Looking for a bed in Athens

Not going to be too much longer. There is a pleasant kind of an ache in my shoulders and neck.
placed there by the drive to the mountain creek and back again, with a little help from trying to keep the dredge sucking water instead of air as the 10 yr old grandson and I tried to find the elusive bit of auric shiny-ness amongst the sand and rocks, with kibitzing from the wife and the pooch.

A week or so ago my friend Armando from El Salvador asked if I was watching the World Cup matches in South Africa beamed to a satellite and thence down to my waiting dish. I told him, "No".

"Do you watch baseball"?

"No".

"Football or college sports"?

Again, "no".

"What do you do for fun", he asked?

Do you know I had to think about that for a while. (This just prior to us climbing into the Red Ram and heading to Washington, GA to buy up a little scrap, which if you had to call anything my job, would be it.)

It surprised, and amused me both, to hear myself reply, "I like to work". And you know, I do.

It's not working on the space shuttle, nor saving lives in a hospital... nothing very important as all really, simply allowing people to convert unusable and unsaleable assets for a more convenient and readily accepted form of asset.

But, it's what I do. Going on 16 years now, off and on. Seen good times and seen bad times.
Sometimes I think I'd prefer there to be more good times.....but they all add up together, don't they.

So, today we went to a creek in the woods, the wife, the pooch, Lee and I, and although I could have been more tolerant of a 10 year old boy's fondness for just playing around while I was in a dead serious hunt for black sand and flecks of golden dreams, I was doing what I love the most. Working hard at whatever I'm doing.

I see lots of guys my age not moving around much and waiting on the day they retire from that dreaded J. O. B. To my jaundiced eye they seem much older than I, and I hope I never become one of them.

It just wouldn't seem like all that much fun.