Random Recollection

    When I was in college, I worked (in the AV department) with a bunch of guys - must've been 3 or 4 of them - who were all from Rice Lake. They used to have parties in their boathouse, which was this crappy house (more of a shack, really) on pontoons (barrels, actually) on a side channel of the River, close to the Wagon Bridge. They rented it, just like an apartment. It had electricity and heat and cable. All the amenities except a shower, so they used the locker rooms at the college every morning. That must've been a real pain in the ass. But it had an otherwise-functional restroom, so it wasn't so bad. A tank of water for cooking and drinking.
     Anyway, they'd have these parties. Half-barrels of decent beer. Hot snacks, which I thought was just so exotic. Chicken wings and stuff. The guys always outnumbered the girls probably 5-to-1, which was amazing at the college because, well, anywhere in this part of the world there are oodles more women than men. So these parties were like smorgasbords for greedy college girls. They apparently grow their boys on the large side around Rice Lake, too, because the boys (can't remember any of their names, although something's telling me that the ringleader was "Link". How weird would that be for a guy's name from that state, born around 1970? Anyway...) and their friends from home were all big, strapping farmer types with bulging arms and wide thighs but tiny little waists.
     We'd stand around and eat wings (and lick our fingers - aha! the reason for the wings!) and drink beer and flirt like mad, and try to not realize that the whole place was subtly moving, gently swaying from side to side (stem to stern? port to starboard?). It enhanced the buzz, lemme tell you.
     And what made it truly classy and unforgettable? Two things: 1. the spiral staircase leading to the Loft of Love (which I never visited, I swear to anything you'd like me to swear to), and 2. the TV renovated as aquarium. That was the coolest thing I've ever seen. It even had a lava lamp on top. I inspected it in detail (albeit drunken detail) once - OK, more than once - and could never tell how they got the tank inside. But it certainly looked like a normal TV, except for the fantailed goldfish inside, swimming in 25+ gallon comfort.
     Very cool.