Like Whack-a-Mole, only with guns.

Our friend Laura's mom lives up in Salmon Arm, and she has a gopher problem. Laura and her husband Jon were headed up there for the weekend before going off on holiday, and cordially invited us along to help do something about the infestation.

I shot a gun. Here's proof.

I did not, however, shoot a gopher, but not for lack of trying. I have, as we all know, bimodal eyes and no depth perception, which translate in to terrible aim.

Joel, on the other hand, proved an admirable marksman.

He shot some 15-odd gophers and a marmot, which we thought at first was the mother of all gophers.

Gophers are a dumb lot. We could get within ten feet of them without startling them off, even after we'd started reducing their numbers. Jon shot at one and missed, and the idiot critter didn't even flinch. He just kept on nibbling his grasses to give Jon time to reload and shoot at him again.

Gopher-huntin' was kept to the late-evening/early-morning due to the excessive monstrous heat (refer to my previous three posts, in which I gripe about the weather). Saturday was devoted to grunting at each other and moving as little as possible. We did venture down to the creek (the three-minute drive was nigh on unbearable) only to find that it was full of lithe, tanned, bikini'd teenagers. How I hate them. However, we were all certain that we'd die if we didn't cool off, and there are few things more enjoyable than ruining the fun of those younger and better-looking than you, so we splashed in with our respectable, ass-covering bathing suits, careless tan-lines, and Laura's seven- and five-year-old nephews. I guess our stodgy old-ness ruined their flirting, so they packed up their boyfriends and left.

Creek to ourselves, we let our crazy out. Jon and Joel jumped off the bridge in to the water. We tried floating downriver on the pokey current. Laura's nephews pretended to drown, and we pretended not to rescue them. It was a riot.

In the evening, Laura's siblings and their attendent spouses came up for a BBQ. Yes, that's right. We not only fired up a BBQ, we built a fire and roasted weiners on it. The weiners tasted oddly like sweat. After dessert, the skies opened up and threw down 18 drops of rain on us. We thought we were being cruelly teased, but later that night, after another round of gopher-erradication, the real and true shower started. Joel and I drove home to that delicious smell that is as a part of summer as nectarines and plastic pools, the smell of rain on hot pavement.