A fire-pit

I’ve added Olympic National Park (Washington) to the previous entry’s list.

To see a map of the Olympic Rain Shadow, click here and scroll down. The rain shadow covers Victoria, British Columbia, a place that seemed curiously arid when I visited fifteen years ago; now I know why.

Speaking of Olympian mountains, I learned that Olympus Mons, on Mars, is about as large as Poland.

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We bought a portable fire-pit for burning the wood that accumulated in our yard these last two years, and for placing our lawn-chairs around, roasting wieners in, grilling cucumbers over, etc.

Samuel’s much-studied book, Cooking with Foil, would have been useful had he not torn out the pages.

Not that we’d’ve been guided by it anytime soon. We’re unable to keep a fire going longer than five minutes. Certain twigs and sections of rotten logs burn, and the rest just don’t.

Last night, Daniel wandered off with the poker, and we crept around in the dark, looking for it with our phone-flashlights. No luck. We searched again today and were about to give up when Karin lowered her eyes and noticed it in plain view.

Poker or no poker, we are hapless.

Karin tried stimulating the fire with her breath; she extinguished it. I told her she should never carry the Olympic torch. (Not that I’ve kept the fire going any better.)

Our lawn-chairs sank pretty far down into the mud.

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This aftertoon I watched forty-one-year-old Pepe, of the immortals, in the UEFA Champions League. He played well. He’s a thug, but I like him; as John Huston says in Chinatown, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I watched through a thicket of climbing, niggling children. Daniel begged to watch “hungry planets” on YouTube, and Samuel, who is susceptible to advertising, kept asking for Heineken.