It's Not My Fault!

That's right!

It's not my fault - they made me do it!

You see, The Wife and I are very casual about events, personal remembrance style events.

Our own birthdays? For the shopping run prior to you might be asked what you want to eat on 'the day' in case we need to order something different than normal. Anniversary? Now that my aunt is no longer around to faithfully send us the card which acted as a reminder we usually don't even remember until something marginally related triggers that memory in one or the other of us weeks later.

And don't even get us started on the so-called Christian church's blatent attempt to usurp yet another ancient pagan celebration (Lupercalia in this case) by declaring Feb 14 as a feast day for St. Valentine (at least three Valentines have been stainted and it's not clear which one was being targeted in this case) Especially since this happened around 500AD, a full 300 years before 'the church' started acknowledging weddings as something worthy of being blessed and a millenia before the 'wedding sacrament', which somehow was suddenly supposed to make the milenias old custom of pair-partnerships more special, was standardized (and moved from the front steps to the alter) during the Council of Trent (1563 AD). Needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, we have never been inclined to participate in this both commercially and religiously driven annual sacrificing of an estimated 2 billion dollars worth of plant sex organs!

Gifts? We don't  do that either, never have, because everyday should be special, not just a select few. (Awww!) - OK, OK, maybe it's part that and part because we're grown-ass adults and if we want something and can afford it there's no sense in screwing around waiting for a 'special day' that might not come untill after the metaphorical bus culls us from this existence. - 

BTW, we're not complete curmudeons. We send The Daughter's half-sister's two small kids something for Christmas every year even though we have rarely seen them in person and they have no idea who we are. In fact we're already working on this year's. (I suspect the act does more for us than the kids.)

My SIL's on the otherhand, are in that segment of polite society that believe traditional gift-giving is mandatory no matter how tightly it squeezes the budget.

So when they saw this thing on the shelf, something that combines my inclination for both camping and puzzling, they just had to go in together and get it for my birthday.

Cool! But I was working on other things at the time so it got shelved

untill I had a project-opening in my schedule.

I figured I could combine this new RV

with my wooden VW Bus RV and make a quaint little camping scene out of them despite, or maybe because of, the scale and style differences.

So, once I had an opening in the schedule, I broke out the first batch of blocks and the 72 page instruction book

and

went

to work.

After a while I'm thinking 'Wow! These people must have every appliance in the Sears catalog. That's no way to camp!'. But I kept on following the instructions anyway.

Right about here, in a panic, I run up to make sure the gate is closed, run back down to the barn, lock the doors, and turn out the lights - because I finally twig to the fact that I'm not building an RV, I'm building a fucking drug lab!

To be fair, The Wife and I only watched one episode of Breaking Bad, way back well before I retired, back when my dad was still alive and Elmer was still hale-n-hardy. That was enought for us to decide it was way too violent for our tastes. We also don't find no-good-way-out scenarios entertaining or educational, just stressful. And between the two of us we've got enough anxiety without adding that crap to our evening routine!

I don't know if my SIL's realized what this actually is, or if this is what they really think of me, but now I'm accidently elbow deep into becoming a drug lord!

Once I got over the shock, and talked myself down off the they're-gona-come-and-get-me ledge I did the only sensible thing I could.

I carried on.

But at this point I deviated from the instructions, not an unusual occurrence for me. 

Before putting the roof on

I installed the wheel-sets out of order so I could figure out where to drill through the floor

in order to wire the model up with lights. (Come on! You didn't  really think I would skip this extracurricular step did you?)

After laying some colored lights on the floor of the RV, both inside and out,

I attached some white lights left over from previous lighting projects to the ceiling before finally installing the roof.

With that done it was time to move on to the base the RV sits on and landscaping around it.

This is where I got another gruesome shock.

This kit, for kids 14 and up, includes a couple of headless torsos!

Yep, propped up there in the sand just outside the door and right next to a casually lounging drug barron.

I suspect that this means something to those who stuck with the show, but for me it’s just creepy!

Anyway, a little more lighting and the kit is finished.

But you didn't really think I would stop there did you?!

In order to redeem my standing in the community - Oh wait, I never did have any standing in the community. OK - in order to make myself feel better, I now have to come up with

some cop-stuff so I can stage a raid on the lab.

Maybe some SWAT people since drug lords, headless people, and remote desert seems like a little much for one cop?

And, because I apparently can't help myself, I'll need to build a desert scene to showcase it all.

And maybe add a few - - -

Oh man!  - - I might need therapy.

New Place, New Toy

I don't usually pay much attention to COE facilities because they focus more on the water and not much on the trails. And the trails are my main focus.

This, passing up COE parks, was especially true when I was in one or another of the various vans and would have to pretty much break camp in order to drive to a distant trailhead.

Which explains why, even though I have driven right past it many dozens of times over the past 40 years on my way to and from family in Michigan, other than briefly dropping into the headquarters just after my 62nd birthday, ten years ago now!, to buy my $10 lifetime geezer pass, I have never stopped at Rend Lake COE Recreation area.

Untill, that is, I was heading back from the family reunion this year after noticing that the bike/hike trail they were putting in around much of the lake is now 80% complete. Still missing a couple of connectors to tie the whole thing together but the southern section of the trail, about 11 miles, is ready to go!

Jumping on my Reserve America account I discovered that they have loads of campsites spread over a half-dozen or so campgrounds wrapped around that end, the southern end, of the lake and was surprized at how many sites were available with only two day's notice.

I haven't taken the time yet to figure out why some electric sites (most, if not all seem to be 30/50 amp sites) are $24 a night while others, seemingly with the same amenities, are $18 a night. I just shrugged it off and snagged one of the $18 sites in the South Marcum unit for two nights. With my geezer pass I paid $9 per night.

I slow-played my way down from Michigan because at this campground check-in isn't untill 1700 (checkout is 1600), but I got hung up in a couple serious storms on the way and didn't get there untill a little after 1800. Not that it made any difference since apparently the little guard shack at the South Marcum campground is closed by 1700(?!).

So I just drove in, found my campsite, and claimed it with no post or vehicle tags, figuring I'd sort things out in the morning, but but when I tried I discovered the shack isn't open untill 1300, so that didn't happen either!

Nice enough paved campground with large, uncrowded sites, private-room style toilet/shower rooms, and water spigots scattered around, though the noise from the freeway to the east was noticable. It might not be so noticeable from the Sandusky Creek campgrounds on the west side of the lake, but verifying that will have to wait untill nect time.

I'm not a fan of lakeside campsites because of the potencial for incessant boat noise, but though site 118 looks like a lakeside site, the satellite view showed a thick band of growth between the site and the lake so it was fine.

But anyway - before continuing on at Rend Lake let's jump over to the new toy part of this post.

Towards the end of July, just in time for the family reunion in early August, I picked up this nifty little Thumb Action Camera for less than $80.

And it comes with all this stuff too!

Starting top-left going clockwise:

• A shirt-pocket clip the camera snaps into
• A couple of stick-on mounts and the camera-mount plate that clips into them. (Unfortunately my bike helmet doesn't have a flat spot large enough to stick one of the mounts onto it.)
• A gimble-style mount
• A magnetic pendant for hanging around your neck under your shirt and sticking the camera on the outside.
• A nifty little USB stick SD and micro SD card reader (the camera uses a micro SD card) that will plug into a USB A or USB C connector. Important because the SD card reader on my 16 year old laptop has long since given up the ghost.
• A frame to wrap around the camera when using some of the mounting options
• And in the center, a water-proof case for the divers among us.

Not shown in the previous photo because it's already on my bike, the bundle also includes a handle-bar mounting system.

The knobs on it are a bit bulky, but that makes them easy to operate when adjusting the mount, although if they were a little shorter they wouldn't seem quite so vulnerable to getting knocked around.

The card reader (left, with a micro-card in it) that comes with the camera is much handier to haul around than the one I keep in the glove box of the Ranger for reading the card in my dash-cam and copying files from it to my phone,

and I have this handy little USB C to C extender cable 

which lets me plug the new card reader into my phone without having to remove the phone's protective Pelican case first.

Like most everything else these days, there's an app for that.

This one lets you adjust the settings of the camera

as well as access and manipulate (delete, move, copy) the files wirelessly.

The way I have the camera configured it only has about a 2 hour battery life, but on the up-side it will continue to record while charging. Since I already carry a battery-pack for keeping my phone, which is my GPS tracker and mapping tool, topped up when hiking or biking all day, the short battery life of the camera is not really an issue for me.

So how well does the camera function in real life?

It's no Go-Pro, but concidering it's size and sub-$80 price, it works pretty damn well!

This is 3 minutes of biking the overly civilized hike/bike trail at the campground where we hold the family reunion.

In addition to the small kiosks with kid-yoga and naturalist info spaced out along this trail (new this year)

there are also

a whole bunch of

these little tchotchkes

hidden in the trees waiting for the observant to spot them.

Technically e-bikes are limited to class 1 on this park's trails and roads (no throttle, peddle assist only), which is how I have mine configured, but I suspect nobody bothers with checking unless you're doing something stupid because I saw several people tooling around on class 2 or 3 bikes using only the throttle.

Here's 3 minutes of biking the uber-civilized  Rend Lake hike/bike trail. Apparently, in addition to boots, street shoes, flipflops, and roller skates, all classes of e-bike are allowed here, as well as lowspeed scooters, hoverboards, and motorized mobility devices. (Hense the uber-civilization of the trail.)

I killed off much of my one day layover here leisurely covering (I'm focusing on slowing down right now, but that's a different post) about 17 miles, out and back, on this trail.

A nice, pleasant day with the trail largely to myself, though more rigs started showing up in the campground that evening (Thursday) so it's probably a good thing I left Friday morning, timing my arrival at the Henderson Texas Walmart for just after sunset (It's hot everywhere in mid August so trying to settle down anywhere, let alone in the middle of a paved Texas parking-lot, while the sun's still up is just not good planning!).

To wrap up the camera assesment, and this post

here's 3 minutes of hiking the decidedly uncivilized trails on our property. You know, the ones that get minimal maintenance because they are mine for me alone (The Wife does not venture beyond the driveway!) and we take a dim, perhaps draconian, view of trespassers here in Texas so don't worry much about them getting hurt.

For this hike I had the magnetic pendant under my shirt and the camera stuck to it from the outside. Obviously more wobbly than when mounted on the bike, and it could have stood a little more downward view, but I think it worked reasonable well.

At Last! DirecTv Direct To The Trash

Neither broadcast TV nor traditional forms of highspeed internet reach out here where we live, and that's not going to change anytime soon. Just not enough population density to make it commercially viable.

15 - 20 years ago our only options were satellites for both TV for critical entertainment* and limited-bandwidth internet for equally critical connectivity. Two seperate things back then.

*For us the TV, or more accurately, screen-based escapism, is a critical mental health tool for winding our brains down at the end of the day.

Some time back I released this post about how we eventually dumped our satellite internet because it was no longer critical to our connectivity and they priced themselves out of our value-for-cost tolerance.

You might think that in this day and age not having an actual internet service at home would be a bit of an inconvenience. Well I released that post in June of 2025 after taking a time-out from social media while dealing with cancer, but I actually wrote it 2.5 years before that.

So that means we've done without a traditional internet connection for some 3.5 years now, relying solely on cell-data, and in The Wife’s case, since she has zombie-fingers which makes using the phone's touch-screen difficult, mobil hotspot over cell in conjuction with her laptop, for a connection to the outside world. All services that were already included with our cell plan, (just under $100 for two unlimited lines) and it has been no hardship at all.

Yes, the cell signal here on the part of the property where we live is not the greatest, about -115 to -110dB at 4G on the serving cell and no usable neighbor cell, and we have to use a cell booster to stay connected when inside the living quarters which are tucked into a corner of an all metal building. (our booster is too old to support 5G and boosters are expensive! So we haven't upgraded). Even with the booster, once in a while the signal isn't strong enough for a data connection for short periods.

When we do have data-strength signal inside, which is probably around 95% of the time, download speeds hover around 13Mb and upload at 1Mb.

Sounds pretty marginal in this day and age, but actually that's comparable to the speeds (real, not advertised) we got from our satellite internet anyway, when we weren’t bit-blocked by clouds that is.

And seriously, what do we need faster for? We're not runnimg a home business relying on connectivity speed for our financial survival, we're retired so there's nobody judging our digital productivity, we don't 'game', multiplayer or otherwise, so aren't trying to slam the bandwidth with fantasy pixels, or doing any of those other things that many people have been brainwashed into thinking they need higher speeds for.

We do do all our banking, bill paying, social media, research, browsing, shopping, video conferencing (for medical appointments), and streaming shows and movies just fine over our cell connection thank you very much!

And streaming brings us to the subject of this particular post.

Evening TV together has always been our winding down time. It’s how we give our brains a chance to re-center before trying to sleep. And our only options for viewing back when we first moved out here was DirecTv over satellite, or Netfix DVD. (Remember, even with the satellite internet connection we had limited total data allowance and couldn't stream more than one or two shows per month without having to buy more, rather expensive, bits. Besides, Netfix streaming didn't yet exist when we first settled here.)

We used that combination of the satellite TV and Netflix for many years. 

Since it was a 34 mile round trip to collect our mail (See here for when the mail delivery situation finally changed in late 2022.) we would pick up mail once a week, including the 3 netflix DVD's our 20 some dollar subscription allowed, usually on a Friday, then burn through the DVD's over the weekend so we could get them back in the mail (a drop box is only a 10 mile round trip away) in time for the next batch to reach us before the following weekend. And then watch stuff off DirecTv in between.

Initially this worked quite well. The turn-around time from Netflix was impressive and reliable, but towards the end of our relationship with Netflix the service level of both them and the USPS had degraded to the point where we were lucky to get 3 rounds of DVDs in our hands in a month, and only 2 wasn't unusual.

So a while back, before they stopped the service altogether, we severed our frustrating relationship with Netflix. Besides, by then we had burned through their dwindling supply of good stuff and the remaining choices were either re-runs or crap.

Now we were making do with DirecTv alone.

Not that that was much better.

For a long time now The Wife and I have generally found the offerings on American TV, network as well as so-called cable-stations, just too pedantic, purile, violent, dooms-dayish, psychologically punishing, or farcicaly fantacy-ish for us.

When we kick back in the evening to watch a show we want something conducive to - well, kicking back. Not something that's going to leave us bored, disgusted, discouraged (by the general state of mental decent into mediocrity),  or, both of us being on the spectrum and sensitive to situational and sensory stimulation, leaping out of our chairs with our minds rattled and bodies flooded with stress hormones.

What ever happened to the likes of Columbo and Murder She Wrote?

Anyway, by then we had enough cell connectivity here on the property (When we first moved here we could get a usable signal from an antenna on top of a water tower about 5 miles north of us, but only from the top of the east ridge, not down by the barn. Eventually a new tower was installed about 4 miles to the east and that signal is usually stong enough to reach down into the valley where our buildings are.) that we started experimenting with the Prime Video that comes with our Amazon prime subscription. (We earn more in discounts during the 15 or so annual trips we make to Whole Foods than the subscription costs, and that's before factoring in the 'free' shipping - and we do a lot of shipping with Amazon!)

Turns out streaming Prime over cell works pretty damn well! Open the Prime Video app on either one of our phones, select something to watch, and cast the phone's screen to the smart TV, which in our case, since we have no internet to actually plug into the TV and make it smart, is actually just a monitor for the phones and the DirecTv box.

The only drawback being the limited offerings. Turns out Prime Video isn't (at least wasn't.  It's  gotten better lately and currently accounts for almost 30% of what we watch) that much different than any other US based studio and for us, the pickins were slim. So, managed from one place through our Amazon account with simple click-to-add or cancel, we added subscriptions to Britbox and Acorn, all watched through the Prime app, which gave us access to shows from other countries which seem to have viewing, intelectual, and philosophical standards more in line with our preferences.

Back a few dwcades ago when I first started watching telenovelas for Spanish practice (with Spanish captioning on) I would sometimes forget to turn the captions off and now we have been watching everything with captions on for years. So moving on to shows in other languages was pretty seamless for us since virtually everything has English captioning available. (We've tried one or two shows that have been dubbed into English but prefer the characters talking in their own voices and language while we read the captions instead.)

After a while you start to get an ear for languages. Because they are related I can often follow bits of Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and even some French, and the Germanic/Nordic languages (Belgian is a mix of French and Germanic) are all related too with a similar sound and cadence.

Except for Finish. You would, I did anyway, expect Finish to be related to the Nordic languages but we recently started watching the Finish series Sunset Grove, and the language is completely different, tracing its roots back to the Uralic family of languages originating in Siberia some 4500 years ago. Which, BTW, even though you might think so, Rusian is not decended from a Uralic language but rather has Proto-Slavic origins. Go figure!

Anyway, all this streaming stuff had us taking a hard look at the value we were getting out of our quite expensive DirecTV subscription.

So we kinda eased into an experiment by adding subscriptions for Paramount+, through our Amazon account, and Hulu*, which is only available as a stand-alone subscription, to see how much we could wean ourselves off of DirecTv. Then, for shows we could still only get off of DirecTv, we researched and spreadsheeted other potential sources, many of which were surprisingly affordable.

*Side-bar. Hulu uses some sort of video encryption that is not compatable with casting to the smart TV. The only way to get Hulu from phone to TV is though a direct connection with a USB C to HDMI cable. (For some reason, if you tell the TV that it's a PC hooked to that port rather than a phone, you get a brighter, clearer image.) Only our identical Galaxy 32 phones don't output video on the USB C port, so we now own one Galaxy 32 and one Galaxy 25, which does output video on the USB C port. Seems counter intuitive that a device with a lower model number would have more features, but hey - they don't consult with me about shit like this.

The resulting spreadsheet confirmed what we suspected. In this day and age traditional cable/satellite TV subscritions are way over priced for the value they deliver! At least for us. Even adding a lot of various streaming subscriptions to make up the difference (I'll list what we currently have later.) we could still save over $2000 a year by getting rid of DirecTv! And without giving anything up along the way.

Of course DirecTv thinks they're exempt from any of the various "click-to-cancel" laws, so you actually have to call and talk to a live person to cancel their service. Not something either one of us are all that comfortable with. On top of that, this live person is actually a "customer retention specialist" that keeps flashing more and more "tempting" deals at you. (Why the fuck do you think I would want 6 free months of HBO?! All 10 chanels are crap, most of it old stuff either already seen or not interested in, and they keep repeating that same drivel over and over again.) And the fact that these "deals" aren't offered to loyal customers, only disatisfied ones on their way out, pisses me off even more!

With a sweaty ear, and getting hoarse from repeating 'not interested' over and over again, we finally made it to the end of the script, you know, the part where they grudgingly give in while make various threats about what will happen if we don't return the outdated equipment we've paid for many times over by the deadline they've given us.  On top of that, in a move that confounds all logic for a service industry, we were warned we wouldn't be allowed to resume service for 6 months. (BTW, the "We want you back" emails started up the week after we terminated the service - the lying bastards.)

Oddly enough, they only wanted us to return the three ancient, dumb-repeater boxes, one out in the main barn for when The Wife was using the stationary bike, one in her barn for when she was working on something out there, and one for Elmer's trailer when it was parked on the pad beside the barn. For some reason they didn't want this much newer, intelligent receiver/DVR box back. Now what the hell are we supposed to do with that?!

That all happened five months or so ago now and we have been happy with the decision, so I guess the two antennae on the roof are some sort of historical yard-art now, because I sure as hell am not climbing up there to take them down!

We have been happy with our current selection of subscriptions but are spreadsheeting our veiwing habits so we can spot any that are underutilized and can drop them. With Amazon Prime's click-to-subscribe/cancel it's easy to add/remove most of our subscriptions on the fly.

In a concession to the sometimes marginal cell signal, in order to avoid the occasional ten minute or so interuption while the cell tower resets, or whatever it's doing, we've learned to keep a handfull of fresh episodes of our current shows downloaded on our phones.

In addition to all that traditional veiwing stuff, when working on crafts in the living quarters The Wife likes to have something going on the TV. Not neccessarily to watch, but as a sudo-companion. With DirecTv she would pick one of the commercial-free channels, such as TCM and have it running with the sound muted.

To replace that feature we have loaded a couple thousand, and counting, personal and historical photos onto a stick which plugs into the TV's USB port and loops as a slideshow.

We also stumbled across window-swap.com, which is pretty cool. People upload 10 minute videos shot out their windows, both stationary and mobile, (We've traveled down a remote highway in Patagonia, navigated the congested streets of an English costal town, and careened on motorcycle down a mountain road, sometimes paved, sometimes not, in Costa Rica.) which then play slideshow-style, and The Wife has spent hours traveling all over the world peeking out people's windows.

Which brings us back to our current subscription list (All commercial free versions). Which, in decending order of cost, goes a little like this:

Hulu: At $19 our most expensive subscription and one we are keeping a close eye on, but where else are you going to get Only Murders In The Building, and HIP, the original French version of the show some American network has copied and called High Potencial? (High Potencial, just like PBS Masterpiece's show Patience, a study of a moderately autistic person navigating through the neuro-typical world, is a poorly done, watered down copy of the French original Astrid.)

Halmark+/Discovery+: This is a bundled subscription. We were after Discovery but do also enjoy some of Halmark's cozy-murder-mysteries so went ahead and grabbed the bundle

Paramount+: for some of the networky shows we watch

Prime Video: Although, factoring in the Whole Foods discounts and free shipping, this one is essencially free for us.

Britbox:

Acorn:

PBS Masterpiece: Not only do we get the movies/series you would see on your local PBS station, like Bookish and Inspector Ellis, but we also have access to the likes of, German, Italian, and French language shows, respectively Partners in Crime, Inspector Riccardo, and Panda, that have never aired here in the States.

Mhz: for loads of Nordic and Germanic shows like the original Walander (Swedish), Homicide Hills (German), and the somewhat dated but still fun Inspector Rex (Austrian).

PBS Passport: For the This Old House/Ask This Old House franchise, America Outdoors, and, among many others, the full catalog of Craft in America. Plus we can watch live-streams of all the scheduled shows on the local PBS station of our choice. (The Wife is pissed that growing up she didn't have access to all the educational opportunities of the PBS kids shows of today.  Somehow, compared to them, the Roadrunner just doesn't stack up as usefully educational!)

All but Hulu and PBS Passport are managed directly from our Amazon account.

Anyway, DirecTv is out, we are saving a bunch of money, and have access to way more than we could ever watch. Which is nice.

For instance, last night we watched the first episode of the Italian, Don Mateo, in part because it's billed as 'warm humor and clever mysteries'

and in part because Terence Hill (remember the My Name is Nobody spaghetti-westerns?) plays the main character. It was nice enough, but didn't really grab us so we took it out of our to-watch list because there's plenty of other choices out there.

Boy it's nice to get that DirecTv monkey off our backs!

We Lost Mom & Dad!

You know how it's pretty easy to find someone in a 137 acre cemetary, especially when you stood right there and put them into the ground?

Yeah, well, apparently we didn't get that memo - - -

After this year's family reunion campout I parked up in The Sister's driveway for a few days, where I was kicked back minding my own business when somebody - I don't remember now which one of us it was - piped up with the great(?) idea of going to visit

The Matter & Patter's grave since it's been two years since we were last there for a one-sided chin-wag.

So we loaded one of the cars with a few essentials, some garden tools, and ourselves, and headed off like we knew what we were doing - straight into rush-hour traffic! (who's running this cluster-fudge?)

After carving through the traffic like gladiators on a mission we got to the grandly named Oakland Hills Memorial Gardens, but here's where things went a little Monty Pythonish.

We collectively knew knew we needed to park alonside one of the tracks at the base of a hill, climb just over the crest of said hill, and find Mom & Dad on the other side.

We cruised on in, found the hill, clamored out of our chariot, grabbed an array of landscaping weaponry, and confidently set off uphill like a merry band of - well I don't know which band it was, but it was a band.

We crested the hill with purpose, paused when that purpose abandoned us as we looked around and said 'this doesn't look right', turned around, and headed back downhill. Only slightly deflated, we loaded everything, including ourselves, back into the car to try again.

OK, just so you know, this place is divided into 28 distinct " memorial gardens" and everyone of those is on top of a hill!

By the time we went up our third hill it was less of noble knights with implements held high picking their way gently around the reposing residents, and more of weary pilgrams dragging their goods behind and not carring who's head they stepped on.

Defeated again, we clumped back down like three of the 7 dwarves at the end of a long day in the mines. I won't say who was which, but Grumpy was involved and Happy - well, wasn't.

Though I suspect Mom was having a right old time watching us fumble around.

To this point one of us, again not naming names, (it might have been me - I mean Doppey) had been insisting the parental units were on the east side of the property on an east-facing slope looking down on the remains of an old service road.

Fed up with this nonsense one of The Sisters said bullshit, took charge, and lead us off in the other direction where we found our AWOL family members on the first try.

This time on the west side of the central lake, on the east slope of a hill looking down on the remains of an old service road where, as boys, Dad and our uncle - at the time a boy that lived a few houses down the lakeshore from Dad's - rode horses on summer afternoons. 

We did a little cleanup, some contemplating, and shared a few reminisces,

then decided, with or without the parents' permision, that after all that farting around we had each earned a Culver's vanilla, with raspberries and chocolate syrup, sundae before heading back to the house and going through a few of Mom’s old photo albums.