I Take An Old Age Test...

It's that time of the year that I take an old age test. Can he still get up on some towable behind the boat toy? It's legitimate testing since I have been getting towed around on Lake Sam Rayburn since probably the late 1970s and real regular since I bought my first boat capable of towing in 1986.

Sadly to say the testing these days is done on a float thing we call the couch. The couch is a lot of fun but it's pretty much idiot proof and you can't fall off of it unless you do something stupid which I was prohibited from doing because I was riding with two little people Luca and Cullen who are under two years old. 

   

Mary rides with Ezra and Parker. 

Ali takes on a full crew. As I was airing up this tube I noticed there was a warning printed on the side that you should not tie riders to the towable. I don't know why I have never seen that before.  

Morgan gets in on the cruise. 

Here you see Mary taking the old age test on the knee board. You are supposed to be kneeling on that thing. I used to take my old age test on the board but it's been a couple of summers since I could pass it and this weekend my right shoulder was really painful which I think was an injury suffered from trying to dip ice cream that was too frozen so I declined this test. 

Not being able to perform this test made me think of something my brother, who works at what they call the "little hospital" or the East Texas Heart Institute, told me. Seems that twenty something people come in for a stress test on a treadmill (the reason being they have reported chest pain) and can't complete this test. If they can't run they then submit to a nuclear stress test which involves injecting radioactive something or other into the body which is what Putin has threatened to do to Ukrainian bodies and given probabilities a few of these heart patients probably refused the Covid vaccine because they did not think doctors knew what they were doing. In some circles "nuclear" is a threat.  

Although I have been retired from health care a couple of years I can't recall seeing patients this young who had heart surgeries so I asked my brother what the the doctor does for this type of thing. His reply was, "He tells them they need to get up and move around."

 So all this getting up and moving around was done with a 40 horse power Johnson outboard motor which happens to pull these water toys at their recommend speeds of 15-20 miles per hour. I have heard reports of 450 horse power motors cruising the lake. That seems like a lot of trouble and it only took about $15 to $20 worth of gas and a $5 entrance to the swimming area to move people around enough that all of them took naps on the way home. It's a good life.  

       

I believe these guys might be talking about another kind of movement in this photo. Hopefully I'll get to redo my testing as many times as possible this summer.