The first full day with The Spud

Saturday was another shooting day. A couple of months ago I'd volunteered to take a group of novice shooters out to the local range. This bunch was from a local Tea Party chapter and none had much shooting experience but they wanted to get together and try it so one of the organizers, a former student of mine, called me up and asked me to take them. For the record, I'm not a Tea Party member myself, but as any reader of this blog well knows, we share the same views on most things. I'm just not a joiner. As luck would have it, the selected day fell on Spud's first full day here, so I took him along.

Here's the Spud, posing with the Ruger 10-22 that I entrusted him with. He did a great job of aiming every shot and demonstrating good muzzle awareness. The boy's learning to be a good shooter and we'll make a rifleman of him yet.









After we shot, a couple of the shooters offered to treat Spud and I to lunch. So we stopped at the Golden Corral, an excellent buffet-style restaurant. It was here that I learned a lesson about letting kids--or at least The Spud--work a buffet line without supervision.
On his first foray, he bypassed all of the quality meats and vegetables and returned with a plate just heaping with macaroni and cheese, pasta in tomato sauce, and that crappy all-dough pizza that places like this put out. I just sighed, because I'd told him up front that he was going to east healthy here and that we were going to try to get him off of his regular all-carb diet that his mom and grandmother seem to keep him on. So after he'd finished that mess, I accompanied him back up for the second round. After stopping him from heaping his plate with a massive scoop of mashed potatoes, I "suggested" a few healthy alternatives--broccoli, roast, shrimp and some catfish. (This place had some excellent lightly-breaded catfish.) He kind of screwed up his face a bit because he'd never had catfish (yes...he's a yankee boy all the way) but as soon as he sat down and tried a piece, he announced that he LOVES catfish.

Hey...it's a start.

So after eating that balanced, sensibly-portioned plate, he said that he wanted some more catfish. So I goofed again and let him return to the buffet counter for plate #3, figuring that just he'd get a couple more pieces and call it a day.

He returned with about 15 fillets on his plate...and more pasta. Cue the face-palm.

The rest of the day was spent swimming--I took him and Lagniappe down to the river--reading (I've started him on my old Hardy Boys books and he's loving the first one) and watching a movie. Do you believe that he's never seen Smokey and the Bandit and had no idea who Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason and Jerry Reed were? I will give this boy a sense of culture yet.

He loved it. Now I gotta find another movie that instills positive "guy values" for tonight. Anyone think that eleven is too young for Full Metal Jacket? Any other recommendations?

Oh, and just as an aside, to anyone with kids...do they all have this programming that makes them turn on every light in a house--even lights in rooms that they are just passing through in broad daylight--and then leaving them on? I mean, WTF?