Summer 2003

After Hawaii, Doug and I helped Megan Champion clean out, paint and repair her house so her and her dad could rent it out.  We spend several hours in the yard cutting the grass, weeding, repairing the porch, painting the house, cleaning the gutters, we made a brick walkway from the driveway to the porch and it even had a wooden archway.  We spent months out there working on that so it could be rented at the end of the summer.  We had a few arguments because Megan felt like she had all the power because it was her house, we got that all smoothed out and it got done on time.

We went over to Grammie’s house a lot over the summer to go swimming in the pool.  The liner was over thirty years old and directly in the center was a tiny hole slowly leaking.  Grandpa bought some pool patches and we took turns diving into the center to fix it.  First we put the water proof glue down and then the patch.  We stood in the center of it for about twenty minutes just to make sure it stayed.  The liner would have to be completely changed in the next few summers.

Often, I would put our family dog Mickey in the back of the truck and take him around the loop just for a nice summer drive around the back roads.  You could definitely tell he was getting older because he had a harder and harder time jumping into the back each time we would go out.  I had to pick him up and set him into the back of the truck.  What really made him unique was he had learned the word “truck” and “keys” over the course of time.  He even knew when we were going to the truck without him even seeing or hearing the keys in your hand.  We opened the front door and he darted for the truck.  He even ran to the truck when we weren’t going to drive it anywhere.  I felt really bad when we got in the truck to go to school in the mornings and he sat there with the sad eyes waiting for us to open the tailgate.

Once the end of August hit, I got all of my stuff ready that I wanted to bring back to school with me.  We loaded up the suburban and back to Pullman we went.