Ned mixes weak Jack & Cokes. I'm used to Jim's.

Saturday we worked on Scott Harrison's carousel. Sort of. The roofing panels needed moving from the community center to the carousel site across town. About sixty panels, 18' by 6' by 1' and about 400 or 500 pounds apiece-- a big block of foam sandwiched between two pieces of particle board.

Mr. Harrison was out of town for his grandmother's memorial service, but his son Max came from Denver to supervise. Max is 26 and pretty cool. He dresses in that kind of UFC style with the baseball cap and sagging pants and tribal-tattoo shirt. Speaking of, he's been a firefighter and an EMT and he's got each crest tattooed on either arm, surrounded by some sweeping tribal curves. They look neater than they sound, but then, the Rod of Asclepius wins me over pretty easily.

Max pulled up in his dad's beat-up pickup with a low-riding and shoddy-looking car trailer dragging behind it. We loaded these panels seven high and then hopped in the back of the truck while Max drove us to the carousel building, bottoming out the trailer on nearly every hill and turn. When the load was empty he tore through the town and around the roundabout and gave us an awesome ride back. Laying back and staring up at moving clouds, or staring out at mountains while Liam and Ned stared off into the distance.

Ned, Lauren and I were the only ones who'd went at first, and we were two-manning these big panels until Liam showed up a half-hour later, back from a morning hiking excursion. We worked for five hours. On one ride back he pulled into the gas station and said, "What color Gatorade do you like?" He came out with an armful and a case of beer. Lauren was in the front seat and he had her mixing liquor into a bottle of club soda or ginger ale or something for him. After a few hours he insisted we take a break and have a beer. "Come on, it's one beer, it's not going to get you drunk," he laughed. And then he gave us another just before we started the last load, too.

When we'd completed it he gave us double the hours we'd worked, justifying it by saying it was really hard work-- which, to be honest, it was-- And taking us to the smokehouse for dinner. His girlfriend met us there and she bartends in Breckenridge, a ski town about an hour and a half away, and she needed a ride. Max is well-known in this town and got us a table on the patio even though they were closing it, and ordered us wings and a pitcher of beer. He told us in May he throws a huge party and calls a bunch of bands he knows and gets them to play. "I've got about ten lined up for this next one. You guys are definitely all invited, I'll get you all VIP passes," he said.

"We've got to go really soon," he insisted, "So order whatever you guys like and enjoy your dinner. We're going to scarf down as many of these wings as we can in the next ten minutes and then take off."

He filled out our ISP form and left a long and appreciative note and to top it off, his dad sent me an appreciative email the next day saying how amazed he was that we'd gotten the work done in one day with only five people.

We came home and the rest of the team had bought beer and relaxed on the porch, played horseshoes, and then came in and set up Monopoly on the table. "Monopoly ruins friendships," Nate said, sitting down at the table nonetheless. Coby and I set up Risk next to them but didn't remember all the rules, having only an FAQ sheet but no actual rulebook available to us, so we winged it on the ones we were unsure of. As the night went on the Monopolists grew more belligerently drunk and Nate yelled, "OKAY. We're done! I told you! This game ruins friendships!" He started disassembling the board. I didn't catch the details, but the overall impression was a vastly amusing spectacle. Coby and I played a far-calmer game of Risk, very straightforward, that I ended up winning. I've just downloaded the rules so we can play for real next time.

I spent the rest of the night, all the way through to Sunday evening, playing Bioshock nonstop. I got pretty far and realized that the game has a ton of Ayn Rand references I'd missed for an embarassingly long time. The bad guy's an angry capitalist named "Andrew Ryan," anagramesque of Ayn Rand. The guy who leads you around by radio is named Atlas. The game's neat; it has this retro-steampunk vibe, and you give yourself injections that give you new superpowers. I'd called Grosse Ile Kat just before bed to see how her thesis paper was going, only to discover it had been completed on Wednesday. She told me she'd write me a letter and that I needed to write her a comic book script for her to paint, since I'd bought her bristol boards for it ages ago. A little sixteen-page number is in the works as we speak.

I've been kind of exhausted lately even though realistically work hasn't been that busy. We tried an experimental technique to prevent pine trees from being killed by beetles today: Kill the perfectly healthy trees and sell them as firewood before the beetles can kill them. I fail to see the logic.