I’ve
been largely vacant from social media sites and remiss in blogging regularly lately.
I apologize. This is due to a couple of things: First, The Boy & high
school - I'll come back to that. Second, it seemed June was vacation
month.
Family
vacations are something unique to individual families. Some go to the beach,
the mountains, or the desert; others choose specific destinations like parks or
cities. I camped as a child, hubby’s family thinks roughing it is a three star
hotel. We try to shake things up for our kids, but there is a specific
type of family vacation that comes up regularly: shooting. Specifically,
machine gun shoots.
There are several machine gun shoots
in the country, Knob Creek is (I believe) the oldest and we’ve never traveled
back to that one. Big Sandy is the biggest, although I remember it when was
much smaller. There’s an age limit for most shoots (for obvious safety reasons)
but occasionally there are machine gun shoots that allow kids.
This particular shoot was a machine
gun shoot for charity so it was more of a family-friendly environment. It’s
held in a small town every year to benefit some part of the town. One year it
was the fire department because they needed equipment and it simply wasn’t in
the budget. This year it was the school for the same reason. The town has its
own people donate things to raffle and to shoot at. One of the local farmers
has a piece of land that’s used for the shoot and for camping. The hotel offers
a discount. The grocery store donates meat and one of the restaurants donates a
cook to barbeque it and people can buy their dinner each night. They truck in
cold drinks and ice for us to buy. All proceeds go to the cause because
everyone in town is donating their time, products, and services to get money
out of the shooters and spectators. Old beat up cars that would get towed
off for scrap are saved and shot up first. We blew up a van this year. I’m
serious, there was a reactive target under it and it flipped the minivan and broke
it in half. Kind of cool. Sponsors put up prizes to be raffled. Lately even some
of the chain sporting stores have been putting in some things to be raffled. It’s
good PR.
We
all have a lot of fun, see people we only see once or twice a year sometimes,
and the town brings thousands of dollars into a depressed, floundering community
in addition to what the actual charity rakes in. It’s a win all the way around.
Now, that being said, I was
supremely happy to go sit in the desert because I needed a break. Really. The
Boy (I said I’d get back to it) had some difficulty at school – not his fault,
we confirmed it, but neither was it the sort of thing we could ignore. And the
school couldn’t fix it. So he chose to switch to home/online school instead of
regular public school. And it was an uphill battle from there.
Actually the first few weeks were
fine. Then for whatever reason he decided he needed to be prompted to do anything. I honestly feel like I slid
back into high school myself. Seriously, I sat with him through the last half
of ninth grade. The thing is, I already passed ninth grade and felt no need to
do it again. That didn’t matter. To make him sit through it, I had to do it
too. The upshot is: I got next to nothing productive done in the last few
months with my writing, although I have had a lot of teen-related angst. I should be angst-proof.
So he finished his classes, barely,
and we take off on vacation. The Girl has lost interest in shooting after the
first half-day and sat with her nose in a book, enjoying the chance to
peacefully read something that wasn’t assigned. I sat in whatever shade I could
find frantically trying to finish A Thousand Words #4 because I’m behind where
I wanted to be courtesy of her little brother. We both had earbuds in under
hearing protection to make it easier to ignore the pop, pop, pop, boom of
gunfire in the background and occasional explosion as someone hits a reactive
target. The cows didn’t seem to mind, although I noticed the sudden lack of
ground squirrels every time the firing line was active. Hmm. Rodents have a
sense of self-preservation after all.
The Boy threw himself into the
predominate activity with gusto, especially since discovering his back-up plan
of playing games on his laptop wasn’t going to happen. There was no internet.
No Wifi to connect with his friends at home, and no cell service as a back up
to text/call/skype them. I’d love to say I laughed at that last bit, but I was
one of the three out of four family members who succumbed to a panic attack
thirty miles from the site when service cut out. GPS still worked, but that was
of limited interest. Hubby doesn’t live and die with his phone in his pocket,
so he was the one who laughed at the rest of his adoring family
when mountains finally killed our weak signal. I called him names. It wasn’t my
finest moment.
On the plus side, that’s one less
distraction. It was just me and my laptop. Until they closed the line for dinner
and the ground squirrels came out to play again. They’re cute. (The farmer
doesn’t think so, but they are.)
As
soon as the shoot ended, we headed home to trade in a very heavy load of
weapons and ammo for a lighter but almost as bulky cello and left on Family Vacation
2.0 – Mount Rushmore. Yes, it added a couple of days to our vacation to return
home to switch out luggage and head out again, but it just seemed like a poor
idea to go to a National Monument armed to the teeth, you know? Besides, The
Girl wanted to find the Team America theme song and load it on her MP3 player
so she could play it at Mount Rushmore. I saw this as another bad idea, but The
Boy sided with her and they so rarely band together anymore I hated to break it
up. I had days for that partnership to crumble before nixing her rebellious
streak. (That didn’t quite go as planned.)
