When I was a child my father worked for one of those rare companies that treated its’ employees like family. The company owned several vacation properties that employees took turns using. Several times a year we would spend a weekend at the company cabin on Pickwick Lake. The cabin had a nickel slot machine and my parents gave every child a full roll of nickels to use in the machine or save for candy. We always spent the entire roll on the machine, playing until we had nothing left (I should never go to Vegas). Staying in the cabin meant you could use the speedboat and pontoon boat to your heart’s content. My family was and is not athletic, but that never stopped us from trying. I still vividly remember my father awkwardly putting on skis in the water and motioning for my mother to start the boat. I don’t know enough about skiing to know what went wrong first, but my father fell and the skis popped off. My grandparents started yelling at my father to “drop the rope” but if he heard anything it sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher since he was deep under the water and still holding that rope. When my mother realized what was happening she stopped the boat and my father popped to the surface. While my father described hitting something deep under the water (trees probably), the children and grandparents were sent back to the cabin for lunch and slot machine negotiations (you had it last, it’s my turn now). Many hours later my father returned from the ER with his 2 cracked ribs bandaged tightly. It’s not a vacation without something breaking.