Four Sherbet Nixons and a Fudge Jibbly-Do

I didn't know what title to use, because I don't know what I'm going to write yet exactly, so I just made something up.
-Well, I'm going to write for the moment about that thing I mentioned at the end of the last post--the "rededication" of the PAC. I'll just copy it out of my journal.
-I had to report at 1815. It started, comically, at 1930. We all just sat and did nothing--or watched the Bengals-Colts game--until we went into the PAC slightly before then We stood onstage and played the Opener and the Closer (for the last time, I might add), and then sat down in some hard wooden seats to enjoy the ceremony.
-I really, literally don't think I can describe the profound, the unbelievable, the impossible boringness. I'll try. Imagine: You are sitting on a cushionless chair in a darkened section of the PAC 100 yards from the stage. The whole group you're with has been cautioned to be very quiet. Onstage, there is an old person. Thie person's task is to tell the whole audience what the PAC was like in the '70s, and to reminisce at incredible length and exhaustiveness about all the plays he did in the '70s--who directed them, the names of all the cast members, and anything and everything else he can possibly remember. He goes on for about twenty minutes without mentioning a single thing you can connect to, or a name you recognize. Then he concludes, there's some sarcastic applause, and up to the podium comes another old person. He is in charge of the '80s. Each speaker took at least twenty minutes onstage; some showed unrecognizable slides, and some came on as a group. Because the focus was moving toward the present from the '70s, they got progressively younger and more numerous. The three in charge of the '90s lasted probably 40 0r 50 minutes. I think they repeated some decades a couple times, because there were more than three groups.
-Finally, we all got up, attempted but failed to go onstage, and then spread around the audience, and had Mr William Swartzel, who started the band program Way Back When, conduct us in the fight song. Then, then we all ran away from the PAC like people chased by wolves and went home shaken. I could not believe how boring that was.

-Now that I've bored you all, let me think what else has happened. We did our holiday concert. Though I played pretty well in practice even a few hours before (at home), my lips were absolutely blown when I got onstage. I couldn't figure it out, but I couldn't get above, like, an F. I probably stuck out, too. They say what's done is done, but I still wish it were done better.
-The following week the big talk around town was the snowstorm predicted for Thursday night. Sources predicted it varying from two to eight inches, but always with 100% certainty of snow. The only question was how much it would snow and when it would start: these are the determining factors in a snow day. I had heard 1400, but on Thursday it didn't start up until I was biking home from school at 1500. Far too early, I thought. Fortunately, it wouldn't stop. It came down vigorously hour after hour, and slowly built up to at least, I figured, six inches. I was disappointed to note it tapering off at around eight or maybe later (I don't remember). I went to bed late, and when I did, there was at least a two-hour delay called in for Finneytown. I hoped for more.
-When I woke up it proved to be a snow day. So Micah and I took a walk up to Warder. I forgot to tell you about what we found up at Warder the other day. We were just walking around by the Ivory Tower (the tall pine tree) when we saw a couple of 6′×6′ wooden decks, one lying on the ground and one leaning up against a tree, and some plywood against another tree. There were also four chairs arranged around a fire pit. Weird, we thought. We investigated a little. Without too much effort, we discovered something even stranger: behind the sheets of plywood were five huge 3′×5′ playing cards. They were K♣, K♠, J♠, J♣, and Q♦. The Queen was weird because she looked like she was singing opera and her crown was poking off the top of the card, like those billboards that have extensions. We also found a scepter with a spade on the end. My immediate first thought was that it was some kind of weird pagan ritual. I still don't know any more about it. Without anything else to see, we left the area.
-That was a week or two before the snow day. On the snow day we just went to the pond and threw stuff across. It wasn't thick enough to walk on, which was puzzling because we'd had about four days in a row where it didn't get above freezing. A little later we went home.

-I had a surprisingly good Monday today. In band we got music: The Awakening, which we played last year, and something called New Dawn. That wasn't what contributed to it being good--it just happened. Let's see. I got my PSAT score back. I got a 222, and I'm in the 99th percentile. Rosie last year got annoyed because I kept asking everyone what they got and then telling them what I got (217) when they asked. She said it was bragging. So this year I just left the results sheet on my desk and watched people come over and look at it, or told them when they asked unsolicited. It still got all over the school, but this time it wasn't because of me. So there, Rosie.
-Next we had academic team, against both Summit Country Day and Mariemont. The matches were separated, and once we finished one we got to go to the other. With Summit, we didn't win, but I got a bunch of questions in the lightning round. With Mariemont we didn't win, but we were darn close, and we would have if they hadn't been faster than us on that last question. We lost 30 to 31. The last answer was Antony and Cleopatra, and Jane knew it (and I guess I kind of did), but they got it first. Nuts.
-But, I was asked my name by the coach of Summit's team, and she wrote it down under "best player on opposing team". I thought that was swell. I rode my bike home, and, since the sidewalks are covered with giant clumps of snow, I rode on the road. That was invigorating.
-And I finished off the day so far with a good pot roast. I've just discovered that my mom, who just left for a vacation to Arizona to her aunt and uncle to burn up her leftover vacation time (which she can't cash in or roll over), has gotten mysteriously ill. She got that way just three hours after she got on the plane, and now she's up in some hospital. They don't know exactly what's going on yet, or, if they do, they haven't told us. But apparently she still has the strength to nag me from across the country (viz. the last comment last post), so it can't be too bad.

Now up--winter

I have neglected to write. Now, I'll be the first to admit that my life has been pretty busy, but I won't pretend that I had absolutely no time to write an entry. Another part of the lateness was just that I didn't want to at the time ("the time" being just whenever). Anyhow, here I am, back with you today, as if nothing had happened.
-First and most importantly, marching band season is over. And about time! We went to State in Columbus on November 4th. The high school hosting it was the size of a modest college. We were the first band to perform. Before going, we stood behind the field idling for twenty minutes while the judges combed their hair and read the comics. ("Hey, Mary Worth is good today.") Then we did our show just like we'd been trained to since July--excellently. Unfortunately, the judges didn't think it was quite so good. Perhaps because we went on first and if they'd given us a One they'd have had to give one to everyone else, or perhaps because our tone was off because of our nice break behind the field, or perhaps because they had a little indigestion and were in a bad mood, they gave us a Two. Well, a Two at State isn't so bad. Not the best, but nothing to sneeze at. Look at it this way: we hadn't even been to state until last year. So we're still cool.
-Seeing as marching band is done with, Concert Band is up. For our holiday concert we have such classics as Sholom Aleichem and A Christmas Festival, along with such actual classics as Hallelujah Chorus (from The Messiah) and Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. I haven't had a bunch of time to practice. I shall get on that this weekend. As well as my playing test (which I just have to record for Mr Canter on a tape).
-Moving Right Along
-We've had an abnormally warm fall this year. All up until two days ago, when I went outside, I felt like I was stepping into a warm September day, not anything like November. But then a highly organized and efficient straight line of storms made a sweep of the whole country, extending all the way from Mississippi or so up to Michigan or thereabouts, and towing a cold front behind them. As a result, we had some reasonably heavy sleet before the line had entirely gotten past us, and the next morning was below freezing. Today, a little puddle that always collects in a little depression on one of the school's sidewalks was frozen until at least ten o'clock. So, winter is finally getting its act together and coming off its stylish vacation in Australia to start working up here, and to that I say, "About time."
-We got report cards recently, and I'm pleased to tell you today that I've just signed legislation outlawing Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. (Have you never heard that Reagan outtake?) Ah, I have strayed a bit. What I mean is that Mom says I got 2 B's and the rest A's. I haven't actually seen it myself, because Mom didn't actually show it to me, but that's what she says. One of them, I believe, is in English, and since that's a semester class I'm not exempt from the midterm. Crap! I couldn't say exactly what caused me to get a B in English (If that's where it was)--I seem to recall getting an A on everything she handed back. AP history I didn't really expect to get an A in, and no, that's not why I didn't--it's genuinely hard, and involves memorizing way too much stuff to be legal. But it's okay. Mr Volz told us that even you, BJ, had your bad moments. (He was saying that you can get a bad test grade and then get a 5 on the AP test, and that there was no doubt from the beginning of the year that the person in question was going to get a 5, and I figured it had to have been you, and he said yeah.) On the other hand, I have to take that midterm too. But the rest of that week is free & clear--almost like an extension of my winter break! I think. Is that how it's going to play out? Ah, I'll check it out later.
-Steven Hackmann, in charge of Youth Groups, has just now called and generously offered to let me rake the leaves of some woman from the church on Saturday morning at 0930, so I suppose I will.
-There's some other stupid band thing on Sunday-- the "rededication" of the PAC. I very much do not want to go. I don't know that I will. I've had enough with band functions. Mr Canter ought surely to have sensed that from everyone in the band by now.

-If I were hungry right now, I'd want some chili. Maybe later I will be.

Food for thought

Mrs Lani's real name is Roselani Nowicki. The first name is Hawaiian; the last name is Polish. The "MRS. LANI" sign in her bus is in a Chinese-style font. She defies classification.

It's been going about normal. We went to two more contests and Qualified two more times. Or has it only been one contest? I'm not prepared for this entry, really. I just found out what Mrs Lani's name was and thought I'd say so on my blog, so I wasn't planning much else.

It's getting to be fall here in Ohio. I read that we here have even more colors than those guys up in New England. However, I also read Bill Bryson's article about New England falls, where he asserts that they're the best not only because they have so many colors, but because the background is exceptional--nice towns and pretty churches--and the air is superb. Regardless either way, I have to spend my fall in Ohio, so I might as well enjoy it as I can. A while ago, I tried to go online and find a guide to when each tree changes colors, what color it changes to, and so on. There was nothing available. Well dang it, I thought, I guess I'll just have to make my own. But not this year, because fall has already started. I'm going to learn stuff about trees starting now, and then I'll be better prepared to record the changing of the seasons when next autumn rolls around. Of course, I could use some help. I'm probably not going to be able to go visit one of every species of trees every day to see if it's changed or not--in fact, I certainly won't. This is where you come in. If, as you watch that tree in your yard change next year, you were to casually note what species it is, what color you'd say it just changed, and the date, and send that information on over to me, I would be quite pleased. This sounds like a fun kind of project. I'll do it every year, of course, so I can get average dates, not just dates for one specific year... I'll have charts, I'll have... other stuff. Don't you agree that it's a noble endeavor?
-I don't have too much else to say. Uh, I've been eating a lot of Hot Pockets, because Mom keeps buying them, and they're not too bad. And I've been working on Cyril. Gettin' better. And for our latest, last game we all dressed up in Halloween costumes, so I dressed up as Neo. So, uh, that's all for today.

That kind of restaurant

My dad: "You know, I feel like Angelo's."
Me: "What, you mean old and slow?"

Grape-Nuts

Yesterday, the only breakfast in the house was a box of Grape-Nuts. I had wanted to try Grape-Nuts for a while. That guy on the commercial, and occasionally people I had seen, looked to think it tasted pretty good. So I poured myself half a bowl as a trial. Then I took a bite.
-I figured it would taste like one of two extremes: either like sawdust or like a delicious bowl of fruit. Well, what I discovered is that it doesn't taste like anything whatsoever. That simple: no taste at all. Thus, the texture makes or breaks whether the cereal is tolerable. And the texture, I decided, was like a mouthful of pebbles. So here I was, with a bowl of gravel that I couldn't possibly eat. In the interest of not being wasteful, I drank just the milk from it, and then threw it out. Yes, I know there are starving kids in Africa, but I'm confident they wouldn't have liked them either.
-And that brings us to the starving kids in Africa. Today in history class, Mr Volz told us to get out a sheet of looseleaf and start writing a letter to a person about our age in Tanzania. He gave us a little background on Tanzania: apparently, it's on the east coast of Africa. And judging from the pictures he sent around, it's also very hot, boring, and hot. There does seem to be starvation, too: one picture showed a kid looking a lot like shrink-wrapped bones. I thought, "That really sucks." I wrote a letter answering the four prompts on the board
1) Who am I?
2) What is a typical day like for me?
3) What would I like to see changed in the world by the time I grow up?
4) How can I help make this happen?
I said I had big hair and I'd like to see the environment less dirty, and to that end I never litter, I recycle whenever possible, and I almost always go places by bike. For my typical day, I described a school day, and then said that when I get home I either go to Warder Park, read a book, or work on my font Cyril.
-And that of course brings us to Cyril. I've made all the letters now. That doesn't mean I'm finished--far from it. Now that I've made all the letters, it goes up for critique, to make sure it's the best it possibly can be. Then I make an Italic. After that I make a bold and a bold italic. And of course I'm making all the Russian bells and whistles, which means about seventy characters, even though only 33 or so are used in regular Russian. The rest are for things like ancient texts and Church Slavonic, when they hadn't whittled the alphabet down quite so far yet. I realize that nobody will ever use these, most likely, but I decided that if I'm going to name the font Cyril I should really include the most of the Cyrillic alphabet I can. (Cyrillic is the name for the Russian alphabet, named after a St Cyril who adapted the Greek alphabet to Russian.) In the meantime, if you want to see a bunch of people talking about beziers, x-heights, encoding, boumas, and hinting, and be astounded when I understand almost all of it, tune in to http://typophile.com/node/12860 and don't say I didn't warn you.

The Suspense

Hi, BJ. Hi, everyone. How's it going? Long time no see.

Sorry I didn't write anything. It's because junior year is quite the busy year. I've had barely any time to write. When I did have time to write, I usually used it on working on my font instead. In fact, Cyril is coming along very well. It's so much better than that version of it that I posted under critique on that one website. It's also getting very complete. Matt, as soon as I get done with it, I'll e-mail you the new version. And then, then I get to start working on the italic. When I haven't been working on the font or busy with school stuff... band, homework... I guess those are the times when I ought to have posted. But, I forgot about the blog at those particular times.
-As I've mentioned, this month has been busy. Band is a leading factor. Every Friday a game, and for the last three Saturdays there's been a competition that took up the entire day. Oh, these competitions... oh, these competitions. A typical competition involves getting to the school at about 1430, then marching in unfailingly hot weather for an hour. Then Mr Canter lets us go back into the band room and usually feeds us; this food break is an hour or so long. Once we've all finished eating and changing into Chafe Brand Band Pants, which go up to your armpits and hang off your shoulders by suspenders, we siphon ourselves onto the buses. Of course they're hot. They cool down some as we ride to another school somewhere, which takes at least 45 minutes, though the first two of the three trips we've taken so far took upwards of two hours. Bored, we tumble off the buses to start waiting for our practice area to clear out. From there we play some parts of the show, tune, and start accumulating into a block of bandmembers, whence we walk up to the area behind the field. There, we watch while another band finishes marching, and then we get into the stadium to start things going. We herd to about the fifty yard line, depending on where we are in the form, and stand at Parade Rest, and then some airheaded guy announces, "Finneytown Band, you may begin your preplacement/warmup." So we do. Next we all march onto the field. Only when we've all gotten onto the field does the announcer say, "You may take the field for your OMEA adjudicated performance," which always seemed peculiar to me.
-Now, during the show, the emotions are so varied that it's impossible to just generalize a typical show experience: it's different from person to person, and competition to competition. Usually there's plenty of tension. Sometimes there's confidence, sometimes nerves. But at any rate, what mood someone's in doesn't matter to the competition, so we put it on the back burner and just march. That's the way it has to be done. Our show is pretty exciting this year and everyone's gotten pretty well into it. So we do well.
-Once we get off the field we filter into a holding area somewhere, where Mr Canter stands on something (yesterday, a tractor tire) and briefs us on how we did. Then, depending on how many bands are left, we either change or don't, and go to the stands to let the competition finish out and the awards to be announced. This year we've done very well as comes to awards. At our first competition we swept the board for Class B bands and got third place for the whole competition, even beating out a AA band and all the A's; at our second one we didn't get many awards, and we were feeling pretty rotten when suddenly the guy announced we were going to State--afterwards we found out that the scores were all within about three points of each other, and that's why everyone got a little bit of everything and three of the four bands qualified for State--; and at our htird competition, yesterday, we marched even better, swept the board again--though we didn't get third place, because judges always seem to favor AA bands and Lakota East was here with all 300 of their members, and plus there were more bands than at the other one--and qualified again. Qualifying again only means that you haven't deteriorated in quality since last competition: you can't go to State twice.
-Finally we load the buses, drive home, and scatter to our respective houses. Usually that's at around 1 am. Yeah.

-In other news, junior year has been going So Far So Good, though I need to keep my nose at that grindstone and work like there ain't no more working... or something. I have a study hall half a year. That really grates me. And I'm only in one AP. Matt's in three. Rosie, three, and one last year. I'm slipping into the "underachiever" file. I suppose I'll just have to take a lot of APs next year. I figured out that there are seven bells that could all fit together, all APs. Matt said, "If you survive, you'll be valedictorian. And if you get all A's. If you don't, you'll just be dead." I don't know if I'll take AP Chem. Could be, could not. Same with Econ. I think physically one of those two won't even fit.

-Mr Lorenz is turning the ignition for Academic team on the 10th, and we'll be kept idling and warming up until the first competition, which is on the Whatth of Whentember. BJ! You're not here this year! What are we going to do? Now when we don't know the answer, nobody will be here to helpfully let us know it's Byron!

-I leave you with this: can you snap triplets with one hand and eighth notes with the other? Hint: it sounds like "Carol of the Bells".

Now that school has started

I got my schedule for the year the night before school started last Wednesday. I was disappointed to find I had a study hall fourth bell. Other than gym and B&W/digital photography (which I have because it was one of only three choices for that bell when I was making choices last spring), all my classes seemed pretty good.
-I woke up at o550 on accident (meaning for 0600, but my clocks wer ten minutes ahead somehow) and found that I didn't need half that time to get ready, so I sat around; I might have even gone back to sleep. Then I biked on up to the school.
-Band came first, and it was just like I remembered X-periods being: tired. Next came physics. Mr Barney, to impress us, did some tricks with an electromagnet and also an interesting one where he put rosin on his fingers and swiped them down a six-foot aluminum pole to make a noise sort of like the world's loudest dog whistle, except low enough that instead of being inaudible it only made you bleed through the ears.
-Gym was stupid; Creutz (Mr Creutzinger) gave us a bunch of forms to sign and told us what the rules were this year. Then came AP American History with Mr Volz. He has long hair and told us he had a sense of humor. When people tell you they have a sense of humor they usually don't have a spectacular one.
-In study hall I read the book I had, A Sand County Almanac (and Sketches Here and There). I like that book. Then I had Advanced Math Concepts with Mrs Otten, who said we were free to talk without raising our hands. Lunch was halfway through that bell; I had pizza. I finished math and then went to English. Mrs Kopke gave us a story to read on the very first night. I've heard that's more or less typical of how English 11 Accelerated goes. And finally I had Spanish IV with Mrs Rudolph, who almost looks like a student. She's short and about 21. After Spanish school let out.

-This year I have three classes with Aaron, compared to just English last year. I'm also with Rosie, Matt, and Kristen more than last year. I've tried to get my study hall fourth bell changed to Community Service, which would look good on a college application, but Mr Volz (who's in charge of that too) told me he already has 36 students in fourth bell and may have to eject some of them into study hall. He never explicitly told me no, so I'll keep a little bit of hope, but it's pretty dim.

-This year there's a new policy in our school: everyone has to tuck their shirts in. They say it's to promote common decency and keep people from concealing weapons. That's a bunch of hooey. Common decency? Tucking shirts in isn't common. And who are they to say just what Common Decency is anyhow? Not many people are tucking their shirts in, but at the class meeting today we found out that if everyone starts doing it they might consider repealing the rule. Also at the class meeting Aaron asked if we could start using mesh bookbags, as opposed to no bookbags, to carry stuff around to classes. As it is I have to carry a toppling twenty-pound stack of binders and textbooks and folders to each class until sixth bell. It doesn't take much to figure that's not quite right.

-This morning I was wearing a "Think Ahead" shirt that my mom ordered a few days ago and Mr Canter noticed it. When he did the daily announcements he said, "First of all, I want you all to look at Neo's shirt." (I'm called Neo in band, for obscure reasons.) "I think we all need to get a shirt like that."
-"I sell 'em," I said peppily.
-"Oh do you?" he said. He didn't ask me for the website name, possibly because I didn't have a chance to tell him I sold them on a website, but in Physics, Oh Who Was It asked me about it and I gave her the address. I'll post it here again too, because by now that one post is far buried. I also think I'll make another shirt today.

Cheers,
Myself

School

My summer has shrunk to the size of a regular old day off. All there is left of it is tomorrow. And I only got one creekwalk in. I wanted to take one today, but then I realized I had band practice. The one I got was on Friday or Saturday. I don't remember which. I was about to go somewhere and was putting on my shoes when Aaron called me. He asked if I wanted to go creeking. I decided creekwalking was more important than where I was going and biked up to his house to show him some maps.
-I had figured we'd either go to the Railroad (doubted it even then) or on a creekwalk I haven't done before, the school to Winton Woods. But Aaron surprised me by telling me of a different creek he knew, one that emanated from a place called Melody Park right down a street from his house. I checked my trusty topography sources and saw that it joined up with the creek behind the school to got to Winton Woods as well. Since Aaron's printer wouldn't work, I freehanded a little map, and we had a few cups of water, and we left his house.
-I didn't know what Melody Park might look like. And as we walked down Melody Lane, which ended in a cul-de-sac a hundred yards from where it started, I didn't even see where it might be. Then when we got to the end I noticed there was a little sidewalk running between two houses. I discovered that the sidewalk runs under a few trees and then turns into a shallow staircase going down a very tall hill to a field lined with tall grass hiding the creek. The creek was different from other creeks, but then all creeks are. It had a lot of rocks around, good for stepping on, and it ran right behind a bunch of backyards. There was almost no room for walking on either shore: there was a vertical bank and then a very thick forest. Luckily the rocks were there for a lot of the time. When they weren't we had to either go through the forest or try to cling to the bank, sometimes by using trees to hold onto. One time while moving down a shore and hanging onto trees one after another, leaning out backwards over the creek, I fell in and dunked my shoes, but other than that we were mainly successful. We named a few places along the way. A tree across the creek from the yard of a guy who kept talking on his cell phone was "Stop Here and Rest a Moment", and a log somewhere farther along was "Chillin' Log". Right around Chillin' Log I found a black plastic A. I gave it to Aaron. And we made jokes, and that sort of stuff. You know, the kind of stuff you do with friends.
-The creek we were on sideswipes Daly Road, and we had started hearing traffic, but the traffic wasn't coming from the right angle to be Daly. Sure enough, when we came up it was Compton, which I then realized we hadn't crossed yet. We did then, and found the creek again running under the Jerome W Sirk bridge. To the left of the bridge it forked away, but we took the right fork and kept on going. The creek was a little wider here and the bank was a little flatter. A while further on the woods at the left bank vanished and as I stood on the other bank, on the edge of what appeared to be a bridge that was demolished, I saw across the creek what looked like some kind of religious building--a pyramid with about twenty sides, and inflated a little so it was convex. Then I looked through the open doorway and realized it was a salt storage dome. While I stood there a green county pickup truck wandered aimlessly there. Aaron caught up and we took advantage of the road that had once crossed the creek on the now-defunct bridge. It was paved with gravel and it ran alongside the creek. It ended at a road. The road was Compton.
-And here I figured we were farther along than that. Across the street was a condo complex called Bridgecreek, featuring the creek running under a nice bridge. To the right was Cherryblossom. I checked my freehand map again and couldn't figure out where we might be. Aaron decided we must've made a wrong turn at the Jerome W Sirk bridge so far back, and rather than keep going we decided to follow Cherryblossom back to his neighborhood. In retrospect it was probably a good thing we stopped there, since we were both probably somewhere close to dehydrated. We hadn't brought bottles, because there weren't any handy. Cherryblossom turned out to end right near Skyline Chili, so we stopped there and with the sixteen dollars we had together bought a modest but filling meal and drank a lot of free refills. We also tried to visit BJ, but he wasn't home so we walked back to Aaron's, stopping at Andy Hughes's place along the way.

-Yesterday Dad took me to bigg's and we bought some school supplies--mainly notebooks and folders. I want to go to Office Depot and get some more #3 Pencils, because I'm running out. I bought, like, five dozen one time about three years ago and they've lasted me until now.
-So school starts on Wednesday. Bright and early at 0720 for us band kids. I think the first day of school should start at noon. And while I'm at it, I also don't think you should have to go to school on your birthday. Oh, and I can't wait for winter. Mrs Rielac up the street says this one's probably going to be a hard one, judging by how there are already berries on her magnolia and acorns on the ground. That means more snow, and thus more snow days!

The Lawnmower Man

True story:
-My uncle Dan and aunt Tracy recently moved. Before they did they had a neighbor who liked to run his riding mower. All the time they would hear his mower going. He wasn't mowing his lawn. He actually had the mower parked there on his patio, and he was sitting on it, letting it run. Occasionally he would have a few beers.
-This is completely irrelevant, but I remembered it a minute ago and decided I'd write about it.

Café Press.

I am going to elaborate on CaféPress here. It is a website that is very clever in concept. You upload your design to them, and choose what shirt it would be best on. Then, when someone orders that shirt, they make it for them and charge them. The price is whatever you want it to be, as long as it's at or above CP's base price, which is usually somewhere like $12 to $14. You mark it up however much you want.
-This is very great. But there are a few problems. The first one is that they don't offer any dark colors, as they can't figure out how to put light-colored ink on a dark-colored shirt. They only offer four colors of shirt: white, light green, gray, and pink. I'd say that severely limits creativity.
-The next problem is that they put limits on you. They offer about fifteen kinds of shirts, including the pink, gray, and green ones. But you can only sell each kind of shirt with one design on it. So if you put, say, "Design A" on a green shirt, and you have also "Design B" that you want to put on a green shirt, you can't do it UNLESS! you upgrade to a "Premium Shop" for $5 a year. That's why I haven't yet put out any more than two designs. I've only found two designs that work with the kind of shirts they're offering.
-And to make things worse, I've hit on a problem that not many other people have. One of my images (One that says "Caution: Do Not Read This Shirt" and has a red triangle with a black exclamation point in it), which I uploaded to the site but had kept in my "Image Basket" until I could find a good shirt for it, seems to violate a copyright. That's what was in the first letter they sent me. It was a very cheerful letter that was careful not to be accusative, so that's all good. But it still supposedly violated someone's copyright. I asked them whose. They promptly sent me another letter telling me that it was the copyright of one Jim Vitello.
-I researched Jim Vitello. He owns an online shop. The shop sells Scratch-'n'Sniff underwear. He markets it under the brand Caution, with an exclamation point in a triangle, a lot like mine. His website doesn't actually appear to sell anything, though. What it looks like has happened is that he registered the word "Caution" for a Registered Trademark with the U.S. Patent office for the sole purpose of cruising CaféPress and pointing out to other people trying to use the word "Caution" that he owns the trademark. Because when I researched him, I found an entire message board consisting of people who had been gotten by the Caution Guy. Most of them were trying to sell stuff on CaféPress that, blindingly obviously, had nothing whatsoever to do with his Scratch-'n'-Sniff underwear (if he even makes it at all). Stuff like my T-shirt. Every time he finds something he writes to CP--I can see him staring at his keyboard in the dark, doing a little hunt and peck with his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth--and tells them BOOP, BOOP he's found someone trying to infringe on his trademark. Then, because CP is afraid of him suing them, they quickly email a paranoid letter to the offending innocent. I wrote CP a letter back once I found out what this guy was about. I said, yes, my shirt was pretty similar to his logo and that I would change it, maybe taking out the exclamation point, but that the real issue was that this guy was a lunatic, and that they needed to get a backbone and do something about him. I don't know if they will, but they obviously should.

-Anyhow, I'm going to write a description for that "Think Ahead" shirt, because I haven't yet, and then maybe put some of my other designs onto the different variations of white shirt they offer (fitted, organic, economy...). But I don't think I'll stick around with CaféPress much longer. They seem to be dweebs. Get the shirts while you can!

Permanent Marker

I have just finished starting creating my T-shirt store! It is located right here. As yet there are only two shirts there: "Think ahead" and "What do you mean it's backwards?" As soon as I figure out how to put more on, I will do it. Rest assured, I've got eleven more great designs to put forth. I'm a little bit worried that it's not possible to add more products. Hope it is.

Other than that, this last week or two I've been going to band practices and doing Spanish stuff mainly, because (have I said this already?) I'm skipping Spanish III this summer to do IV this year, but I can't just skip it, so I've got to do the course during the summer. I just finished the course book last night and tonight wrote my one-page essay on La Catrina, which isn't as lame a book as it sounds like, but is still fairly lame. Fortunately, the essay only peripherally involved the book. It was much more about what foreign country I would go to college in if I were going to. I said Canada. I also vouched for Spain's siestas. I said I think there should be siestas everwhere. Tomorrow is the Spanish "Exam", which Mrs. Rudolph mentioned before she left for vacation last week, but didn't explain. I guess I'll... go up to her house, or something. I don't know.

BJ--How do you want me to Drop You A Line? If here is okay, then sure I'll go to the bowling party with you. What alley? One time at Brentwood Bowl a few years ago I was with Micah and one of their vending machines failed to vend (it was the kind where you stick a quarter in and out comes a small, crappy toy), and when we told a certain guy at the desk, he said it was a vending machine where you only have a chance of getting something, which it obviously wasn't--for one thing why would anyone put their money into it if they didn't know they'd get anything and there was no fun involved in trying to get it?-- and when we tried to explain this to him he got all annoyed and rude--and we were, like, twelve and eight at the time, bear in mind. So I told him he was a rude person and ever since I haven't gone back there. But maybe they've fired him. It seems likely. And if they haven't, he wouldn't dare be rude to a large group of teenagers, for fear he might find his car on fire, with him in it.

Ted Berry

I was at Wendy's the other day, having a spicy chicken sandwich and sitting by the window watching the cars pull into the parking lot. I had been sitting there about fifteen minutes when one car in particular got my attention, because it had two bumper stickers that said "Ted Berry for Judge" and two huge decals saying the same things on both the back doors, and the license plate said "TMB 2". It didn't take much to deduce that the person driving this car was probably Ted Berry himself, whoever that was. He came out of the car, dutifully peeled the two decals off the back doors (they turned out to have been magnetic), put them in the trunk, and came into the restaurant.
-After he ordered he sat at a table that was nowhere near mine. He looked kind of Mexican, and he had a mustache and was wearing a tie. He ate for a while, and one time he got a phone call from what seemed to be his wife. I ate the rest of my meal too. He got up around the same time I did, and we met at the garbage can. "So are you Ted Berry?" I asked.
-"Yeah," he said. "Why?"
-"Oh, I saw your decals and your car."
-"Oh. Yes, I'm Ted Berry," he said and shook my hand. As we walked out the door he asked, "Are you eighteen yet?"
-"No, I'm not voting age," I laughed.
-"Oh," he said, walking to his car. "…You live around here?"
-"Yeah, just down the street."
-"Well … tell your parents to vote for me!" he said eagerly. I smiled at him. Then he opened his trunk and gave me a flyer, which I later discovered had a few typos, and pulled out a Ted Berry for Judge sticker and put it on my sleeve. We said bye and I got on my bike. I realized I didn't know yet whether or not I supported him, or even what party he was from, but I thought it was kind of neat that I had met someone with his own stickers, so I wore it all the way home and then stuck it on my door. I did some research on him and found out that he's the son of Ted Berry, Senior (thus TMB 2), Cincinnati's first black mayor. He's also a Democrat. My family is Republicans, but he seemed like a nice enough guy (if a little desperate—but wouldn't you be?). But then again, I imagine so would his opponent if I met her. It's all moot anyhow, 'cause I'm not voting age.

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The rest of this post is unrelated and happened more toward the current time (the Ted Berry thing happened on 23JUL). It has to do with the fact that I've sort of been wasting the last few days of my summer, but now that I've realized that, I'm doing my best to remedy it. Yesterday I sat around inside the house and did almost absolutely nothing. Today I'm going to do stuff. In fact I've already done a little stuff: I went to Wendy's again, and I updated my 'blog. Next I'm going to sit and do some of that "Español III en el verano" stuff that I have to do before school lets back in. I figured it would take me a lot less time than it actually does. For example two days ago I decided I'd do a bunch of it, so I went to Warder and sat in the Ivory Tower (a tall pine) and cracked the books. I figured I'd have about a quarter of the book done by the time I got down, but I only got a lesson and a half done, out of 16 lessons. So I realized it might not have been an entirely bad thing if I had started earlier on in the summer. Now I have to cram, in a way.
-I've also realized and been depressed by the fact that there's not even a month of summer vacation left. By the way, does anyone know when school starts back up? I hate the end of summer. It's like a Sunday night during the school year, except a lot worse.

Getting up to date

Now that I'm finally done with that Crowduck segment, which is the longest single-topic thing by far anywhere on my blog, I can get y'all up to speed on what's been happening recently. I expect you've all been waiting very patiently but a little irritatedly for me to finish up with all this Crowduck stuff and do that.
-First and foremost is band. The day after I started the Crowduck installments I had a band practice, and thence one every day after it. It was really different from what the rest of my summer has been. Especially odd was the first one, where I went to the band room for the first time in several months and was around bunches of people I had forgotten I even knew. It was uncomfortable. After that week of practices, I had band camp.
-Band camp, ouggh.
-I just got back from it yesterday. I'm not even going to talk about it, because it was just like any other week of band camp, which means that it was torture. I'm trying to purge it from my memory by sitting down for the first time in a week and staring at a computer or drawing fonts or stuff like that. Which reminds me: I have a lot of fonts sitting on top of my dresser, prbably twenty pages of them. I still haven't had Mom buy me the program I need to make these sheets of looseleaf into workable fonts. I'm going to do that directly.
-And one more thing: I'm about to start up a business. A t-shirt business. It's going to be called Permanent Marker T-Shirts. As soon as I create it I'll give you the address. I'll have all the funny T-shirts I come up with, which so far is about thirteen. What I need you to do is buy a bunch and then tell everyone you know to buy a bunch, and tell them to tell everyone they know. If it works, eventually the entire world will have heard of my T-shirt business and bought a shirt from me. At $3 profit per shirt, that works out to be $18 billion for me! And all you have to do is tell someone about it. I might even give you a few hundred million if you do.

Having left

We had the 0600 departure today, so at 0515 someone, I think Mom, woke me up, and I spent the next half hour or so gathering up every last trace of what I'd brought. We stuck all our suitcases and other crap on the back of one of those pickup trucks and then we climbed on.
-I took a few last pictures as we went. The lake disappeared into the trees. It was over for this year.
-We loaded our stuff off the pickup onto a boat, then took a different boat from that one (except Micah rode with the stuff) to the end of Provincial Road 309. We unloaded the stuff from the boat and into the car and then we drove off, following Grandma and Grandpa in their big van. About a hundred miles down the road we stopped for breakfast at a place that had good food, despite being called "The Lawg Caybun". I don't know why stupidity is all the rage. My breakfast was really good, anyhow.
-Then, long story short: we drove for seventeen hours. Slept some, listened to CDs, but mostly just sat. Seventeen hours. It's the most boring day I've ever had. Well, maybe a few in school. No. I worked a little bit on an idea I have for a font called "Siwash"*, but I had no notebook paper. We got really familiar with the Harry Potter 3 soundtrack. And also a really weird and spooky-sounding CD called libera that Mom has of a little boys' choir. Toward the end I played solitaire with a deck of cards Micah got at the border shop so many hours ago. I'm not sure where we are right now. I was asleep when we got here. All I can tell you is Toom 218, and I'm not even sure if that's right.

*I've since renamed it "Creek", because it turned out "Siwash" is a derogatory term for an Indian.

7 Camp

The last day is depressing. Now I know it's just a few short hours until I'm back in a cramped car with Micah just driving and driving all the way back to Smellville.
-Today I had a bunch of breakfast: 3 Pop-Tarts and a few strips of bacon. Then I lounged around for a few. It'll be another year before I have this much family with me for this long, so I made conversation while it lasted. Family being together. It's always good.
-Instead of Micah, I went with Mom and Dad to fish today. I figured we'd go to "Chuck's Cove"--I'll call it that for now--but we went to Dad's. It was a different cove than what I thought Dad's cove was--Dad didn't even know he had a cove, but apparently this one we were in now was his. At least that's what Mom said. On Dad's very first cast he got a fish, a real kicker of a pike named Dirk. We figured it must be a hot spot. So we trolled around. Nothing happened. That lasted about fifteen minutes. Then Dad caught three more pike. Mom caught one too, and I finally got another fish, even though it was a walleye. A little later we drove back in. The water was really choppy and it got to hurting your butt from bouncing it against the seat. But it was also tremendously beautiful. The air was clear, the sun was bright, and the wind was cool. We were in an especially scenic section of the lake, with granite and forest intermingling on the hilly bank. Boy, do I love this place.
-An hour or so after we got back we decided not to go out to the Falls again today. Going all the way up there in this extra-choppy water would leave you with no butt. So I have no pictures of it until next year.
-Today Ray Henschell, the guy who sold shirts here last year, was here. He had a broader selection of shirts and stuff this year, but none of them had pictures of the lake on them. I'm glad I bought mine last year. Still, I liked the hat I saw there and, even though it was a ridiculous $25, I still bought it. After all, where else am I going to get one? A lot of other people from our camp bought stuff too. Ray Henschell went home pretty rich.
-Earlier today I had a nice talk with Nick, Bill's dad, about what he used to do out here. He was a trapper, back in the '40s. He says it really toughened him up, and he meant way up. When he went into the --Air Force, was it?--he could lift double what everyone else could. After he got out of the Air Force he opened up a restaurant called Nick's, and then when Crowduck "came along", he bought it. I also talked about maps, and he went to get me a Whiteshell map from behind the counter, but he couldn't find any. Maybe there'll be some at the Visitor's Center or whatever. Hope so.
-I went swimming today. There were already three kids--relatives of Bill's?--there, playing on a big yellow thing that you could inflate and then stand on in the water. Their names were Nathan, Sid, and "Jube", but I don't think Micah heard that last one right before he told me. Well, Micah was sitting, on top of that yellow thing, and he hadn't gotten all the way underwater yet. So one of the kids and I decided to push him off. He put up a lot of struggle, but we got him. Then he got all sulky and got out of the lake. He kicked into the lake the stuff I'd taken off before I got in. Oh well.
-We had a huge dinner tonight, with all the great stuff from the rest of the week. I had onion rings, waffle fries, fish, muffins, and salad. It was the best meal I'll have for a year.
-I kept wanting to do something really fun and different to finish off the week, but it was too late to do anything on the boats--they had to be back by 2000--and I couldn't think of anything to do without them. So with a little melancholy I sat down and played Scrabble with Mom and Aunt Irene. I didn't win. I have to do something great tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll go jump in the lake off the dock or something. Definitely I'll take a few more pictures.
-There's some lightning playing south of us. A cool breeze is sweeping in through the screens out here on the porch. I'm sitting here listening to Crowduck and I wish it weren't over. I wish I could stay here and fish and hike and listen to the wind forever. But I can't.

6 Camp

I'm sorry, everyone. I had two days to get the last two entries on the internet, and I forgot. Then I had to go to band camp. But now I'm back and I'll type both of them. Here's this one:
++++++++++++++
I woke up about 0900, I guess. I had some cereal and then I went outside. Every time I do this I end up with Sierra, tickling her or something to make her laugh. I did that for a short time. Then I went down to the beach in my swimsuit and water shoes. But I stood in the water and while it was very pretty, it didn't offer much more than the dock where views came and I wasn't about to put my head underwater to swim, so I ended up only staying one or two minutes. I walked back to the cabin and changed back out of that and retrieved Micah and we went fishing, with Dad.
-I drove up to that cove we discovered yesterday. The wind started lazily drifting us as we cast our lines out and waited. Occasionally I trolled us. I caught the first, and, as it happened, last fish, a real fighter of a pike right next to the boat. Dad took us for a brief but interesting rest stop on a granite and grass peninsula around there, where both of us stepped in a lively colony of ants.
-It's interesting to think about the hills as you boat by them. They roll up and down to all sides of you, closing you into the lake, and they're lush and green. And what really fascinates me is thinking that almost all the area I'm seeing has never been walked on by a person. Aside from occasional airplanes overhead and boat engines on the lake, for all the animals in the forest know there's no such thing as a human. If I went bursting in there, and met a bear, it would have no clue what to make of me. And I would be the first person, ever, to set foot there. I think it's pretty incredible to think that inspite of the millions of years people have been around, it's still possible to be the first person anywhere.
-We drove back, Dad tossed back a couple of beers with the folks, and then we went back out again, this time to go see the Falls. Dad had Micah drive, but Micah wussed out, so Dad drove. Halfway there I realized I'd forgotten my camera. I couldn't believe it. Fortunately Dad's agreed to go back tomorrow. It's a long ride out to the Falls, crossing the entire lake. The Falls start with a bay at the far side.
-The bay is edged with green reeds. It empties out through a small corridor into an imperceptibly flowing river of crystal clear water that seems just like the lake except that it's narrow and the boat only drifts one way, which eventually I realized was downstream. Today we all cast our lines out and drifted haphazardly downstream, occasionally bumping off things on the bank, like parts of a fallen tree. Granite rocks made genial steep slopes at different places on either bank. Then the current took us into a broad, flat, shallow bay with bad fishing, so we took in our lines and Dad drove the rest of the way. Just as we came up onto the Falls, it was weird to see one little corner of the lake where instead of trees on the bank there was no bank at all and the lake slipped off an edge. We hoisted the boat up onto some rocks and tied it up and walked through some grass to go see the Falls close-up.
-Boy, are they ever energetic this year, what with the water level up about a foot. The water slipping into them immediately hits a frothy oblivion sliding uncontrollably down a 45° granite chaotic slope littered with spare boulders, and, in somewhat dry spots, some really brazen bushes. It's impossible to even stand in it on the very edge wihout being swept off to a scenic death. We had to admire it from the edges as it roared perpetually off down the rocks and churned the devil out of the lake water. I could sit there for hours.
-But Micah went over to the ramshackle old dock nearby and somehow started finding things people had dropped off it: first a pretty nice reel repair multitool with a knife and pliers, then three green bottles. He got the multitool himself, but he was too freaked out to get the bottles. I was too for a minute, but finally I took the plunge of faith and went all the way under to grab one at my feet in three- or four-foot water. It was cold, but refreshing. And he gave me 65¢ in poker tonight for it. He made it $1.50 for that one and the two others, but later on he changed it to $1.25. We got in the boat, lazed up the river, and briefly fished a bay up around there. Dad caught a five-inch bass. It was downright cute. Obviously he threw it back.
-We had a terrific dinner that we almost missed coming back late. I liked the fried potatoes especially. And I had two salads. A little while later we started poker. Everyone had drunk quite a bunch. So I should've been the best player around. But I wasn't. I started out playing two hands really badly, letting Grandpa buy me out of a pair of Ks with a stone bluff on one. Then for the rest of the night I had absolutely turd luck. I never should've played poker tonight. I was down only, what, $4.45? Everyone kept urging me on tonight and I was reckless and I'm down $11.45. On the upside, barely any of it is mine. Mom's giving me $5 for allowance and dad gave me $3 just because. And we might not even settle up. We didn't last year.
-Everyone checked out the stars, but there were no Northern Lights, just a beautiful clear sky. Then we went inside. And I read my Bill Bryson book for way too long. At 0215, Mom said, "Well, sun is gonna rise in an hour." I hate trying to sleep un sunlight. I don't think it's risen yet, so maybe she was wrong.

5 Camp

It was a lot nicer sleeping inside. And, since Mom and Dad slept in, I didn't get woken up by breakfast being made. I just got up and had a few Pop-Tarts. Then, for lack of anything to do, I walked over to Cabin 5. Sierra was there. So was I think Dave, Erin, and Grandma, maybe Dan, and we all drew stuff. Dan's really bad at drawing. Sierra, at 4 years, has a unique style where the person's head is way bigger than their body and instead of hair they have a handle that looks like a sock connected seamlessly to their head. Everyone wears lipstick. Little kids' drawings are always interesting to look at.
-I got out and walked around some. Nobody was going out: Dad was busy making some "cabbage rolls" and nobody else seemed to feel like it. Eventually Dad got Mom to tend to the rolls and took Micah and me to the Gull Rocks. Well, I drove. So I took us. Dad was too beered to drive. I angled us in no problems. The only problem we eventually came up against was the fish. Dad got a walleye on his first cast and I got a bite shortly after, but after that fishing dropped off completely. Micah and I caught absolutely nothing. Dad got two walleye, but that didn't do us any good because you can't keep walleye in Crowduck and anyhow we were bass fishing. We got bored and left.
-As I drove Dad gave me directions. But it looked like he was pointing me to the long way around some islands, and his directions had been iffy on the way in, so I trusted my judgment instead of his and got us a bit lost, but we made it okay. I briefly got stuck on babysitting duty, and then a while later dinner was ready. It was those blasted cabbage rolls. I tried to eat one, but I was a little unsuccessful, only ate most of it. Luckily there were fish and biscuits and potato stuff too.
-After dinner we saw a turtle on the road. We sure have been seeing the animals this week. I saw a tame deer earlier having a bite from a box Bill puts out for it; there was of course a bear yesterday; foxes; the loons are nice and talkative. I especially like the loons. Beautiful-sounding birds.
-The whole day through, everyone was plotting a surprise party for Aunt Irene, who as it turns out is 60 in a couple weeks. After a lot of sneaking around with balloons and stuff like that, it culminated in a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" and a lot of really good cake (thanks, Tracy). Mmm, cake.
-There was a gap of nothing, and then poker. I took out $2 and went down to -$9.65. Then I did a lot better than last night. I acutally won a few hands! I was still skirting the edge of staying afloat when I got some pocket Ks and played a perfect hand. I completely bled everyone of all the money I could and took about $6. Though I lost some in In-Between, I still finished with $5.20, putting me at only -$4.45.
-We all walked out of the poker porch and down to The Point to look at the stars. It's not an especially clear night tonight, but it's a lot clearer than any of the other nights we've had. There were no Northern Lights, but we could still see the Milky Way. Isn't that great? There's no way at all to see the Milky way at home. Only here do we get that privilege. The sky was beautiful, and I took a picture that probably didn't turn out and then just tilted back and admired it. When we were all satisfied we walked back and it was time for bed.

4 Camp

Last night was different, but not better. I got up on accident at 0300, not 0600, and my feet were too cold to let me get back to sleep. I guess I kind of did anyhow, and then at 0800 Dad or maybe Micah came in and said, "Breakfast's ready". So I had some and then, with my last remaining energy, asked if there was a free bed inside. Then I crawled into the bottom bunk and slept until noon. From time to time people looked at me incredulously and said, "Still asleep?"
-I replaced my afternoon fishing trip with a look deep into Erin's mind: I spent a few hours looking at all the drawings she does and listening to her explain them. Erin draws a lot, and she brought her sketchbook here. She has all kinds of strange cartoons about, say, characters from a video game coming to life as high-school students, or someone catching a cold that makes them transform into a different thing each time they sneeze. It's very crazy. She uses an anime style. I've never really liked anime as a style. Nonetheless I thought it was pretty good, at least an accurate portrayal of whatever's going on up there in her mind. I also showed her some of my own stuff in my journal, like the cartoon on page 146, and she thought it was funny. I mentioned I'd spent an hour and a half on my entry last night and everyone in the cabin wanted to know what could possibly take an hour and a half to describe, so I got to read the whole thing aloud. Afterwards Erin cruised through the journal looking for references to herself. She'll have a bonanza with tonight's entry.
-All that was fun and all, but I was really ready to get outside and on another boat out on the lake. I saw Dad getting ready to leave and got in with him. We planned to check out the area around the trailhead of the Whiteshell portage, because the two guys there yesterday said they always find a lot of lures there on the rocks, so it must be a good place. We stopped at a little cove on the way, and then another and then one more. We stayed at that one and never made it to the portage. It was a very quiet, secluded cove, fringed with wild rice. Dad took out one fish after another. It was frustrating, because I couldn't seem to catch any. After he got four or five I finally did pull one pike out, and before that I caught two walleye (one of them pretty nice-sized), so it was okay. I like that place. Maybe if I have a halfway decent fishing day there, it can be Chuck's Cove.
-When we decided we had enough fish we drove back. Up at the cabins, Aunt Irene said we'd probably like to see this, and she and Grandma led us a little ways up the road behind Cabin 6. They pointed our attention to the road. There in the sand were the distinctive tracks of a bear. Irene had actually seen it loaf across camp a little earlier.
-A couple minutes later I was sitting in Cabin 5 and Irene, outside the door, started pointing and in a panicky voice saying, "Bear... bear..." Contrary to what would've been smart, everyone went outside to see if they could see it. Dan and Dad and a few people followed after it and I followed after them. It was a flurry of activity and everyone was pointing to where the bear was, but I couldn't see it. Then everyone said, "Oh, there it goes, it's walking away," and I still didn't see it. And it was gone. I was really disappointed.
-A little later dinner was ready. Pretty much the same as last night, but with some latkes thrown in. We made a few latke jokes. After dinner poker got started. Everone was issued $3.00 --but I only wanted two!-- and we played. My luck wasn't much better than last night. I still didn't win a hand for about half an hour, and then they switched to In-Between just a few hands later. In-Between has not redeemed itself for me yet. I watched my stack of chips magically shrink. I only stayed in through the grace of a "good-boy dollar" Grandpa gave me. And then just barely.
-For some reason, about ten minutes in Micah took my hat. I gave him a quick and by his own admission painless punch on the top of the head and took it back. Then he went to take it again, and I blocked his hand, and somehow his face got into it because I accidentally hit him in the jaw with my elbow. Grandpa got up and cashed in his chips like he just couldn't take any more of the violence. He acted like we'd been kicking each other in the face on top of the table. Then Dan told us both to get out of the porch and swore at us. I hadn't done anything a normal person wouldn't do, and all Micah had done was steal my hat and get elbowed in the jaw, but we still both got kicked out like we'd been having a brawl. I think that's just crap. When we got back to our cabin I called Micah a piece of crap and it felt good. Then I took a little walk down at the dock in the dark. I could barely see anything. The sky has been cloudy all day.
-When I got back Dad was finished with the chapter of my book he was reading and gave it to me. Grandma came in with some hot chocolate she'd offered to make us while we were still playing poker. It was top-notch hot chocolate; I drank that and read my book and explained to Micah why it'd actually been neither of our faults, but Dan's for acting like such a jerkoff, and he went to sleep as I read.
-Now I'm going to go to bed. It is pretty late. Crowduck entries are pretty time-consuming.

3 Camp

This morning was just like yesterday morning: it rained some (though it rained more than yesterday); I woke up on accident at 0600, and then I couldn't get back to sleep very well because it was cold. If that happens again tomorrow I'm not sleeping on the porch anymore.
-I had an unattractive breakfast with Dad and some squishy sausages, and then we headed out to [what I thought was] Steve's cove. Two people were already there - I didn't see who they were - and we cast a few times. Then we cast some more. Nothing happened, and nothing kept happening. We sat for a very long time. Dan and Tracy came and then went. Dad hooked one fish, but it got off. Finally we marked it off as a slow fishing day and went back to the dock, no fish caught.
-Dan and Tracy got back a little after us and Dad hatched a plan to go to Ritchie Lake. They said it was our funeral, they weren't even going to try it after last night's rain. But they advised us what kind of lures to take (copper). We had a little break and Dad had some beers and then we got in the boat.
-Ritchie lake is a lake that's a lot smaller than Crowduck. It's a little to the south and it's not connected. You get there by first driving your boat to the trailhead of a portage that goes there, then bringing your lures and plenty of bug spray and hiking 0.6 km to it. There's a canoe padlocked to a tree near the lake and you take out the key you brought and unlock it and then go fishing in Ritchie. Pretty simple.
-I drove to the portage. There were a lot of boats there and even a few people, people not staying at the Camp, just visitors to Whiteshell Provincial Park who were vigorous hikers. Two teenage guys with mud halfway up their shins told us that of the two trails that led from here to there, one was longer and ridiculously muddy, and the other was shorter and absolutely insanely muddy, up to your knees. We got our copper-looking lures and poles and took off down the longer one, which they had recommended.
-The trail was not a trail. Not even remotely. It was a bog. There were whole inches of water standing on top of dark, thick mud. I carefully skirted around it, but I sitll got my shoes wet up to the ankles and plenty inside them too. It was impossible to stay away from the mud. Maybe if I hadn't been carrying stuff I could've, but I lost a lot of maneuverability to the oar I had with me. After a few minutes of squishing, it got a little dryer, and then even ran on a nice granite rock for a few metres, but then it turned off into a flowing, prosperous stream. Dad got to the top of a hill before me and found a sign that said, BIG WHITESHELL, and had an arrow pointing onwards.
-We were on the wrong trail.
-Dad thought we could find a side branch that would take us to Ritchie. We walked on and very soon found ourselves at the end of the trail, with a scenic but disheartening view of Big Whiteshell Lake. Dad conceded we had to turn around. And so we slogged back through the water mixed with mud for long, agonizing minutes. Even though we had been through already, there were places where we were sure continuing was impossible. My favorite spot was where the path emptied into a deep pool a metre wide, flanked on either side by forest too dense to step into, and a small tree had fallen across the pool. Someone had helpfully put a few logs on top of the mud in the pool so people could walk on those, but the logs had been sucked up almost completely by the mud and weren't much help at all anymore. Somehow, we ended up back at the trailhead. Dad inspected the triangular sign put up by the park service a little more closely and saw that, being as how it said "BIG WHITESHELL--.75 KM", we hadn't just taken the wrong one of the two trails, we had put the boat in at the wrong trailhead and somehow accidentally misled the two seasoned hikers we met into thinking we were going to Whiteshell. And so we got back on the boat.
-The portage to Ritchie, unlike the other, was deserted, with only one spot for a boat - a little notch cut in the shoreline with a stream flowing out of it into the lake. We tied the boat to a little rope tied to a little tree, made sure the sign said Ritchie, and did it all over again. The trail was, predictably, insane. Just like the one to Whiteshell, but a little shorter and maybe just a little less severe. It was a tremendous moment when we finally reached the end and saw Ritchie, stretching out steel gray beneath the overcast skies. Dad unlocked the canoe and we carried it through a friendly swarm of dragonflies that were keeping the mosquitoes down for us, and then we got on and pushed off. At last.
-We paddled into the lake up next to a granite rock about a hundred metres away. I stuck my line in and looked out over the hills. The clouds had cleared above us some, but there were still plenty of them around, tall cotton ones floating way up above the distant forests. I took a picture. Then we did some fishing.
-As we sat the wind drifted us slowly back toward shore. We ended up in a bed of wild rice, and I finally, excitedly, caught a fish, the first fish of the day, and my first fish of the trip. It was a little pickerel*, about eight inches long. We threw it back. A little later I caught a mussel somehow. It looked like it had actually bitten my lure. Periodically we had to paddle out of the wild rice and back to the granit rock. Dad caught the first real fish, a nice pike. Around then we decided idly to pull up on the rock, which it turned out was lavishly covered with bird crap, and peacefully but unsuccessfully fished off that. Failing the rock, we got back on the canoe and drifted around. The wind was really picking up. More than that, there were hulking, dark gray clouds coming up from the west. As they blew closer to us I could see torrents of rain dumping out of them. They still had a ways to go before they hit us, but they weren't wasting any time. "Those clouds look foreboding," I told Dad. "Yep, some of 'em are even fiveboding," he said.
-We didn't head in, though I suggested it. Instead we headed for some granite rocks on shore. On the way there I hooked a fish. Finally! This was my first keeper of the week. It was a pike. I hauled it in and decided for the time being I'd call him "Gent". Dad tucked the canoe into a notch you'd swear was made for it and we sat on top of the rocks and fished some more. It was very tranquil. Dad got one more, but all I could get was snag after snag. Meanwhile we watched the storm. It hadn't come up and hit us after all. It was rolling by in front of us, always in full view over the trees we had just hiked through. It was really hammering down over Crowduck, we could see. The huge dark gray clouds had blocked out the sun and were pouring tremendous amounts of rain out of the sky. It was awesome to actually watch it take place while sitting in another lake a long hike away from it.
-When we decided it had almost passed we rowed back to the put-in. Just then was when it did hit Ritchie. We got a good dousing of rain, but no thunder or lightning, and it passed pretty quickly. While it did we got our stuff out of the canoe, put the fish in the net for easy carrying, and locked it up. Then we hiked on back. And it was still ridiculous, only this time I was carrying a net with four heavy pike in it and it had rained not five minutes ago. I was glad to get back to the boat.
-The water at Crowduck was browner than when we left; the storm had really churned up the place. And the boat motor was buried in the mud under the shallow water. So we couldn't get it started or even push the boat out. Dad had me try and pull it up, but it wouldn't budge. We also tried rocking the boat back and forth, and that didn't do anything. We did those two things several times but it was no use. So we sat down and thought.
-"Your shoes are already pretty wet... and the mud's not that deep..." said Dad, "... why don't you wade in there and lift it out?" And as much as I hated to admit it, that was our last chance. Reluctantly I took off my shoes and was happy to discover there wasn't any mud under the water, just sand! But I also discovered I couldn't lift the boat enough. It's hard to grip a boat. So Dad took his boots off and lent me a hand. It was glorious: we pulled it smoothly up and out. No matter we were wet up to our knees; we were going back to camp! And we did.
-I changed into fresh pants and Dan and Tracy came back from fishing along with Grandma and Grandpa. They were out driving in the storm, they said, and they had to turn in to shore; it was the first time in ten years they had had to get up on shore to weather a storm out. They even saw a waterspout**--the lake equivalent of a dust devil: Dan was behind some guy, and the guy all of a sudden peeled off left. First Dan was wondering what the hell that guy was doing, and then he saw all this mist. Then he noticed it was swirling and he said, "Uh-uh," and peeled off straight back to East Gull Rock. Grandma and Grandpa were behind him and followed him right around.
-When Dave, who is a pilot and knows his weather, heard the story, he told them that wasn't a waterspout, it was the beginnings of a screaming tornado.
-After Dan's story he played horseshoes with me against Tracy and Uncle Joe. Dan and I lost, which is kind of sad because Tracy has tennis elbow and had to throw left-handed. After that dinner appeared - fried fish, onion rings, mashed potatoes, green beans, and salad. I had some of all but the salad, and none of that because my plate wouldn't fit it on. I loved it. Crowduck food is in a class of its own. You can't get fresh fish anywhere else. I ate to bursting. And then we got out the poker.
-I had luck about like the first night. Every time I would get pretty nice hole cards, and then they'd amount to nothing. Slowly but surely I lost everything I won last night. We played an hour and I didn't win a single hand. It was tiresome to say the least. Then finally I got pocket fives and won a pot, and immediately we switched to In-Between. I have no luck with In-Between. In fact Grandpa was the one who kept raking it in, pot after pot. It wasn't even anything like fair. I love poker, but I hate losing. So tonight wasn't a good night for me. I think I'm now back down to -$5.8o.
-When poker dissolved we had a look at the stars. There were clouds lining the horizon all around us, but directly overhead some stars were visible. The sky is great around here, because it's completely black. Nothing around to taint it for a hundred miles. But tonight there weren't many stars and none of the Northern Lights we were looking for. Lots of clouds but not much else.
-Wow, this has been a long one. It's been a heck of a day. I just wrote for an hour and a half.

*There's some dispute over whether this is what it was. Grandma says pike and pickerel are the same thing and that it might've been a tulibee.
**I know this is wrong, but I'm about to correct it with a little drama, so hold tight.

2 Camp

It rained some last night; when I woke up, though, it wasn't raining. Dad had made some breakfast, but I was too late to get as much as I wanted. I still got plenty. Then we decided to go fishing. Micah came along with us and we got on the boat to push out.
-The sense of seclusion is terrific. We were out there, three guys in a boat, and all around us the water stretched out to shores we would never walk on. It was deep blue and huge, enough to remind you that you're pretty small when it comes right down to it. We hung a left into Darkwater Bay. We trolled around there for about fifteen minutes, but we didn't catch anything, so we went around to a little cove nearby. [I thought at the time it was Steve's cove, but later I found out it wasn't.] Most family members have a cove named after them, one where they had a particularly good fishing day. This one [I thought] was Dad's, and it was pretty good. He caught the first one. It was a pike, about normal size-- somewhere over a foot. Then Micah got one right after his, another nice pike. We trolled and cast awhile and I didn't catch anything. A while later Micah caught another pike and Dad caught one too. I still had a score of zero. Eventually we got tired and went in.
-I don't know exactly when, but around noon I took a nap-- I guess I just didn't get enough sleep last night. I slept until about three and then decided not to waste the rest of the day and got up to have some chips and salsa. Mom and Dad were gone but Grandma and Grandpa and Dan and Tracy were still sitting around, along with some of our other people. I finished off my chips and salsa and was sitting there in the sun when Grandpa and Uncle Joe told me, "We're going fishing. Want to come along?" I said sure and we went.
-Grandpa drove us to North Bay. At first he got a little lost, but he figured it out and we stuck our lures in the water. We trolled around the bay. And nothing happened. About ten minutes in I thought I got a bite but that was all for me. Ten more minutes or so and Grandpa caught a small pike. Then nothing else happened. We went to another cove on our way back but nothing happened there either except that I got tangled in Grandpa's line, they twisted together for about three feet, and we both had to cut our lines.
-When we got back we formed a loose circle of chairs on the porch like we always do and discussed random stuff. Normally the type of stuff we discuss wouldn't be so interesting-- old tractors, annoying people at work-- but at Crowduck it's enhanced just by being here. That and Dan always adds a bit of funny into the conversation. Dinner happened a little later and we ate plenty, especially of waffle fries, and I sat with Erin and Micah in the screened-in part of the porch, which has a picnic-style table in it. It's nice to just sit around here and have meaningless conversation.
-Bill ran his grader today, an ancient, loud piece of machine that he has to run to keep the roads solvent. When he came back from going all the way to the Whiteshell dock and back I talked to him a little. He told me he did get that letter I wrote him last February after all, and he was honored I'd like to work for him, but he didn't know if it could work out, what with me being a non-resident. Aaron [he and his parents work at the dock; he's 15 or 16 years old], though, lives in Florida and still works here on weekends. I'll dig a little deeper and get all the facts. Maybe it has to do with him going to Ontario when it's not the weekend.
-I took two more dollars out for poker tonight, putting me at -$8 for the week. Then I kept getting some really good hands, and playing it very nicely. I took a lot of money from everyone and regained all of the money I lost yesterday. I had a really good day with Texas Hold 'Em. I'm going to keep playing through the rest of the week. Where I lost money, though, was when we switched to In-Between.
-In-Between is a betting game, except that virtually no skill is involved. It goes like this: the dealer puts two cards on the table with a space in between them for another one. You then bet according to what you think the odds are of the card he puts in the space being between them in value. Aces are high. For example: the dealer (Dan) puts down a 5 and a 6. There is no 5½ card, so you bet nothing and the play goes to the person on your left. Another example: he puts down an A and a 2 (this spread is known as the Acey-Deucey) and, since that's the best spread possible, you bet the whole pot. He puts down a 2 in between them and that's called hitting post: one of the cards already down comes up again. When you hit post you pay double what you bet, and since the pot has accumulated, let's say, $1.50 of other people's bets, you pay $3.00. Sucks, doesn't it? Well, it is possible to win, but evidently I haven't figured out the secret. I couldn't get a decent spread to save my life, so I just kept getting my money whittled away by anteing up once someone else won the pot. Still, though, I cashed out at only -$1.25 for the week, up $6.75 today. Then I watched everyone else funnel their money into a brutal pot that had people hit post on $3.00 and $6.00. I was really glad I got out when I did, but I still wasn't pleased to note that Grandpa won it all when he took the $15.50 pot on a King-Deuce.
-Right after poker a storm came up. At first it was just thunder and lightning. I watched the lightning over the treetops. So quiet, it was pretty eerie, with the pines at the edge of camp jutting into its light. Up here you get reminded a lot that you're not so big after all. I took a few pictures, but I don't think most of them turned out. It's really an incredible experience to see a lightning storm here. With no city light the sky is completely black until a lightning strike. At that point it turns a bright inky blue. And tonight there was a lot of lightning. It flashed on and off wildly, light half the time and dark half. It's vvery awesome.
-By the way:
-In Cabin 5, there are some bats in the roof. Dave just found this out today. He called Bill in and got the eaves repaired, sealing off their usual route out, so during poker they discovered a different way, through a hole into the screened-in porch that's connected to the cabin. There were about a dozen of them flying around in the porch, and they just kind of filtered themselves out the open door, one by one. I don't know if they'll stay gone, but they've left the roof for tonight, at least for a while.

1 Camp

It wasn't Erin, so I walked past her and turned around in the lobby and went to sleep.
-First I got up at 0800 when Dan and Tracy knocked on the door. I think they wanted me to get Mom up so she could go shopping with them, but I'm not sure, because I was half-asleep. Next I woke up at about 1000, and I think they were trying to get her up again. Every year we go shopping just before the trip, but this year to save energy just Mom, Tracy, and Grandma were going. Usually we go at 8 but this year it fell on Canada Day, so the stores were closed until 10.
-While they were shopping I hung around in Dave & Co.'s room. Erin made me some tea. She and I and the two small ones were the only ones in the room at the time. She says tea is good so I had her make me some. I guess I didn't top it right. She says topping is everything. Later I frankly got worried at 1100, checkout time, because they weren't checking their room out, but I found out they had gotten an hour's swing time somehow. Mom and the shopping women came back and we loaded stuff and then we finally left.
-The sun was out this morning. The scenery was expansive and piny. I liked that two-hour drive. The lakes and everything are very pretty. When we got to our drop-off point we could tell because the highway ended by pouring into the Big Whiteshell Lake. I love that. It's just so different. Half the rest of the people were there already, and Dan said Bill had seen us as he was just leaving on a boat across the lake, so he was coming back in a few. Meanwhile we unloaded the cars. Man, did we ever have a lot of stuff. I think we packed way too much this year. We pack too much every year, that's a given, but this year way too much. We all got nice and tired loading stuff onto the boat that came and then sat down for the ten-minute ride across Big Whiteshell. We were going fast, but the scenery was still great. Then we hit the far dock and started unloading and loading all over again. Everyone got to do their part. Right as we got it all out of the big boat, we realized Mom wasn't there. So a boat went back to get her. We pushed on, though. I sat in the back of a pickup with Erin and Sierra and Dave and Micah and I took pictures. In fact I took a lot of pictures today. I especially liked the one where we saw the lake over some trees. Right after that we pulled into camp. And so the unloading began again. We also had to sort stuff by cabins this time. First we determined who has what cabin. As far as I can tell our family has Cabin 4, the older generation has 6, and everyone else is in 5. Maybe Dan and Tracy are in 6. But we have the best one. Bill remodeled Number 4 last winter, so now it's really posh and swanky, as such terms apply ten miles from everyone else in the deep woods of Canada, and it has a marble fireplace and brand new sinkwork and real pretty walls. As soon as we were done unloading I took a look at the lake. It was beautiful. It stretched out dark blue everywhere in front of me. The banks were carpeted with a green, wild forest full of bears and moose and deer. A little wind whipped up the surface. I loved it. I really love this place.
-Reluctantly I headed back up the hill to the cabins, but not without a picture, and fooled around. That's the beauty of the first day: there's absolutely nothing you have to do, so you can walk around, or you can talk to people, or you can sit down, or anything. I talked aimlessly with Erin. That's the best way to talk. We walked down to The Point [little granite peninsula] and then back up the sand road. After we were done I had some chips and salsa. Then I played horseshoes with Dan and Tracy and Dave in the horseshoe pit just barely carved out of the forest behind the cabins. For a long time we couldn't find the fourth horseshoe, and we finally gave up and played with three. On the first turn, though, Dave threw such a sucky two shoes right into a bunch of fallen trees and when we went to get his we found the other one too. We were down 4 to 8 when Dave quit because he sucked so much, and when I went back to recruit Dad to take his place I found out dinner was ready. Chili and wild rice soup. I just had chili, lots and lots of it. Chili is one of my favorite foods. Afterwards I replaced Dave with Uncle Joe and still lost, pretty badly too.
-The lake is up really high this year. Everyone working here says it's the highest they've ever seen it. It's so high the docks have been overflowed and they had to put down some more boards. It's because there's been a lot of rain (to put it mildly). This may mean good fishing (but I don't know), but it's also lots of mosquitoes. OFF! is required at all times, indoors and out.
-I was sitting there messing with a fishing rod and someone came by, I think Tracy, and said there were some foxes playing at the beach. Everyone went to the docks to watch them from across a little bit of the lake (so as not to scare them). The foxes were really frisky and looked to be having a lot of fun. I took three pictures, but they weren't zoomed in far enough because my camera doesn't have that much zoom. I used some binoculars, though, and saw them up close. Orange and white with those black paws. I have only seen one fox before that, and that was a pretty sick-looking one today on the road. (Zoos don't count.)
-When we played poker I won the first hand. Then I won absolutely nothing after that. I took out five dollars and slowly lost it all, because I kept getting mediocre hands. I took out another dollar to play In-Between later, but every time it looked promising I would hit post and have to pay double what I bet, or I would completely miss it. In short, I had a bad day at poker and lost a lot of money. I'll try again tomorrow, but once I'm down ten bucks I'm going to be a spectator. I was for the last 75% of In-Between. I watched while the last pot would not die, and it was too bad for Grandma because she wanted to sleep on the porch where we were playing. Finally, of all the undeserving people, Micah took it all. I hate poker tonight.
-It felt like a lot later than it was when we quit. It wasn't even midnight. Generally my night would be just beginning if I were at home. But tonight I'm going to fall asleep out here on the porch.

3 Travel

By the time I got to put on the flannel, it was too warm to be practical, but I still kept it on, just because I liked it. It was still dull gray in Duluth. I had some Froot Loops for breakfast and we walked out into the quick wind and drove off. Now Micah was in the back seat with me, so I didn't have the freedom to spread out like I did before. While we were driving across Minnesota, which is almost Canada, I realized what it was that made Canadian scenery look different from American scenery: most of the trees are pine trees. It was also still dull gray, like it has been a lot of times I've gone through Canada. Dad kept driving.
-We had built up a lot of anticipation by the time We got to International Falls to cross into Canada, and it turned out not to be as great as I remembered, probably because we didn't go to the places I like to go to. Instead of the Canada Welcome Centre or whatever, which is friendly and does currency exchange, we went to a clothes store full of MINNESOTA merchandise; Mom bought me some underwear; and then to a lousy restaurant called Giovanni's, and I wasn't even hungry. I didn't get my currency exchanged at all. Then we courageously approached the crossing, which I was happy to see was just as insane as I remembered. The smell of paper pulp from that paper factory sets the mood. Then there are the various parts of the factory that intrude into the crossing--those big pipes, sprouting up out of the ground like trees from a wasteland planet, and those trains that have two or three cars if they have any. I especially like the part where the railroad runs right up the middle of the road and then out the left side, then curves around and intersects the road again twenty feet farther on. We made it through all that. Then we pulled up to the window and a fat guy with a florid goatee asked us for our IDs and where we were going and what kind of odd stuff we were taking into the country with us. Then he let us go. And that was that.
-Canada was just like Minnesota. We drove kilometre after kilometre. There were a lot of nice lakes off to our side, and they all had a dark, deep bluish-gray to them. The sky still spat rain on us. I did my part to relieve boredom by reading aloud the Bill Bryson book I got yesterday. Everyone laughed out loud when the Irish guy came drunk down the street and cussed out Denmark. You have to read it. We didn't stop much, but one time when we did, at a grocery store next to a bait shop, I got my currency exchanged at the grocery store's checkout. I thought that was neat.
-Kenora kind of snuck up on us. It's a quiet town and it's almost like it's not there when you're driving by it. There's a big lake you can see from everywhere in town. I think it's the Lake of the Woods. Before we knew it we were at our Super 8. I really like this motel, because I was hungry when I came in and they had a big crock of soup right there. It was such great soup. It came from a restaurant next door, and it was hot and really delicious. I checked out our room--also nice--and then donned my flannel, because it was chilly again now we were farther north. Dan, Tracy, Dave, Erin, Sierra, and Hayden arrived. I exchanged hellos and went out and sat on a hill and watched the traffic. I even took a picture of it. The lake is just on the other side of the road. It's beautiful, really. A little while later I watched the traffic from the other side of the street at a different spot where I could see every car for maybe a quarter mile. I was waiting for Grandma and Grandpa's big van, but it didn't come, so I went back in at 2010, to Dave's room. There were a lot of people there, all the ones I mentioned earlier. Hayden was literally climbing up the walls, or window at least. Uncle Dan was tickling Sierra and she was shrieking happily. Everyone else just watched. I played with the two little kids some too-- giving them piggyback rides and that kind of stuff. We waited for Grandma and Grandpa, but they still didn't come, so we had fun without them. I even took Sierra out to see the lake, but she got cold, so we went back in. Around then Hayden fell asleep. Dave also called Grandma and Grandpa and found out why they were delayed. Here it is. Aunt Irene's luggage never came in at the airport where they were picking her up, and then she got really sick because (we think) of some food. And she had to buy some more clothes to replace her luggage. The airport's going to get it to her when she goes back into the US, probably, but that does her zero good now. I felt sorry for all of them and told Dan and Tracy and Micah about it and went back to my room. Everyone talked until about 2300. Then they went to bed. Wimps.
-Micah watched the window, and at 2330 or so he spotted them. They came in and explained to us what had happened, and that Irene was still vividly sick, and how today had been for them a total nightmare. I felt sorry again, but also glad that it wasn't me. They went to sleep pretty quickly, and left me in my room. But everyone there is asleep. They told me not to do my journal entry in there so they wouldn't have to have the lights on. Actually they suggested the bathroom, but I came out to the hallway instead. There's a someone down the hall reading something. They let out a burp earlier, so it might be Erin. I'm going to go check it out.
-[The next day I found out the airport had Aunt Irene's luggage delivered overnight on a cargo plane of some sort. That was very cordial of them.]

2 Travel

What the heck, I'll give you another, since it's only travel.

I didn't wake up until about 0930, and only then because we were getting ready to roll. That bed I slept on didn't turn out to be too bad. I had a nice breakfast of a slice of bacon and two eggs. Then we all started slowly getting ready to leave. I stood around some. I was standing around looking through my wallet, making sure Micah hadn't stolen anything from me during the night, and Aunt Ellen saw me and asked what was up. "Just lookin' to see what's there," I said.
-"Do you need some money?" She asked. I had $70. "Not... really," I said. "...Why, were you going to give me some?"
-It turned out she was. She gave me $2o for no particular reason, just as a parting gift, and another $20 to give to Micah (he was traveling in Grandma and Grandpa's van, not in the car with us), and I thanked her. Around then we said goodbye and piled into the car.
-Dad drove us into Wisconsin. It was a nice green day in the Dairy State. The trees were green and so were the farms. And that's what we passed through for most of the day. Just outside of Pittsville or something I drove for about an hour; then Dad took over again at a Cenex station and we kept going.
-Around 1920 we started coming up on Duluth, where we were going to meet Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Joe. As we approached the town, a creeping fog settled over the road. Once we got in view of Lake Superior, we could see a stiff wind blowing in off the dark blue water. It really got to buffeting the car around, and we could tell it was going to be cold when we got out of the car.
-We were scheduled to meet them at an Applebee's. It was in a big mall. We parked and, preparatorily, looked out at the rolling sky, the same color as Lake Superior. Then we got out. And yes, it was cold, boy was it ever. It felt like a brisk February day, not like June 29th. I stuck my hands in my pockets and hurried on across the parking lot into the Applebee's. I was just about to ask where the Troxel party was sitting when Micah yelled to me from a table right next to the door. Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Joe were there sitting with him, and the table looked full, but of course I made room. In a minute Mom and Dad joined--Dad had to sit at the end of the table on a chair--and we were served by a perky waitress with an accent that reminded us we were in Minnesota now. I had a great steak and made light chit-chat, but then I peeled off to a Barnes & Noble next door.
-Looking around I found another Bill Bryson book. Might as well, I figured. This one's called Neither Here Nor There and it's about him traveling in Europe. So far it's really funny. I especially like the part where he said,
"We were awakened early for another rest stop, this one in Where the F-ck, Finland."
I shelled out $14 for it and joined up with everyone else. I showed Micah a big moth I found at a restaurant in Wisconsin, and then we drove a little ways to our EconoLodge motel.
-I was going to sit and read my new book, but Dad commandeered it so I went off to the pool. It was a lot like the Y's pool, which sucks, but for some reason it didn't suck. Same chlorinated, soggy air, same chemically stinging water, but it didn't suck. As much. I think it still did to a certain extent. While we were there, strangely enough, we found out that the other kids there with us (three boys who liked to do cannonballs) were also from Cincinnati. Small world.
-I came back, did read some of my book, and then washed the chlorine off in a shower and got to writing. It's still foggy and damp out, and I kinda like it. I'm going to wear my flannel tomorrow.

1 Travel

But I did [have to get up early]. In fact, Dad got me up at 0830. We battened down the house and left at 1000.
-Mom and Dad drove today. It was an uneventful drive. We went nonstop through Indianapolis and I sat in the back and designed a floor plan for a house I want to build. I have all three floors mostly done, but it needs refining.
-I had plenty of time to work on them. It took many hours of just sitting in the car twiddling thumbs, hours and hours, to get to and through Chicago. Then we passed through some suburbs. After a few, we were finally in Cary, and we eventually found Ellen & Chuck's house, which if I forgot to tell you is where we're staying.
-When I got out of the car Mom asked me if I remembered the place. I went here last when I was four. No, of course I don't remember it, dweeb. Aunt Ellen opened the door and there was an awkward moment where everyone hugged each other. Then we all came inside. Mom immediately took me upstairs to see if I remembered a certain room with an airplane motif that I supposedly slept in last time I was here. I didn't. It was twelve years ago, dweeb! It was a small room, but that's still where I get to sleep tonight, in a micro-sized bed, with Micah snoring nearby.
-Aunt Ellen and Uncle Chuck ordered pizza, so ate and got really full. Then I lounged reading the Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book, which it turns out they have. We socialized a little... in a way... and then more and then it was time for bed.

Dramatis Personae

Hi, Everybody!

I've actually been back since last Saturday, but I felt I deserved a little bit of hiatus and sleeping in. But now I'm back in "full force", as they say! Now: what I think I'm going to do over the next week and a half is write down each journal entry I did in my big fat journal (you may remember me showing it to youy once or twice if you're someone I showed it to). But before I do I'm going to keep you from getting confused, by giving you a cast list of everyone I'm going to mention.

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Mom, Dad, Micah, and me: you already know us.
Grandma and Grandpa: live in Oxford. They're the ones in charge of the trip every year.
Uncle Dan, Aunt Tracy: Dan is my mom's brother. They're both real funny folks.
Uncle Dave: Also my mom's brother. His wife Rachael didn't come this year.
Erin, Sierra, Hayden: Dave's kids. Erin is 17 (well, not anymore--turned 18 on the 12th), Sierra is 4, and Hayden is 2, and autistic. Leah stayed home too. She's 15, I think.
Great Uncle Joe: Grandpa's brother. Lives in Denver. Quieter than Grandpa.
Great Aunt Irene: Grandma's sister. Lives near DC. She writes stuff, like plays for kids. Also a quiet person.
Great Aunt Ellen and Uncle Chuck: live in Chicago and in Arizona. They're both pilots. They didn't come along this year, just let us sleep in their house.
Bill Kolansky: Lean, wiry, black hair, fun guy. Runs the Crowduck Lake Camp. Used to have a float plane, but it sank and they say it's no good anymore.
Nick Kolansky: Bill's dad. Like Bill, but with gray hair. I think he came from the Ukraine, once, long ago, but I can't hear any accent. He was the one who bought the camp originally. I don't know whether he still owns it or if he ceded it to Bill.
Crowduck Lake: Crowduck Lake
(sorry, it wouldn't let me put the full-size map there)

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That's about it. I'll edit out some of the parts that would be dense and fill space, and I'll also keep tabs on what's happening currently, alongside this play-by-play. First entry comes out tomorrow.