Chronicles of Camping (In Which I Kick Sand in the Face of Danger)

This year, I found myself thinking that I hadn’t been camping in a very long time, and that I might like to go. Tragically, I had this thought some time in the middle of August, and drastically underestimated the amount of people that enjoy reserving camp sites in the middle of September. I say ‘reserving camp sites’ rather than ‘camping’ because I can only assume, based on the number of reserved sites in the month of September (many) compared to the amount of actual live people at the campground (none), that people are getting their kicks from sitting at home on their computers and making campground reservations for the sheer thrill. As a result, Bryan and I got pigeon-holed into camping at the end of September. (This conveniently coincided with the week of his birthday so that I can pretend that we went camping for his birthday and not feel bad for not doing anything special even though he doesn’t really like camping.)

That is not to say that the camping trip was bad. It wasn’t. It was a great trip and, considering that it took place in the middle of the fall, could hardly have gone better. We were largely prepared for the cold weather, which surprised us by being balmy and beautiful (for September), and we didn’t expect to be able to swim or tan or anything like that, so we weren’t disappointed. The thing that I didn’t take into account was the fact that the last time I was camping I was literally responsible for absolutely nothing. I had no say in, nor responsibility for any of the organizational aspects of the trips. My parents ran the whole show, and I was pretty much completely oblivious as to all the finer details of camping. After hitting this realization like an electric fence, I asked my wonderful mom for some helpful advice. She proceeded to tell me things that I am sure seasoned campers will take for granted as common sense that I had not even begun to think of. For example, freeze things before you go. Don’t just put kind of chilled food in a cooler and expect it to keep. Keep your cooler under the bench of a picnic table so that animals can’t get into it. (That one I found to be particularly ingenious.)

Speaking of animals, since the park that we were able to scrounge up a reservation at was located on a tiny, sandy peninsula in lake Erie, one side of it was nothing but a great big beach, and the other side was nothing but a giant squishy marsh, with a bit of solid land in the middle to set up tents on. (Our campsite was on the beachy side, so the ground cover on the whole site was sand.) As a result there is a distinct lack of wildlife at this park aside from snakes, toads and seagulls, which we saw in abundance. Other than that we encountered approximately two animals. (Approximately.) One was a very tiny black turtle that I rescued from the middle of the deserted road and didn’t think to take a picture of. The other was a furry mammal of some kind that thought it would like whatever was in our garbage bag. (This goes back to another piece of what I suspect is camping common sense: Take out your trash every night. Or at least put it in the trunk.) Bryan and I were sitting around the fire on our second (or maybe third - I really don’t recall) night there, and there was a snuffling sound around the picnic table. I got up to investigate, forgetting that the animals of a provincial park are so acclimatized to humans that just walking near them is not enough to make them go away. I walked over to the picnic table, mostly blind as I didn’t think to bring a light, and thought to myself “What did I think I was going to do about this? I walked over here like I had some kind of purpose, and since my mere presence isn’t enough to scare it away, I guess I have to do something.” Except this whole thought process took place in about 0.4 seconds, so really it was something like “Oh-gawd-it’s-not-leaving-and-I-can’t-see-whatdoIdo?” KICK. My reflexive reaction was to kick sand at the beastie in hopes that it would go away. Immediately following this decision I realized that it was pretty stupid, thinking that it could be an angry porcupine at worst, or a particularly brave raccoon at best. To my great relief, rather than shooting quills at me or jumping on my face and maiming me, the animal trundled off and hid under the car for the next several hours. As it waddled away, I was still almost entirely blind, so I took the opportunity to check the animal out a little. All I could tell was that it was very light in colour, and I didn’t really think anything of it until I reached forward to pick up the garbage bag that it had been rooting through. Then I noticed the smell. I then ran away and hid behind the tent, babbling a little bit. Bryan was suitably confused, and I had to explain to him that “I just kicked sand in a skunk’s face.” He laughed at me and I came out from behind the tent and disposed of the garbage (armed with a lantern this time) and then we sat by the fire some more. So, like most of my stories, the end is a bit anticlimactic: “And then it ran away.” I didn’t get sprayed, and it didn’t come back, and I didn’t chase it down with a stick or anything, but it is the most interesting of my non-mushy camping stories, so there you have it. I kicked sand at a skunk and lived.

Red Hat Society Cupcakes!

I have been meaning to write about these cupcakes since they were made. The wonderful Lara and I made them for my mother’s 50th birthday party. (If you don’t understand the importance of the colours and whatnot, then you should read up on the RHS. Then they are quite funny.) Their creation was a bit of a fiasco, but as you can see, they turned out wonderfully, and with much leftover material.

Our initial shopping trip involved a lengthy visit to the bulk barn for baking supplies, (fondant, food colouring, bulk icing sugar…) and some other grocery store for an entire dozen eggs and two whole sticks of butter, all of which we used. (These cupcakes were healthy.) The baking all took place at my parents’ house, so I had a hard time finding things, so we wound up buying a large amount of unnecessary junk. (For example, four muffin trays and a giant bag of powdered sugar.) There was also a dart lying around in the kitchen mysteriously, so it got used as a baking instrument. (By baking instrument I mean poking thing to open stuff with.)

Our first step was to make the cake itself, which I am ashamed to say was cake-in-a-box. After using an entire container of red food colouring to make the batter the right colour, we popped the cake part in the oven and planned our next trip to the Bulk Barn. We made one batch of buttercream in the meantime, thereby making a complete disaster area and staining pretty much everything in my parents’ kitchen purple. (The meat cutting board will never be the same.)

My plan with the rec cupcakes was for the icing to be red as well, so the fact that we had already used up all of our red food colouring on the batter was an issue. Once the cupcakes came out of the oven we went on another Bulk Barn adventure and picked up another container of red food colouring and (on a whim) a tiny vial of strawberry flavouring. Seemed like a productive trip. We then drove fifteen minutes back to my parents’ house and started making the second batch of buttercream. One whole stick of butter (See? Healthy.) and a crazy amount of icing sugar later, we had some yellowish-white icing. Upon adding another entire container of red food colouring, we had some slightly pink icing. Frak. Two more trips and three more containers later, we came out with the right colour.

After icing them, which was totally the easiest part, I had to figure out how the frak to make things out of fondant without them falling apart. (And pray that the little bit of purple that we had left was enough to colour the fondant.) With an awful lot of instruction from Lara, I spent about a million years making tiny bows out of sheets of purple sugar. Lara felt the need to take a picture of my “trying hard face”, which, though you can’t really see it, features my tongue sticking out of the side of my mouth. It would have been neat if I had any tools besides a knife that was altogether too big for my purposes, but it wasn’t a complete disaster.

All the people who ate the red ones kind of looked like they had been eating people, but sacrifices must be made for aesthetics. If I hadn’t spent so much money learning to be a musician already, maybe I would consider learning to be a baker. (Maybe I will anyway?)

Vuvuzela Excerpts

Skip to about 1 minute, unless you would like a lesson in the finer arts of vuvuzela playing. As much as vuvuzelas seem to be the funniest thing in the world right now according to popular opinion, the only thing that made me want to post this is the fact that they are playing trombone excerpts. It makes sense. The mouthpieces (if you can claim that they have one) are roughly the same size, and the range seems similar. It still kind of hurts me.

It took some digging through German websites, but I have determined that the people playing are probably Uwe Saegebarth, a trumpet player, Helge von Niswandt, trombone, and either Stephan Stadtfeld (trumpet) or Stefan Gorasdza (french horn), all of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin. The spelling in the subtitles leads me to think that the Stephan in question is the trumpet player. I am at least satisfied that the person playing the Boléro solo was, in fact the trombone player.

A Day at my Desk

Structured chaos. I know where everything is.

I Really Like Getting Mail

Today I walked for half an hour in the blazing ten billion degree sun (that’s Centigrade, for anyone who’s wondering), braving road construction and unfinished stairs and heat stroke to pick up a package from the post office. That is how important getting mail is to me.
I was expecting my package to be full of shirts, because I ordered shirts several weeks ago from TeeFury.com. (For the record, their shipping to Canada is VERY slow.) Instead of my long-awaited tee shirts, I got computer decals, which are good too, I guess. I actually got two of them because I couldn’t decide which one I liked better, so for now I have the one pictured to the left on my laptop. I also got this one.

I bought them on the internet, because I don’t seem to believe in real stores and things anymore, and I am including a link to the store where I bought them because there are some other really cool ones there, and they are totally worth buying and I am not just saying that to get a discount. There is a really cool Iron Man one that was definitely my third choice. As it stands, I am pretty happy with my retro nerdery.

Cool Decal on Etsy.