My Saturday, by Sarah

Yesterday I did the following things:

• Stirred the doggie septic system. This is about as pleasant as it sounds. Our system is experiencing a slight slowdown, which necessitates a daily stirring and watering.
• Cleaned up all the dog crap in the yard. Since the doggie septic system is still on the mend, I can't add any "new" deposits, so I have to go back to picking up crap in a pail.
  
• Cleaned the litter boxes. Always a good time.
• Stirred up the compost in the compost pile and added some water.
• Shopped for laminate flooring.
• Watched a smelt shack race.

I took pictures of one of the above activities. Lucky for you, this was one of the events that did not involve crap or stirring. Or stirring crap.

You see, every year our town has a little festival, with activities like a skillet toss contest and a smelt shack race. I was disappointed to miss the skillet toss (I was going to enter this year), but we did make it for the smelt shack race. The smelt shacks (for those of you urban dwellers or those not in Maine, when the ice freezes over on a lake or river, the smelt shacks appear. People setup colonies of shacks, and spent all day ice fishing).

For your reference, here is a photo of an ice fishing "neighborhood" on a local river:
Here's what happens when you put a couple of these babies on wheels:

Above you can see the two shacks at the starting line. The shacks have been modified with wheels. I think in the past the teams actually had to carry the shacks, and I heard that people would get injured. Hence the ambulance nearby...

Anyway, the "rules" (and I use that term very loosely) seemed to be: One person has to be in the shack at all times. The team had to run the shack up the road and pickup a bucket of wood. Then they came to the "break station" (a bucket of water) and one team member would have to chuck what appeared to be about 16 ounces of water while other shifted places.
It was all very interesting.

Check back in a couple days...I'll upload the video from work (faster connection) for your enjoyment and/or bewilderment.