Hello muddah. Hello Faddah. Here I am at Camp Grenada

I seriously need a mental exam

    While you folks are all snug in your homes, awaiting a good night's sleep, I am going to be sleeping outside, in a tent, on the ground, with a bunch of guys who fart a lot.
     Yes, I am going camping.  Yes, it is going to be 26 tonight for a low, but hey, it's a guy weekend!
     I have packed:  extra socks, sweatshirts (2), stocking hat, gloves, long underwear, tent, poles, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, snuggle blanket, 6 pairs of underwear, (my philosophy of a traveler can never have enough underwear holds true even when camping) small grill, charcoal, two chairs, cup, water, paper plates, toilet paper, (another fear....the johns will be out) knife, paper towels, double stuffed Oreos, hot chocolate mix, spoons, knives........the list goes on.
     Funny thing about the chairs and most of the other stuff.  There are four of us going.  Or five, not really sure.  Either everybody brings two chairs or no one brings any.  Since I already have my two out, we will end up with 10 chairs tomorrow night.  Same with paper plates.  One person is supposed to bring them, but four of us will bring some in case the one person forgot.
     One year we got there and realized no one had brought matches.  No one. Now everyone does.
     We meet at The Rafters on 20 just west of Freeport.  We meet at 12.  Every time, we meet at 12.  I was 40 minutes late last year and I was still the first one there.
     We will get to park, find a spot, set up our tents, take a hike, realize it is getting dark really early, have supper, talk, laugh, visit, and at some point go to bed.
     Or a rough equivalent to bed.
     And since I have been blessed with a prostate that doesn't like to hold it for longer than six hours, I will be up in the middle of the night, and taking a hike to the washroom.  (I use this term loosely.   With few campers, and lots of trees, it is not always a long walk.  Oh don't look at me like that, where do you think the deer and coyote pee?)
     Then I get the giggles.
     I don't mean to, it just happens.
     I unzip my sleeping bag, unzip my snuggle sack, unzip the tent, unzip the rain fly, come back in, zip the rain fly, zip the tent, then I can never find the snuggle sack zipper or the sleeping bag zipper.  Sometimes I can't even find the sleeping bag.
     And I start to laugh.  Sometimes I am laughing so hard my body shakes and my sides hurt.
     I try to hold it in, but it sneaks out.  I know I am waking people up, but I really can't help it.
     After about five minutes I will calm down.
     And just as everyone has dozed back off, I will start up again.
     Hopefully Sunday morning dawns sunny so we can break camp down in the warmth of the sun on a mid 20s morning.
     But even if it doesn't, it will be a good weekend.

I want Candy!

I eat when I get bored or frustrated

     Halloween this year is not good.
     I bought Julia a huge bag of Nestle candy....Baby Ruth, Crunch, Butterfingers.....you get the idea.
     I thought I packed it when we went to visit her, but I didn't.  (It turns out my accusation that the candy had been stolen by security people was  uncalled for.)
     So we used it for Halloween.
     This is a two pound bag.  We had six (6)  kids. Six!!
     Here's were my math skills suck.  Last year we had none, but this year we had six.  So that is an increase of what percentage?  I thought "just use the  fact that we had six this year and that becomes a 600 percent increase."  (I thought the quotation marks would give clearer meaning to my thinking this.)
     But how can it?  What is a 100 percent increase over 0?  Don't you multiply to get the answer?  And if you have 0, then whatever you multiply will be 0 because of the zero power of multiplication.
     (I lost a bet with Mr. Torres, my eighth grade teacher.  He was a White Sox fan.  I am a Cub fan.  He bet me that if you took the number of runs the Sox scored game by game and added them, it would be more than the number of runs the Cubs scored game by game if multiplied.  I was so eager to beat the Sox at something, I said it was a bet.  He asked me if the Cubs had been shut out yet, and I realized my mistake.  Lesson learned.)
     The 6 may be inflated....two were special visitors and they got special candy.  Plus some from the bowl.
     Anyway, I have candy left.  And I am bored.  When I get bored, I nibble.  When I nibble, I get upset with myself for my lack of self control.  When I get upset, I nibble.
     It is a viscous circle.  By the time Sunday night rolls around, I will have gained six pounds and the bowl will be empty.
     And I am also a little frustrated....but I'll save that story.  Let's just say Jackie and I may control the future of television as you know it.

I heard the news today, oh boy

I think the news is driving me batty

     I should rephrase that.  Too much news is driving me batty.
     It's not that I am anti news, but sometimes I get confused.
     A Yahoo news headline recently said:  New York City Police shoot dead man.
     I wondered, why would you shoot a dead man?  It reminded me a National Inquirer article about a man was shot six times and lived, as the paper reported.  Then it said the seventh shot killed him.
     I miss the days when we got important news.  Vital news.
     Now so much of it is just, well, titillating.  (I have never used that word in a sentence!)
      Everyday there is a story of a high school teacher accused of having sex with a high school, or junior high, student.  Last week a substitute was charged after she had sex with a 17 year old boy during the pep assembly!  First day on the job, and she blew it!  (No pun intended.)
     Today there was the story of a bus driver in New York who was on his way to a parochial school to drop off his last student when he stopped the bus and masturbated!  The student could see the guy in the bus's rear view mirror and reported the incident to staff at his school.
     And then there is the case of the missing Colorado man, who disappeared during half time of a recent Broncos game.
     His stepson went to the bathroom, and when he came back, the guy had vanished.
     Turns out, he decided he had enough of football and walked home.  Police found him 110 miles away, heading in the wrong direction.  He doesn't appear to be ill or unbalanced, but he walked 110 miles in four days!  That is not normal behavior!  (He may have gotten some rides...he also said he hitch hiked.)
       So is news so dominant in our lives that we crave more and more, even thought the stories get weirder and weirder?  (And I say our, because if people were not reading them, Yahoo would not be running them.)
       Or are we just getting weirder and weirder?
       I mean, I may get up and go into the next room if I don't want to watch a TV show.  But that's not the same as wandering 110 miles and not telling anybody where you are, or where you are going.
     Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I spend too much time reading the news.
     I do skip anything that deals with a Kardashian, and usually most articles dealing with movie stars.
     But I am fascinated by the lava in Hawaii, the ongoing water shortage in California, and weather.  I do follow what's happening in Syria, although I don't like to because it truthfully scares the beejeebees out of me.
     Lately I have stopped reading anything about elections......I have reached my fill of garbage.
     Gotta cut this off now...there is a family in Rockford Michigan with 12 children....and they are expecting.
     Now, that's news.

something tells me it's all happenin' at the zoo

I went to Lincoln Park Zoo today

     Lincoln Park is free.  No admission.  Parking is expensive, but you can find free spaces on the street.
     Which is what we did.
     Chicago John went with.  The two of us went to the zoo because I wanted to see the new macaque monkey exhibit space .... but I'll get back to that.
     I used to go to LPZ (I get tired of typing Lincoln Park Zoo) when I was a kid.  I have fond memories of the place.
     There used to be a miniature train that ran around the zoo and into the park.  Brookfield also had one, and both are gone. (The BZ one is at a place in LaPorte, Indiana, which is on my list of places to go next year.)
     I was talking to a volunteer at LPZ.  She was telling us about the cats, their breeds and numbers, that are in the zoo.  I asked her if the lost children's area was still in the lion house.... but she said no, and looked at me like I was nuts.
     When I was a kid, there was a huge sign in front of the lion house that said "lost children here."  I do believe my father, or brothers, told me if I got lost at the zoo to go there and if I wasn't claimed by 4 p.m. they would feed me to the lions.
     I believed them.
     It has been 30 years since we took niece Tracy and my girls there.   Things have changed.
     Lots of trees and native plantings.
     There is a new big ape house, which opened in 1992.  There is also a new small ape house.  The old one, which was new last time I went, seems to be offices now.
     No elephants.  If you want to see elephants, go to Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, or Coal City.... because the local zoos don't have any.  My understanding is, the group that evaluates zoos and sets standards has increased the space requirements for elephants.  Neither local zoo has the right amount of space, but BZ plans to bring them back someday.
     Didn't see polar bears or giraffes....I think their areas were closed for some expansion of displays.
     The macaque monkey area is new.  It is a $13 million plus exhibit that tries to mimic the monkeys' natural environment.  These are the snow monkeys, famous in Japan and were frequently shown during the last Olympics there.
     So I took the train, got to the zoo and headed for the display that is set to open in October.
     It's not done.
     They are still working on it.
     I know I had read a story about the display opening Oct. 4..... but evidently I did not read about the monkeys, but about the Lionel train that meanders through parts of the zoo.
     Unlike the one of my childhood, this runs on natural gas and does not have tracks.  Hard for me to even call it a train.
     And the zoo is a lot smaller than I remember.  Funny how time does that to a person.
     I will go back when the exhibit opens, and maybe hang around the Chicago History Museum for a couple of hours.
     After all, life isn't getting longer and there are a lot of things I want to do and see!!

wrong weekend, again

I am going camping with my buds

     A bunch of guys I grew up with, plus a couple of people I recently met....like within the past 5 years..head out into the woods for a weekend of fellowship and fun.
     We like going in early November.  The bugs are gone.  The people are gone.  The nights are crisp and great for sleeping.
     In all the years we have gone, I only remember one that got rained out.  I may have been at fault.  When Dave and the kids showed up at my house, I said, optimistically, "The rain will pass by the time we reach Savannah."  After we sat in the car watching pouring rain in Savannah with two kids and three slightly grouchy adults for what seemed hours, we gave in and went home.
     One time we were at the Mississippi Palisades and it was pretty cold.  I remember waking up and thinking leaves were hitting the tent top.  It was snow.  While we were OK, all our water was frozen.
    We stopped going to the Palisades when we goofed and picked a bow hunting weekend.  We were warned not to stray too far from the campsite and to wear orange.
     In subsequent years, we ended up at Apple River Canyon.  It's a beautiful park with several nice hiking trails.  We seemed to find large groups of Boy Scouts camping next to us on our last two trips.
     So we moved to Lake Le Aqua Na.
     In November some of the camping grounds are closed....go figure.
     We always look for one site that is a little secluded, not near other campers.  I snore.
     We bring our own wood, pay our fees, clean up the camping site when we leave in the morning.
     We do have some nature based products that we bring along to ward off the cold.  Some of these products are made from grapes, some from rye grasses.  We listen to Simon and Garfunkel, or Coyote Oldham,  watch the stars and tell stories.
     Some of the stories are true.  Many of them have been told before, but have grown in scope with each passing year.
     We remember those high school days, when we had no worries.
     We remember the difficult times in life, when life itself was a challenge.
     We talk about the Cubs.  The Bears.  Sometimes the other sports, but mainly football and baseball.
     It's going to be cold as hell this weekend.  27 for a low Saturday night.
     There is a time change.  So when we go to bed at midnight, half frozen and maybe slurring words due to the cold, we will really be going to bed at 11.
     To me, it means an extra hour of freezing my butt off in a tent.
     The really hard part is getting out of the bag in the morning.  I have to get dressed, take down the tent, throw (literally, it's usually damp from the dew) the tent, rain fly, tarp, sleeping bag, extra clothes, empty bottles, and everything else I can find into the car, which is running with the heat on high, within 5 minutes or literally freeze solid. OK, not literally.
     At breakfast at the restaurant in Lena, we will all complain about how cold it was, talk about going earlier next year, talk about not going at all next year because at age 66 it's hard to sleep on the ground, pay our bill and part.
     And secretly, we will all be looking forward to next year.

this is a first

I can't think of anything to tell tonight

I may have hit the wall, in the vernacular of marathon runners.
I have posted nearly every single day.  I have been funny, insightful, sad, thoughtful, boring...... but tonight I am empty.
I have told you just about everything about me, from shaking hands with a real president to my first ever stage appearance.
But tonight, I guess I am too tired and headachy to think.
That's it.

why didn't I think of that?

Sometimes I don't plan ahead

     I ordered the tin ceiling.  Now all I have to do is put it up.
     This is not as easy as it seems.
     First off, I have to decide on plywood or firring strips.  Firring strips are cheaper and easier.  Plywood would make it easier to install the panels, which are 2 x 2.
     First decision, plywood.
     Now, I have to fasten the tin panels to the ceiling.  If I use round headed screws, will they show and be a distraction to the pattern?  Will flat headed screws work better for the overall look?  Should I just get black screws so they stand out and become obvious to their presence?  Will trim screws work, with their tiny heads and custom colors?
     I don't want to nail the panels because the soffit covers water and gas pipes.  I thought, in my little mind, that if someone ever needed to get to those pipes, unscrewing stuff would be easier than unnailing.  If you can unnail.
     Emily, who has done more reading on this than I have, said wood trim is not recommended, because the wood will not set evenly on the tin tiles.  I hadn't thought of that.  Not sure what I will do in that case.
     Bob, Jackie's brother, asked what I was doing on the facing part of the soffit.  Hadn't thought too much of that either.  Originally thought I would get a 1 x 12 piece of pine and paint it red.  No reason why, except to add some color.  Maybe I could stain it to match the oak trim.  Maybe I can just paint what is there and not spend money on it.
     And all of those questions are part of my problem:  I get an idea and proceed, not thinking it through to the end.  Maybe it's ADD, maybe it's just optimism that all will work out.
     I can get the big picture.  I just can't get the focus to get there.  I don't want to be negative, but that's how my personality developed.  (If you are counting, that is four photo references in two sentences.)
     The tin tiles should arrive this week....which means I am going to work on this eventually.
     I wonder:  How many people does it take to put up my ceiling?  Time will tell.
     Meanwhile, feel free to volunteer.  You could hold tiles, cut plywood, or make cream puffs.  In any case, help would be appreciated.