Chicago

Have you ever experienced a perfect weekend? I believe I just did.

In the past I have heard the saying, "Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten." This was the weekend where I first heard, "Every time you kill a kitten, God masturbates." It was amusing in a very sick and twisted kind of way. I hope to start selling the T-shirt.

It all began at O'Hare. Actually, now that I think of it, it started way before that.

I have needed to get an I-PASS for a while now. I find myself in Chicagoland now and again, and when I am down that way, I have to wait in huge lines to pay my toll. They have transponders you can mount in your car that allow you to bypass the toll booth and take advantage of open road tolling. Back in Denver on the E-470, they had the same thing, but since the lines were never very long, I never bothered getting one. I just paid my toll and went on my merry way. In Illinois, it behooves you to get an I-PASS.

A friend let me borrow his transponder for a previous trip to Chicago, and after using it, I was hooked.

Every time I attempted to order one for myself, I had been thwarted in the attempt. The web site quit taking orders. The 800 line took too long to answer. I stopped once at an Oasis and the customer service center was closed.

Not this time.

I stopped, the Oasis was staffed, and within 30 minutes I had my very own shiny new I-PASS transponder. No more stopping at toll booths. And the tolls are half priced when you use your I-PASS. It is a win win.

After this happy bit of news, I was off to the airport to pick up my co conspirators in our weekend's festivities.

I guess now I need to back up and explain why we were bothering to get together in the first place. Long ago, and far away, we all lived in Arizona. While we were in Arizona, we all worked for a company in Tempe. While we did this, many of the musically talented employees would get together and play music. Some of these musicians got together and formed a band. The band went on to get signed, and get a pretty large following. Then, the band broke up.

In those early days, I went to many of their shows, and enjoyed the music very much. Since the band broke up, and I have moved away from Arizona, the memories are contained on a few CD's that I have listened to over the years. I cannot remember the last time I saw them play live.

While messing around with Google one day, I came across a posting from one of the members of that band. He mentioned that he would be playing a show in Chicago and they would be performing many of those songs. Now that I am pretty close to Chicago, I thought that it sounded great. I planned to attend that show.

One thing I know about myself is that I am lazy. If I can come up with an excuse to skip a show, I will probably take it. The bar is too far away. It is too smoke filled. I am too old to stay out that late. I will never find a parking spot. I do not want to pay the cover. Blah Blah. It is easy to make up excuses when you are old and married and raising kids. Going to clubs is for the young, and I no longer qualify.

So I brainstormed a little bit, and remembered the last live show I had been to. While in Denver, I was contacted by my friend who is a huge Shins fan. The Shins would not be swinging through Phoenix, but they would be coming to Denver. Would I be interested in going with him? Sure I would. So he dragged my butt out of the house, and I had a wonderful time. So much so that when the opening act from that show (The Brunettes) came back through town, I ventured out on my own to see them again. That had been quite some time ago.

I contacted my Shins loving friend, and asked him if he wanted to go to this show in Chicago. Since he was very good friends with the musician that would be playing, he wholeheartedly endorsed the plan. We made plans for him to fly up on the Friday afternoon, we would catch the show on Saturday, and he would fly out on Sunday.

He contacted the musician, and they worked out a song that they could both play together. The weekend was shaping up to be a memorable one.

A week or so before the adventure was to begin, we were sending IM's back and forth and working out last minute details. While Googling around, I found another of our old friends (and my Shins loving friend's old roommate) and sent him an email. He wrote back. We sent messages back and forth, and when he heard about Chicago, he was in too. The two to get ready became three for the show. The plans were set.

When he booked his flight, he booked a room in the loop, and all was well.

Now our latest arrival also had an old musician friend that is currently living in the Chicago area, so he sent an email to him letting him know that he would be in town. The old musician friend said, hey, why don't you swing by for a bit when you get into town?

This all takes me back to the airport. My first experience driving to O'Hare. I have taken a bus to O'Hare when the flight from Milwaukee to Chicago was cancelled. I have hung around O'Hare waiting for flights when I could not find a non stop out of Milwaukee. This was my first attempt in a car.

The traffic was light, finding parking was a breeze, but now I had no idea where I was. Since I had stopped for the I-PASS, I was running a little bit late, and one of the planes had arrived. (There were two flights I needed to meet, one from NYC and one from Phoenix. They were originally scheduled to arrive at about the same time, but the one from Phoenix ran into a delay. It was not due to mechanical problems, or due to weather. Frankly, I suppose we will whitewash history and not put into words the actual reason for the delay. However. The flight I was to meet from Phoenix was moved back two hours, so we had a bit of time to kill at the airport and I was not in a super big rush to make it there on time.)

I called the cell phone, and found that he had already gotten off the plane, and was in the terminal. I will skip the details of phone calls, misunderstandings of airport layouts, and the fact that there are two entrances to the airport Hilton. I will fast forward to the moment where we finally found each other. We spent the next few hours catching up, working out business plans, and listening to scratch / demo songs that my NYC dwelling friend had been working on. It was a blast.

When the third musketeer arrived, we went to the car, and began our journey over to our NYC friend's house. However, what I did not know at the time, was that all three of these guys knew each other in high school. I was the odd man out. I was a little bit concerned. How would we get along? Would it be awkward? Would I want to leave after ten minutes and start the weekend off on a sour note?

Not at all. He treated us all like old friends, threw some food on the grill, and made us all feel very welcome. The three talented musicians went upstairs and I listened to them work out some songs on the keyboards, drums, and guitars. It was a great afternoon. After the music, we walked the two blocks from the townhouse to the beach on Lake Michigan. It felt like visiting someone that I had known for years, and I very much appreciated his hospitality. The sun began to set, and we began our journey into the city.

I have a terrible sense of direction. I used to deliver pizzas, and even toward the end of those days I would need to call the customers to ask them how to get the pizzas from the pizza shop to their house. Assuming I had good directions to work from, I had no problem actually finding the houses. But if you set me down in a new city, I promise you, I will get lost, and will need to pull over and look at a map. (Looking at a map and stopping to ask for directions are two different things. I will not ask, but I will stop and look. Yes, there is a difference. It's a guy thing.)

With my two GPS systems (as I called the guys riding along in my car) in place, they told me where to turn, and we headed down along the lake into the city. We found our way to the House of Blues hotel and some public parking. (Valet = $40 per day. Self park = $26 per day. You do the math.)

Now we were three young men on a mission. Trying to avoid detection by the front desk. We had three adult males sharing one room. The hotel clearly said only two adults to a room by golly. We were skimping on parking, we would not be splurging on hotel rooms. Chicago hotels are not cheap, and we had a plan. One of my bags contained an air mattress. We were well prepared, and well equipped. But we had to be careful. We concocted elaborate schemes, and prepared ourselves for mission impossible. We had laid out routes into the hotel to avoid detection. We would take different entrances. We would wear disguises. We would use voice changing technology and knew different escape routes and had rendezvous points mapped out.

None of it was necessary. The hotel was undergoing renovations. The check in desk was on the fourth floor. Nobody saw us coming or going. Nobody cared. This was Chicago.

We checked in, dumped our bags, and went out for a bit. Found a good Cajun restaurant and enjoyed a great dinner. The waitress came by, seemed a little flirty. Asked us to see ID. The young looking member of our party played the 'how old do you think I am' game. She guessed 25. After learning the true number, did not talk to us much the rest of the night. We tipped her anyway.

We were tired, and retired after dinner.

Some snored.

We slept.

It was at least noon before we stirred.

It was heaven.

Upon waking we went to heaven. Heaven on Seven. Good food. Not enough hot sauce. A great piano man singing and playing. We left the restaurant and rented some bikes. We went toward Navy Pier, then turned around and went south by Soldier Field and the sledding hill where all the cool kids go sledding in the winter. We rode our bikes down the sledding hill. We just enjoyed a great afternoon biking in the sun.

We saw the bean in Millennium Park. We saw the fountain from Married with Children. We saw the Blue's festival. We saw the statue come to life. We saw the Trump building under construction. We did not see the winner of that first season of the Apprentice or Oprah. But we still managed to have fun.



























































It was time. Time for the show. Time for the entire reason this trip was made.

We cleaned up. We were pokey. We were speedy. We watched the coverage of Paris Hilton going back to jail. We found out where the trains run and where the stops are and where we needed to go.

And then we did.

Go.

To the train stop. On the train. Brown line north.

Slight mixup with directions. Ask for help. Friendly people tell us to turn around and head south. We arrive at the venue. We are on the list.

We walk in. There he is. We all say hi. It is great.

The plan is, he will do some new songs. Our Shins loving friend will do a song with him. There will be a break. A local Chicagoland band will do a set, then after a break they will do a cover of the old well known songs, with our musician friend playing on bass. After this, an unrelated act will fill out the bill.

The lights go down. Our musician friend does his thing. It is one man, with a guitar, on stage. I am extremely impressed. I like the material. I like the confidence and ability to stand up in front of a room full of strangers and be a rock star. It all goes well. Our Shins loving friend goes on and together they perform a song. It goes great. A fun time.



There is a short break.

The band takes the stage and does some original material. I am not familiar with the music, but it's loud and it's live and the sound seems right. After another break, it is time for the reason I am here. The reason two men jumped on airplanes and came to Chicago. The band takes the stage.

Frankly I am not sure what to expect. Some crappy versions of songs I love? Mistakes and desecration of the memories I hold dear? A singer that can't sing? Nope. It was an honest to God great set.

There were minor deviations from the band I remembered. Some lyrics forgotten. But as was stated from the stage, when you make a mistake, you just call it jazz. It worked. The whole thing worked. The band sounded great. The songs were fantastic. I do not have adequate adjectives to describe it. It literally brought me back to another time. A crowd of people that was there to see someone else, being drawn into the music, just like back in Arizona. A section of die hard fans dancing, people singing along with the songs throughout the bar. It was magic.

I figured we would maybe hear two or three songs, but they kept coming. As always happens in a moment like that, you never want it to end.

There were smiles on stage, the band looked like they were having a great time performing great material.

It was over far too fast.

I wish I could more adequately describe it, but this post is meant to remind me of what I felt that night, and all those nights back in the early 90s. When the music was new, and fresh, and live. When we all wished we had recordings of the music, because at that time all we had was the live performances and no way to relive them while driving in our car. We would go to a show and hear the next new song these guys had written. We would sing along and have a great time. Now that I have the CD's and so much time has passed, I had completely forgotten what this music was like live. Now that I have the CD's, I wish I had the power to hear it all live again. I guess I am never satisfied.

I was reminded of how much I used to LOVE going to see these guys. There really is power in this music. And it was over. What a gift to have been reminded of those days gone by.

Who knows if I will have any more chances to see this music performed live. I am just glad that I took this opportunity, and I am glad the guys that were with me were also able to experience this night. (I am not pretending to know if it affected them the same way that it affected me, but affected me it did.)

They are a talented group of guys I was with last weekend. I was given some CD's and I have started listening to them. I am enjoying that music. I have been given some scratch / demo tracks to listen to. People walked away from this gig inspired. They liked what they saw. They wanted more. These guys are musicians, poets, writers. When I grow up I want to be like them.

It all ended. We took the train home. We were tired. It was late. We crashed. We had to get up way too early to make it to the airport. One flight left on time, another was delayed. I had no problems with tollbooths because of my I-PASS. I returned home in a good mood.

I had to get back to real life, do some laundry, fix some problems with some computers around the house so the kids could continue playing their games. I had to go back to the office and get back to the grind.

You can take my dignity, and make me sit in a cube. I will get old, and one day I will decide that I am too old and will never again go out to a club to see live music. But nobody can take away my memory of that weekend.

Why do I love the Model M keyboard?

What is the Model M you ask? You are obviously new to computing.

You can keep your fancy pants whisper quiet keyboards of today. Take your DVORAK, your ergonomic, your cheap throwaway free keyboards that come with your new Dell and throw them all away.

For those of you that have only used these, you do not know any better. You can still be forgiven. But for those that started on the Model M, and have moved on to something else, all I can ask is, what were you thinking?

When you type on a Model M, you know you are typing. Those around you know you are typing. There is no question that typing is being done. (As I am typing this, my co worker that lives on the other side of the wall in this veal fattening pen known as the cube farm starts to get annoyed.)

When I relocated to another state to take a new job, one of the things that was placed into my trunk so that it would be with me on the first day, was my trusty Model M.

There is a tactile feel to the keyboard that has not been duplicated by any other keyboard I have tried. These keyboards are indestructible, I have been using the same one for years and years, and expect it to last until I can no longer type.

They have ps/2 connectors, but with the advent of ps/2 to usb connectors, I do not see any reason that these keyboards will not keep on working in the future.

I guess if you never had one and do not know any better, you can be forgiven, but after reading this, you should go out and find one.

From the wikipedia article:

"The many different variations of the keyboard have their own distinct characteristics, with the vast majority having a buckling spring key design and many having fully swappable keycaps. Model Ms have been prized by computer enthusiasts and heavy typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback resulting from a keystroke.

The Model M is also regarded as an extremely durable piece of hardware. Many units manufactured since the mid 1980s are still in use today, while the computers and monitors of the day have long since been thrown out, recycled, or retired to museums."


from another site that I enjoy:

"For two decades, the IBM Model M Keyboard has been the defacto standard human interface for force-feedback computing. Constructed with "buckling spring" action and a chassis that doubles as a weapon, Model M's appeal to stone-code scallywags and hackers alike. This site honors that which is built on Selectric technology, and those who click them into kernels all over the world."

A new set of tires

I love new tires. The fact that I can go in and pony up for a set of 4 nice new tires is such a change for the better. Yes, I know Mr. Salesman, you are ripping me off with your tire disposal fees, your valve stem replacement fees, your balance the tire fees, your roadside assistance fees. Blah. Just take my old tires off, and put the new ones on.

Do I want the super deluxe whisper quiet tires? How about the super duper traction tires? Are they H rated? T rated? Do I care?

Just give me some good tires, I do not want their life's story. If those tires will last 80,000 miles, great, put them on. That is probably longer than I will have the car. If they actually manage to provide traction in the snow, all the better.

It did not used to be this way. I can remember delivering pizzas for a living. Gas was much cheaper then, frankly I do not know how drivers make much money doing that these days.

I was in a VW Bug and I had no money. I found a tire shop that would sell pre owned tires for $5. It was great. Except pre owned meant that all the life had already been sucked out of them. They were someone else's trash.

These tires did not last very long, so pretty soon I had spent $5 here, and $5 there, and before you know it, I could have easily paid for a brand new tire. Thus began the lesson, don't pay less for junk that will wear out, pay more for stuff that will last a while. It can be painful up front, but it pays for itself in the long run.

Eventually I did graduate to being able to afford a set of 4 brand new tires at the same time. It was a grand feeling.

But then the curse of the new tires began. I had a minivan. I put new tires on it. The transmission went out and it turned out that it was more economical to just sell the thing and buy another car. My new tires went with it. (This was another lesson, I bought an old used junker, and I got what I paid for..)

I had another car where the tires were brand new and I needed to sell it as the children and car seats would not fit in the stupid thing. Bye bye new tires. (It was a case of having a sporty car when I was single and newly married not being a good fit for an old married couple with children.)

Same with my 79 Chevy Blazer, the tires on it had very low miles, but the gas prices kept going up and the miles per gallon stayed the same. It had to go as well. But not before the neighborhood hooligans came by and sliced the sidewalls of many cars that were parked in the street, mine included.

That was how I quit using an insurance company. They tried to tell me that these tires had a bunch of wear on them, and they would be prorating them to a much lower value than they should have had. Whatever they saved on that claim, they have lost on a ton of vehicle and home insurance premiums that have since gone to another insurance company.

Now that I have new tires on both of my cars, I guess it is time to go buy two new ones. But at least I can enjoy the new tires for a while...

You gotta put more into the system than you take out

When you are part of a volunteer organization, please do not take advantage of others.

We go to church. One of the things that we will get asked to do, when people are moving out of or moving in to our congregation, is to go over to their place and help them move. Whether they are coming or going, it is usually a good thing to go over and help lighten the load. Moving is no fun, and the idea of loading and unloading a moving van all alone is even less fun.

I do not mind getting the call, going over, and helping to unload the van. You meet the new folks, hopefully make their stress levels go down, and let them meet some friendly faces so that when they start going to church with you next week, they will know some names. When it is friends that are leaving, it is a nice time to get together for the last time and say goodbye.

Hopefully they understand that they get what they pay for, we are not professional movers and we might break something. (I do remember one guy getting upset when we scratched his furniture. We all stopped and told him he was welcome to do the work on his own. That calmed him down a little bit.)

Some people feel entitled, like this *IS* some professional service that they can call up. Instead of remembering that we are volunteering time out of our day out of the goodness of our hearts, and trying to make things easy for us, they will instead do the opposite.

They schedule their moves at some oddball time of the day, and wonder why nobody shows up to help. If you want help, try asking for people to come by as they can after work or on Saturday. Do not tell people that you need them there at noon on a Wednesday, odds are really good that people have to work and are unwilling or unable to take off from work to accommodate you. It also helps when they have actually shown up once or twice during their tenure in the area to help when someone else has moved. Who would you rather go help, the guy that never showed up to help anyone else move, or the guy that was at all of the moves for the last several years??

Providing pizza or donuts or at the very least water for your volunteer moving crew is a nice touch.

Doing as much as you can on your own is also good. Some moves have gone great, the family moved as much of the lighter stuff as they could on their own, then asked for help with the heavy stuff. Showing up and finding out that all that needs to be moved are the couches and a few heavy boxes makes for a great memory of that family.

Do not lie and tell me you do not have much stuff, or that there is nothing heavy to move. When I show up and find a treadmill and a piano and other heavy goodies, we both know that you knew you had this stuff when you were asking for help. It is not as if you will somehow be able to hide this from us.

Try to tidy up a little bit, there is nothing like going through someone's bedroom and finding the goodies that they should have packed up before we got there. That is just, Ewwww.

Do not ask me to go over to your storage shed and clean that out when we get done at your house. Why don't you take care of that before the big day of the move.

Do not ask me to go to different locations to pick up your stuff. Try to be organized and ready to go on moving day.

Do not ask me to come over and help you load your truck, and then let me show up and find that you have not packed your belongings.

Do not ask us to show up at 7am, and then arrive at 9am with the U-Haul. Yes, I know, sometimes the reservations get screwed up, but try to be ready for that contingency. Have a cell phone, and use it to let people know what is going on, and that there will be a delay, and how long that delay will last. I have stuff I can be doing at my house too, ask me to come back when you get your act together.

I understand there will be exceptions to these rules. There will be elderly people, disabled people, or others that genuinely need this help, and we will gladly give it.

When you are able bodied, and just lazy, then please, do not call me. I do not want to pack your stuff. I will help you MOVE your stuff, but there is a difference.

Remember, we are volunteering our time. If you cannot abide by these simple rules, I will simply get busy, and that will be one less person coming by to help you out.

It is not just the moving however, these thoughts apply to any aspect of the volunteer organization. If you are constantly sucking up the time and resources of the group, you will end up killing the group. There is only so much time and resources to go around, we cannot continually give it to only you. Do not be the whiner that has the pastor's phone number on speed dial. Do not live your life in such a way that you are always in crisis mode, you always need help with your bills and you always need meals brought over.

Do not get me wrong, these systems are in place for a reason, and we are all glad to give them to those in need, but when you are taking advantage of them, there is less to go around to everyone else. Yes, I know, there are times that people are in need and we do not have access to all the information. We are asked to help and we do. However, there is not always enough for everyone. Sure, over time, everyone can probably take advantage of the different benefits, but in practice, hopefully there are those that are completely self reliant and do not need to take. But. They will still need to give in order for this system to work.

In the 80/20 rule, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. 80% of the people are willing to let the 20% do that work. If you are one of the 20%, great. If you are one of the 80%, why not see about switching over.

Sometimes we call it STP. The same ten people. They are the same 10 people that sign up to bring the food to the potluck, to clean the building, to do whatever needs to be done. If the rest of you just sit back, and do not do your share, soon enough those 10 become 5 who then become 0.

It is pretty easy. Do unto others. As you would have them. Do unto you.

Excuse me, some dude needs help moving again.

More links for fun reading.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/05/theory_x_doesnt_work_with_tele.html

http://www.cio.com/article/30100/Management_Remote_Worker_Control_

http://www.cio.com/article/108501/

Buy it.

Poor little Cub Scouts. I have your answer. Homemade cars will not cut it in 2007.

In our last installment, the question was, do you buy your cars?

The answer is, yes. Yes you do. (Assuming you want to win..)

The Cub Scouts spent their den meetings building cars. For weeks on end, they were sawing, sanding, painting, and enjoying themselves. Tools were shared, designs were admired, the kids were having a good time.

It was fun standing around with the other dads, occasionally we would offer a word of encouragement, or maybe help out with a tricky cut with the coping saw. One dad did not join us in our little group. One dad joined the dark side.

He spent time the same way I did, looking online at kits and designs and whatnot.

However, instead of coming to my conclusion, which was to let the kids build their cars on their own, he decided to buy one. It looked great. All it needed was some paint.

Instead of letting his Cub Scout paint the car, the Dad would let his Cub Scout watch the car get painted. Maybe it is our own fault, none of the Dads that witnessed this spoke up. We let him push his son out of the way so his son could not ruin Dad's pinewood derby car.

In the end it was a fantastic racer. It beat all of the other cars with no problem.

It had the best paint job and won best in show.

They went on to race in the district pinewood derby races.

It reminded me of the story of the able bodied athlete that went and raced the contestants at the Special Olympics. He won. Nobody was surprised that he won. But at the end of the day, all he had done was beaten a bunch of handicapped people.

Sure, this guy bought his racer, painted it up, and won the races. I am glad that a 30 year old was able to beat out a group of 8 year olds.

It is funny, when they took that racer to district, they did not even place. I guess district is where all the 30 year olds race each other, and some other 30 year old did a better job with his application of knowledge gained from the pinewood derby websites.

I prefer to let the kids be kids and build and race their own cars. Lets have an adults only race on another day, and leave the Cub Scouts to race each other.

Pinewood Derby, Build it or Buy it?

Did you build a pinewood derby car when you were in the Cub Scouts?

I can remember building one that was splotchy red and black. I carved it with my own little 8 year old hands. I do not remember any grown ups helping with its construction, other than providing me with the sharp tools to carve with and the paint to paint with.

Sharp tools in 8 year old hands, I wonder if that is good parenting or not? It probably helped to clear out the gene pool in some instances.

The car might have had stripes or flames or some other similar decoration. I am sure it was an outstanding piece of 8 year old craftsmanship and engineering.

I know that it won the coveted oil can award. At the time I did not know what that meant. I think I do now. It meant it was butt ugly, it was slow, and they tried to give everyone at least one trophy. Thanks for participating. Here is your cheap little plastic trophy. Hope your feelings did not get hurt. Heck no, thanks a million for telling me that my car is not just ugly, it is the ugliest thing you have ever seen, and its ugliness needs a trophy to show the world just how ugly it is.

When I was 8 years old, I had less skill in the woodworking arts than I do now. My woodworking abilities at this moment consist of taking a pocketknife, and whittling a stick. I learned how to do this during my many years in the Boy Scouts. I also learned an off color joke during those years. (Do you know when a Cub Scout becomes a Boy Scout? When he eats his first Brownie. Try the veal, I will be here all week.)

While participating in my first official Boy Scout hike / campout, I took out a hatchet. I was going to chop some wood for a fire. Why we thought we needed a fire at night in Arizona, I am not sure. Probably something to do with S'mores.

I set down a piece of wood, and stepped on it with my foot to stabilize it. I am sure this made perfect sense in the mind of an 11 year old city boy. With a mighty swing of the hatchet, I chopped into my shoe and my big toe. I must have been a fairly wimpy child, for although the mighty swing of the hatchet penetrated through my shoe, and my sock, and part of my big toe nail, it did not go deep enough into the toe to require much in the way of first aid. Explain again why we had such easy access to the sharp implements of destruction? Oh yeah, the gene pool. We should do more of that with our children, they are too soft these days with all the video games and the cell phones and whatnot. They need more knives and hatchets. The minor injury did get me out of more hiking, so that was a plus. Why leaders would allow kids to play with hatchets is a story for another day. I cannot imagine lawsuit happy parents to even allow a kid today to touch a hatchet, but what do I know.

These same leaders waited for us to grow a few years, then took us on a Boy Scout trip to Mexico. We were older, but not much wiser. We bought some very cheap bottle rockets from some vendors who happened to be selling them on the beach. They would come along shouting 'Big Boom'. We talked one kid into making the initial purchase to test out the claim. He proceeded to light it, and holy cow, the vendor certainly could claim truth in advertising. Big Boom indeed. We were all believers, and most of our spare cash went toward buying the Big Boom's for the rest of that week.

We were camping and sleeping on the beach. We did not shower. We were stinky Boy Scouts. We were in Mexico. We had leaders that had taken the week off of work, and they were burning up their vacation time from work to take us down to Mexico. They were interested in going deep sea fishing, and as long as we were not killing anyone, they were not very interested in the details of how we entertained ourselves.

We found that we were not too far from town, and some of the guys went for a walk during the day and returned with booze and cigarettes. Everyone was happy. The leaders were happy since they were out fishing and eating fresh seafood and enjoying a week away from their families. The kids were happy since they were also eating fresh seafood and blowing things up and trying to make any kind of headway with the neighboring hordes of girls that were also camping on the beach.

I am sure that blowing up bottle rockets is the first method that teenagers should use to attract women. It is odd how little luck we had with that approach, especially compared to the guys that had been taking showers and had access to ATV's and Sand Rails.

I am not sure which of the kids decided that shooting the rockets into the air was not nearly as much fun as shooting the rockets down the beach toward other people. All I know is, alcohol plus young Boy Scouts plus Big Boom bottle rockets equals disaster. It is an equation that has been proven time and time again in all of the advanced math classes that I ever attended.

The kids that went to town and purchased cigarettes had a huge advantage. Luckily for me I happened to be on their end of the beach that fateful night.

They would light a cigarette, and use that brightly lit end to light the fuses of their rockets. They might be starting down the path toward lung cancer and bad breath, but while their adversaries at the other end of the beach struggled with matches and lighters in the wind, the cigarette wielding hooligans were firing rockets with impunity. Nothing could stop them.

Until they ran out of rockets.

Nobody shot their eye out that night. Nobody was killed. To this day I am not sure why a bunch of drunk kids shooting rockets up and down the beach at each other was not ever stopped or questioned by the adults. There were adult Boy Scout leaders, and there were adults that had no connection to the group, but you would think that one of them might have thought that no good could come of this.

Looking back, maybe that is just what you do when you sleep on a beach in Mexico. You let the kids drink and shoot rockets up and down the beach at each other and hope nobody gets hurt. I am sure the medical facilities in the area would have been state of the art affairs where we would have gotten all the best possible care.

The best moment was driving back across the border. This was all very pre 9/11, and coming back the lazy officer asked us if we were bringing back any contraband. If they would have torn into that truck they would have found illegal fireworks and alcohol and who knows what all was being taken into the States. We all looked blandly at the officer and said no sir, we do not have anything in the truck. He saw the scout uniforms and must have believed us as he let us cross without checking us out.

This all brings me back to the pinewood derby. I am now peripherally involved as my own Cub Scout is soon going to be building a car. Do I let him build one himself, and face the oil can award? Or do I buy one of the fancy kits that you can find online? Did you know that you can buy wheels that have been turned on a lathe and precision engineered to reduce friction and drag? You can buy tungsten weights as they have more mass in a smaller package and will help your car speed down the track. You need to be sure to lubricate your wheels properly and prepare you axles. These are all things I did not know two days ago.

You can buy a book for $5.95 that contains 30 tips and tricks written by an engineer and a physicist. You can sink a ton of money into a car and try to beat the other kids. I had no idea that this was what I was up against. I just carved up a car and painted it and did the best I could. Do I want to subject my own kid to losing all the races and having an ugly home made car when I could have bought him a prefabricated Batmobile or Formula One racer? Who doesn't want to win all the races and bring home first prize? Is it really winning if I buy the thing from the internet? Is there going to be much pride in a car that you did not build, if you win first place? Will the kids that could not afford to buy a car but made a really nice one feel upset that the other kid went out and bought the wins and the trophies?

I wonder if the dude that invented the pinewood derby had any idea that it would come to this.