it’s a common proverb that you should try to learn one new thing every day of your life. with this in mind i would like to tell you my lesson for friday, february 11, 2005. what i learned today is that terrell men should never attempt to fly stunt kites. terrell’s are traditionally excellent kites-men. it’s really true. when i was in high school my family and i would make our own kites from scratch. we even entered dothan, alabama kite flying contest – quite possibly the world’s premiere kite competition. many people would say that the history of kites began in china 3,000 years ago but those people would be wrong. kite flying began in dothan, alabama and the art of kite flying reached its zenith in dothan. the terrell men were a part of helping dothan reach that high point.
of course, that was with traditional and box kites. we never flew stunt kites. they’re a different breed. since, pam is gone for the weekend (trying of for jeopardy) i decided to have a little fun with the boys and go fly some kites at highland park. we went to academy to buy a few kites. apparently academy sports & outdoor is trying to destroy all of the traditions of america because they did not carry any traditional kites. all they had were stunt kites which operate by means of two separate strings. being an expert in regards to regular kites i guessed that my skill would be sufficient to operate the easiest stunt kite they had in stock. turns out i was wrong.
me and the boys tried again and again to fly the stunt kites we bought from academy. each time we tried to fly a kite we met with complete, abject failure. our longest flight was about fifteen seconds and reached an apex of twenty feet in height. we tried for an hour solid with three different kites and never did any good. it was all pretty humiliating. ironically we had allot of fun in spite of the fact that we were horrible and flying those stupid kites.
tomorrow we’re going to search the town and see if we can find a traditional kite. if all else fails i’ll make one.
SIDE NOTE – if you are a pc user (instead of an intelligent mac user) and you are still using micro$oft internet explorer then you are missing out. you really need to consider swapping to mozilla’s firefox. it is a much better browser and allows you to surf in tabs. try tabs for a few days and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. on top of having tabs by using firefox you’ll also have the pleasing knowledge of not supporting the “evil empire” of micro$oft.