Category: pictures

Last week we went to

and pretty much the first thing we did was

Once The Mermaids were properly outfitted they were introduced to

and many of her friends.

By the third day the shine had worn off just a little bit and we settled into what you might call

As you can see, it wasn’t all bad, the weather was warm and other than a touch of fever and a sore throat for a couple of days the

and the

The girls were positively

at almost every turn. You’d have thought they’d

They weren’t crazy though, they were simply excited. Everything was as it should be really and

showed us a pretty darn good time.

Why? Because we love you.

I am all but caught up with the goings on around here.
The last big event worth my time at a computer is our annual camping trip to Dash Point.

Last year you may remember as The Year Of The Spider. If that is so then this year is The Year Of The Hammock.

I won this hammock some years ago at a gift exchange and The Mommy found it this year while packing. Perfect.
Except for one little thing – our site didn’t have great anchor points. So I did the best I could and wound up with a slightly unstable, taffy-wrapper.
It was good for playing in but not great for sleeping in.

LaGrande Mermaid proved that on the first night when I acquiesced to her demands. Along about o’dark thirty I was awakened by a little mermaid propped up in a sitting position on the cold hard reality called ground.

Daddy!?
Wha…huuu..Are you okay?
Yeah.
[sigh] You fell out of the hammock allright.
No I didn’t.
Oh, you got out then? Why’d you do that?
I didn’t…
What? Well then why are you on the ground?
I’m not.
Mermaid, Look…[pointing at the empty hammock]…are you still in it?
Yeah.
What? Look at it.
[long look at the the empty hammock and now gesticulating with her hands]
Daddy, this might sound funny but…I didn’t get out.
Honey, you are sitting on the ground.
No I’m not look!

And she proceeded to flop down onto the “hammock” of rocks and stickery bushes underneath the real hammock.
When I told her to get up her voice and line of reasoning changed gears suddenly into “I’m freezing” and more common-sensical complaints of a night.
Nowwww, she’s with me.

I put her in the tent and only two other people fell out of that hammock the rest of the weekend – none while sleeping. The Mommy never got in it.

We enjoyed one of the smokier fires on record…all weekend…and suffered only a small smattering of mosquitos to prove it.

The t-shirt I am wearing tonight, two weeks later, has been through the wash twice and continues to repel even the hardiest bugs..

It wasn’t all fun and games – there was sunscreen to put on, hair to comb, and treats upon cookies upon candies to NEEEEEEEEEDD…and deny.

But in the scheme of things, the good times far outweighed the nasty looks.

With the weather so good, warm, and sunny, we were on the beach often making sandcastles, sculpturing mermaid tails and Ursula tentacles, throwing Mermaids “up high”…

…and having seaweed fights. In the following sequence you can see the result of my dare

You can’t get me with that seaweed…I dare you.

I successfully avoided the splatter for many minutes. I REALLY didn’t want to get that nasty slimy stuff on me.
Unfortunately my memory and attention span is short. LaGrande’s – not so much.
The Mommy captured the sequence on film.

I have also recently made a similar bet.
I bet LaGrande Mermaid that she would be unable to startle me – I confessed that these many years of “startles” were contrived for her benefit and that I have only been successfully startled a handful of times in my adult life.
She has my word that if she is successful I will own up to it, and tell the story, on this blog. The gauntlet has been tossed.

Lucky for me, I don’t really have to remember that she’s gunning for me – I count on my well-dulled sense of danger to save me. If I were a caveman I would probably have been eaten by a Sabre-toothed tiger I just assumed was Thlog trying to scare me.

Before the batteries on our respective cameras went dead for the remainder of the weekend I adequately captured The Year of the Hammock – dirty feet and all.
LaGrande on one side making fish-faces and TheWeeOne on the other laughing her scales off..

If the major story of the weekend was the hammock, then I got a minor in Raccoon.

One night, late, a raccoon started poking around our site. I shooed him off and went back to sleep. At dawn he found the edge of his territory, and perhaps another raccoon. The resulting sounds, and the headlong escape crashing through the underbrush jump-started my heart. When I popped up here was a medium-sized raccoon barreling across the campsite right at my face (I sleep under the stars). I did the only thing a full grown man threatened by a stark-raving-mad-wild-animal would do.

Didja grin ‘im down?
No.
Didja swat him aside with’a back a yer hand?
No.
Well…whadja do then?

I roared at him like an enraged lion and skeered him off.
He saw the light and knew he was beaten so he veered hard right and made for the tallest tree.

My hackles were still raised when TheMommy quickly unzipped her fortress and poked out.

What the heck was that?!!
Just a raccoon [I said “calmly”]
Really!? Wow. It sounded just like a pig!

The “afterimage” of sound still ringing in my ears proved that my cavernous and tremendous lion-like roar came out more like a squealing…cornered…runt…pig.

No matter: Raccoons don’t know what a lion sounds like.