Labor Day

I'm really not a holiday person. It's that whole disrupted schedule thing that bugs me. Somebody picks some (usually) random day to remember something, and now I have to remember to put my trash out a day later than usual. And the bank is closed. I mostly ignored holidays for the last 6 years, in graduate school. The high number of international students and post-docs, for whom American holidays mean nothing, means that there's always someone in the building, if not in the lab. Every time a holiday approached, I'd get the question, "Is Columbus Day a REAL holiday, or do people still go to work?" Most of those days were Neal and Amanda holidays, which means that the people who have regular jobs don't work, but the rest of us do.

Now that I'm working on my own schedule (as in, still making it up as I go along), I forgot that things would be closed on Labor Day (like the gym and the liquor store). But we made the best of it anyway. A bunch of us descended on Danielle's grandparents' lake house, where water skiing is the thing to do. Bruce did quite well, except nobody got any pictures of it. Here's Mary, waiting to be towed, then being towed.
Here's Mary up on the water skis. This was her first time getting up, which was soon followed by a face-plant in the water. She said that fall didn't hurt nearly as much as the subsequent ones.

It shouldn't surprise any of my readers that I didn't try water skiing. I didn't even get in the water. But I did sit on the dock and soak up some sunblock-filtered sun.