Boat Builders

This past weekend seems almost like a vacation. A great football Saturday, good food, nice whether -- it had everything I could want.

Saturday morning, we went to the Wooden Boat Festival in Madisonville. In my mind, it's more of a boat show than a boat festival, as no one was deep-frying Oreos near a stage full of fiddle players. But who doesn't like a boat show?

At the far end of the show was a tent where old codgers help little kids build their own toy wooden boats. The lane for boat builders were for kids only, but there was a path for grown ups to follow behind them.

Both of our kids went through. K picked out a catamaran hull, and V picked the biggest monohull that he could see.

K stood in front of his old guy with his chin at table level and nodded yes to every question.

"Should I put a cabin on it?"

Nod yes.

"How about some rudders?"

Nod yes.

Since he didn't actually do any of the hammering or gluing, he was done first. I walked him around to the other side where women were stationed to enhance the boats with flags and sails. He was dressed in an LSU jersey (it was game day, after all), so the woman gave him purple and gold sails and flags. One more person added a little American flag flaying on the stern. It was a nice looking boat.

From there, you could exit past a giant tub, where kids could take their new boats for shake-out cruises. K thought the goal was to sink his boat, and he did his best to keep it submerged. Unfortunately, this was too much for the still new hot glue, and his boat lost one of its hulls.

By then, V had come around, and he had picked sails and flags of royal blue and orange. This caused me no small amount of concern. He picked Florida's exact colors just an hour before the LSU-Florida kickoff. This from a kid who chose a red T-shirt the morning of the LSU-Georgia game, which didn' go as well as we had hoped.

I was thinking that he had signle handedly cost LSU the game, and although I only mentioned it 1 of every 100 times it popped up in my head, he still fussed at me later about hurting his feelings when I "made fun" of his boat.

V and his horribly clueless sailboat.