First posted on Mark Is Cranky:

So here was a typical Saturday. There was a home-type project to be done (or at least started) by me & stepson #1. The project was to build a set of built in bookcases for the wife up in her office (The real skinny on this is that the bookcases were to be a Christmas present from stepson #1 to his mom. How I'm involved in this is both more complicated and more boring than anybody needs to be putting up with. Lets just say that stepson #1 has been very busy dealing with things like his last coop term, construction projects for a local theatre group and mooning about his girlfriend being all the way out in Oklahoma. Hmmmm....that last bit isn't quite right. I'm not actually certain that he's been mooning about said romance object but am guessing that if he is anything like was I was at the age of twenty-two, he's been doing some serious mooning.)

Ahem...

A few weeks back I'd given stepson #1 directions to a local lumber yard which looked to be A) promising and B) not Home Depot (which #1 has taken to calling 'Home Devil'.) He had stopped by there last weekend and discovered that they were only open til noon on Saturdays. So this past Saturday we loaded ourselves into the big rig (my old Chevy K1500, currently 'owned' by stepson #2, who has modified it to sound like your typical Honda Accord with Cabbage-Shooter exhaust, but on steroids) and head to the lumber yard. As #1 takes a turn to the left at a critical juncture, and away from the lumber yard, I just have to ask him where he's going. Turns out that the lumber yard I described to him didn't end up being the one he checked out. The yard I recommended looked like a smaller and less evil version of Home Depot. He did sort of go near that place but on the way spied a sign for another place. This turned out to be a fantastic and rewarding mistake.

After driving a half-mile or so through the heart of cookie-cutter-house suburbia (I hope they built more houses outa all the danged trees they cut down) we made another turn down a cul-de-sac full of more McMansions. One more turn to the right and suddenly we're on an unpaved road paralleling a long row of Northern Pines. We end up in a small open field bordered by the office/garage on our left and two huge lumber storage buildings on our right. There are a lot of cars and pickups there. Looked very promising.

One step through the office door and we realized that this was definitely not Home Depot. All four walls are absolutely plastered with photos, newspaper cutouts and various trinkets related to fishing. There are about four guys on our side of the counter (some drinking from cans of Budweiser) and two on the other. The two guys on the 'business side' of the counter appear to be engaged in a serious match of some form of ring toss, which involves flinging large (3 inches in diameter) metal washers toward a long wooden box on the floor. The box has several holes of various sizes drilled into the top. I can also see through a doorway on the far wall that there are a bunch of guys in the attached garage who appear to be lobbing horseshoes back & forth (and also drinking from cans of Budweiser.) Things are getting very curious.