My apologies to anyone who recognizes the title (I assume it’ll just be me and Erin.)

So, to get you up to speed, I’ll have to take a few days, and sort of savour the events of the last 20 days or so.

The beginning of my two weeks of holidays was a wedding held at Pike Lake - a provincial park about 15 minutes out of town. We had packed most of our stuff up Thursday night, in hopes of driving out to Pike Lake and setting up camp as quickly and painlessly as possible. For a change, our plans worked out, and we got the tent set up and fed ourselves before the predators came out for the night. Erin’s dad broke out the gin and tonics. William found a g&t in progress (just the g) and had a sip (Note to social services - please don’t take William away.) He didn’t much care for it. It rained a bit in the night, but we stayed dry and warm in our tent.

Oh, you think I was joking about the predators? Well, the next day, William and I were walking through the woods, and a horned owl swooped over our heads, probably not more than 10 feet above us, then perched on a tree about 30 feet from us. William and I watched him for a bit (and it watched us right back) and then it flew off. Owl flight is spookily silent, and something very cool to see. We went back to the campsite to tell everyone about it. Everyone was too busy with the wedding preparations to come back with us to look for the owl. We grabbed a camera and went back to the general area. It was sitting in a tree, right near where we saw it in the first place, so I snapped a couple of pictures. I’ll try to remember to post them later, but I don’t have them at work.

After that, we helped set up things for the wedding - decorating tables, getting underfoot, just basic helping out stuff. There were rain clouds, but I assured everyone that it couldn’t rain. (heh.) Well, what do I know about rain anyway? It rained during the ceremony. Cold, wet, still quite nice. Afterwards, we went back to the campsite and started starting a fire.

We had a good start on the fire, when someone told us that we should have started it in the big communal fire pit instead of the small individual fire box that we were using. Without naming names, the person who was helping me start the fire decided that we’d just move what we had started the 400 feet to the communal fire pit. So here we were, running across an open field with burning newspapers perched on top of a log. The papers caught fire quite well with all the oxygen they were getting, so the other person dropped them. In the middle of the field. Luckily I had a couple of logs that weren’t really burning yet, so I chopsticked the burning paper, and carried it the rest of the way. The rest of the weekend was pretty uneventful, though William had a great time, and it was quite a while before I’d think of eating a cupcake (there were a lot of cupcakes. A lot of cupcakes.)

Tomorrow - the following week

Simpson’s quote of the day: “As of now, Lionel Hutz no longer exists. Say hello to Miguel Sanchez!” - Lionel Hutz