Labor Day weekend,  some much-needed down-time, good company, and a nice cold beer. We had a cookout with brats, hot dogs, and lots of conversation around the fire on Friday night.

Saturday, contrary to expectations of a sleep-in, I was up at 6:30 am to accompany Jim to my first Midwest auction. Two in fact. They were great fun, very entertaining and not as undecipherable as I expected. I managed to follow what was going on and didn’t buy anything. It was fascinating to watch and listen to. Almost always the auctioneer managed to get some bidding going, and despite any early reluctance to start bidding on his initial opening price, the final price ended up very close to his opening price. I was perplexed as to why people spent the money they did on some of the things they did, but hey, that’s up to them. We got off very lightly as Jim spent under $25. The two high-value items he was interested in went for a lot more than he thought it was worth spending on them.

In the evening we all watched a movie on TV and then played games.

Sunday we managed to sleep in until 10:30 am when I was woken by the call of bacon. After a bacon and egg breakfast I adjourned to the workshop and took a picture of a tool display for Jim, I say picture, but as we didn’t have a backdrop big enough, I ended up taking five pictures to stitch together in post-processing, there was a lot of setting up and trying different things out, before I got the shots I wanted.

Ginger then took a load of pictures of Jim’s Jewelry working tools to post on her blog. Finally, at Lanie’s insistence, there were yet more games. I reckon that’s at least three year’s games credit I’ve earned this weekend.

After dinner we had an uneventful drive home to Springfield. Lanie must be extra lucky as we treated her (and ourselves) to a double-dip cone at Braums on the way back.  Back home the kitties seemed to have fared okay in our absence, though there was a larger than usual pile of barf in the hallway.

Copyright © 2013 Gary Allman, all rights reserved.