One of the more memorable monthly Ericson family nights for me was when my dad gave the lesson which he entitled “Doing nothing isn’t fun.”
I’ve tried to adopt this as a motto, though I’m not sure I completely agree with it. Sometimes lying on the beach with a lemonade in your hand watching the waves wash up and the birds fly by while you bake to a crisp in the sun can be very, very fun.
HOWEVER, the point was if one were to sit at the beach every day all day and do nothing but drink lemonade and watch the waves, one would become very fat and very lazy and very very bored. Doing nothing isn’t fun. The moral: We should always be working toward something. Have a goal, work hard to achieve it, do your best, blah blah blah.
Example: Every year when the season rolled around, my parents used to make all of us kids help bottle fruit and tomatoes (which I maintain are vegetables). Peaches, apricots, pears, applesauce, plums, tomatoes, grape juice, you name it. It was agonizing, but so delicious in the end. One year when he was about 14, Ike refused to help with the bottling extravaganza. He just wanted to watch Scooby Doo and LHOTP on TV like a slug. In Ike’s defense, Michael Landon did have the coolest mullet on the prairie. My dad gave Ike the choice to either help bottle peaches or stare at the blank TV screen. He chose the blank TV. What a bum. I think he learned his lesson.
The purpose of this post is to explain that in the following posts, I am not bragging about my cool vacations and/or awesome skills, I am simply proving to my parents and the world that I am not doing nothing, because… what ladies and gentlemen? That's right. Doing nothing isn’t fun.
