The Queen

I finally found out why men play chess and most women don’t. Tamara told me that when she’s playing chess, she’s not so concerned about the next move. She’s more worried about how the queen feels standing so close to the bishop, and is she sure that the knight will protect her in her time of need?

Tamara did such a great job planning our menu and preparing our meals for our anniversary camping trip. Pictured are turkey burgers, crook necked squash, zuchinni, onions, eggplant, and carrots.

Ravens

We're no bird experts, but we're pretty sure these huge birds are ravens. The tent doesn't give good perpective, but look at the bird by the chair. They must be almost 2 feet tall. They were very noisy sometimes, so much that I threw a boot at them from the tent one morning, but it was fun to see them trying to scavenge in our camp. They knew from long exposure to humans that leftovers are likely to be in the firepit.

Ladder Ball

When I went on the Fathers and Sons campout this year, one of the guys had brought a game he called Boku Ball or something. Well, I couldn't find on the game on the internet under that name, but I did find Ladder Ball, which is the same game. Wikipedia said that this game goes by many names, but it didn't enumerate them all, so I'm sticking with Ladder Ball.

I thought I would cut all 2 foot lengths and it would turn out just like Brother Hatch's, because his was homemade like mine, and I had measured with my hands and I thought that all of his lengths were 2 feet. Apparently, I didn't look very closely (or think very carefully either) because the game would have turned out 6 feet tall and his were only 3 or 4 feet tall. I ended up testing 18 inch lengths and 14 inch lengths, but I decided to go with 1 foot lengths for verticle bars and 2 foot lenghts for horizontal. It's a good thing I didn't pick longer than a foot too because I thought I had several feet more pipe than I needed, but it turned out to be just barely enough.

Tamara and I had a great time playing our new game.