DIARY

It rained all of May and most of June, that made getting the park ready for the season quite tricky.

The picnic tables needed repainting. …I know, don't paint picnic tables! Unfortunately someone already had and it's peeling off, so they were going to get a fresh coat, and some site numbers. Sadly it never stopped raining long enough for the exposed wood to dry out before it got too busy to paint them. Well there's always Fall. The upside to all the rain is that the grass that was long dead this time last year is still mostly green. We're going to need to start watering it soon though.

The 4th of July was great. This year Mandi and I finished early enough to get to watch most of the displays put on around to lake. I included a snapshot in this post from a video I took of the display from the small island, it doesn't do justice to the amount of rockets they were sending up, but it's the best I could do. I think Lake Haven were setting of fireworks for about two hours, and that's not including the ones they did the night before! The barge and the small island also had plenty. All in all is was a great show, the only problem was knowing which way to look while standing out on our dock! =D

July has seen a huge spike in business inline with what we saw last year. The RV park is pretty much full for the month, with just a few spots open here and there. and the restaurant has been getting slammed on the last few weekend evenings. We were chatting with a friend in town today who has a similar business and they asked us if business had been slow for us as well. Apparently Maine Street has been dead for the last week and half or so. I guess everyone was on the lake. =S

We added breakfast on Saturday mornings after Memorial Day weekend, but while there was enthusiasm for it, it didn't pick up enough business to justify the extra strain it was putting on our kitchen staff so we stopped it. We still have Sunday mornings though. We're struggling to find more line cooks, and don't want to kill the ones we have, who are doing an amazing job, and working some very long hours. =( Keeping front of house staff isn't much easier, we've had quite a turnover already this summer. Currently we're enduring an outbreak of some kind of sickness that's working it's way through our staff. They're staying home where they can't infect anyone, but that's making it impossible to keep the restaurant fully staffed on the busy nights. Hopefully it'll be done soon and we'll get back on track. =)

On a personal note, I bought a 1985 16' Hobie Cat sailboat from a friend a couple of months back. It needed a bit of love, but nothing major. I got it all cleaned up and fixed/upgraded the old, worn out parts and it's working well. I'm starting to get the hang of sailing. I learnt that the timing for moving your weight from one side of the boat to the other as you turn is very important in stronger winds. If you get it wrong you can capsize. I also learnt that once capsized you cannot get a 16' Hobie Cat upright on your own. After some recent reasearch I found that it's only possible with a bag to hold a lot of water that hangs from the righting rope, and a pulley system to lift it. I now have these. While I was capsized the wind blew the boat and I to a neighbor's dock where I was then stuck preventing the boat and dock damaging each other as the wind attempted to smash them together. Thankfully a very kind person who saw me go over, came to my rescue on his jet ski. We were unable to get the boat righted though and he ended up towing me back to the beach at Sedlmayer's where I was able to easily right the boat by simply walking the mast up. I later found out that had I had him lift the end of the mast out of the water (after pulling me away from shore) I could probably have righted the boat in the water. You have to make mistakes to learn from them. =D