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Sorry so long with no update. I guess I’ve been taking a sabbatical of sorts.

It’s a shame the whole pinched nerve thing, happened, by the way, because Lake in Wood Family Camping Resort was a lot of fun to visit. Kate said that it reminded her of Kellerman’s, the Catskills resort in Dirty Dancing, except it was more working-class. There were a lot of big Ford F350s with four wheels on the rear axle and extended mirrors, but it wasn’t in the least bit hick-y. These were folks who had an RV as their vacation house, and had rented a pad and hookup for the summer. Lots of wooden signs out front of each campsite (“The Zimmermans, Earl and Marie”; “This is HOG HEAVEN for Marv and Sally”; “If we’re not here, you can find us at Wal-Mart!”) Actually, it was a lot less kitschy than I’m making it out. It was really nice; the boys played softball on the communal field, the girls walked back from the pool saying “oh..my..GOD!” to each other, and the parents and granparents zoomed around on golf carts, often pulling up next to each other for long stretches to hold palaver.

Kate and I were in site A22, which the woman at the Trading Post desk assured us was “…way out there in mountain goat country!” Actually, it was about twenty-five feet away from a couple of big RVs, each with exactly 18 patio lights hung from the awning (18 is the maximum, it says in the rules), and most with flagged walkways, built-up firepits, and screen porches.

The coolest feature about Lake In Wood is that it has “special accomodations” you can rent, including a caboose, a treehouse, a double-decker bus, and a grounded 1950s cabin cruiser (named”the shipwreck.”) If I had camped in the shipwreck as a young child, I would have just about expired from an overdose of coolness. Okay, I admit it, I *still* want to go stay in the shipwreck!

So, what with the self-heating meals, the shipwreck, and the Saturday night “Ho-Down [sic]” at Lake In Wood’s entertainment hall, it was quite an eventful camping trip.

I crossed my eyes, and they stayed that way.

Kate and I went camping last weekend; armed with a four-person Eureka A-frame tent and several self-heating meals (you just pull the string and wait twenty minutes, they are the coolest things EVER), we went to a campground in Lancaster county. This was to be car camping, definitely not hard-core, so we looked in the Woodall’s Tent Camping Guide to find a place. Woodall’s is only good to find RV campsites, unfortunately, but we found a great place called “Lake in Woods Family Camping Resort”, which had a trading post, a lake with paddleboads, one bazillion RV hookups with LP gas, electricity, and a coaxial cable for satellite TV(!) and golf carts darting everywhere.

The camping was a lot of fun, with one big problem. I carried a forty-pound stack of firewood on my shoulder for about three-quarters of a mile, then slept in a funny position with a cold breeze on my neck. Or something. Anyhow, when I woke up, my neck and left arm had these shooting pains that wouldn’t stop, no matter what position I put myself in. It sucked.

It turns out that I damaged the medial nerve that comes out of vertebrae C6. Or something. So I spent three days in a semi-recumbent position chewing Ibuprofen and trying to ignore my arm. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Kate’s family knew a great chiropractor, though, and the company was congenial (I stayed in Philly), and I’m pretty much better, except that if you look at the webcam, you’ll probably notice that I’m slouching waaay down in my chair.

Celery + Gravity = ART

My friend Genevieve IMmed me this link, featuring the work of obsessed fifties illustrator Art Frahm. Frahm’s muse must have been an Austrian, with round glasses and a homburg hat: it commanded him to paint the same scenario over and over again: falling panties, blowing skirts, hatboxes, celery, and an observer in uniform. The commentary is funny as hell, too. The site is put together by newspaper columnist James Lileks. There are many other great sitelets there, too — a disturbing archive of stock dog photos, a careful anthology of cartoon flip-takes. He’s my home-page hero!

PowerPoint? Power Drill!

The Ultimate Water Gun Council of Elders thing is working out AWESOMELY; my mom (“Uncle Nancy”) and friend Dan Check (“The Holy Eucharist”) are the first to weigh in. I’ve also had to fix a problem with the gun; ever since it came back from Yale University, it hasn’t been able to hold pressure over 35PSI. Make up your own funny comment about Yale here. Anyhow, I’m switching tanks, so I now have a pile of watergun parts behind my pod, and I brought my Milwaukee drill to work (I have to drill the handles to accept the cable that works the firing action.) The drill is sitting in an empty pod, charging its big red battery pack. There’s something satisfyingly incongruous about bringing power tools to work at a marketing company. “Gonna build some customer value today, yes sir, you bet! You need a strategy deck? Great, I can build that deck in pine, or I can build that deck in redwood!

I stayed up late tonight creating a “Council of Elders” tool for the Ultimate Water Gun Loan Requests page. Now the Ultimate Water Gun Council of Elders (much like the cartoon versions on the dashboard of Billy Batson’s RV in Shazam!) can weigh in on the requests, dispensing wisdom, asking clarifying questions, and making snide remarks. Long live the Republic!

Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury —

The Council of Elders from Shazam!

For several weeks, there’s been a spooky feeling at my full-time employer [My employer], with rumored layoffs lurking just around the corner. The layoffs finally happened yesterday, and there were pretty deep cuts in my department. As recently as Monday afternoon, I didn’t know whether I was gonna keep my job or not, so I had been making preparations — bought a Kanguru removable hard drive and moved my personal files onto it, backed up my e-mail, brought my cell phone charger home. I’m still here, but it’s bittersweet — my team was let go, and they were really good at their jobs.

I got a request to borrow the Ultimate Water Gun from Captain Mike Shilling of Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, Fl. Hell, yeah! He’s even promised me a couple of patches, which I can put on the tank. With a logo like that, how can I refuse?

I installed a Java Runtime Environment on my Linux box today, after wrestling with all the half-forgotten commands for tar and rpm. And “path”. And editing the .bash-profile file. Anyhow, I got it working, yippee! Now I can write applets to say “hello world” faster and better than ever before!!

Mountain Laurel and Steel Cage Monster Wrestling

I wanted a really strong contrast of a day on Saturday, so I took the Metro-North train up to Garrison and hiked down the Appalachian Trail to Bear Mountain, about ten miles. It was an incredibly beautiful late spring day, and at the end of the hike I sat on Anthony’s Nose, 800 feet above the bend in the Hudson that the English called “World’s End”, and admired the blooming mountain laurel all around, the hawks soaring above, and the freight trains rumbling through the river valley far below.

Then I went to see live Japanese monster wrestling!

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