 short years the family cabin at the Lake of The Ozarks will be 50 years old. It was built in 1958. I asked my Dad today if he could remember the actual month it was actually finished. I didn’t truly expect him to remember but he has surprised me at times, at 82 years old and some dementia setting in. I was only 5 years old then and even though I can remember a lot of things from then, details like that usually escape me.

With the 50th Anniversary looming and on my mind all weekend, I had a lot of things going on in my head.
Continue Reading »