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.

Umbrella; vermin; children; Heineken

Rihanna: “ … under my um-bar-
ella, -ella, -ella,
eh, eh.”

Samuel: “Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

A timely song, what with all the drizzle. Summer appears to be winding down. We’ve had our first notable cooling, and leaves have been peppering the ground. This is a “false fall”; but tell that to the mice, who’ve again infiltrated our mud-room: we’ve found little mounds of dirt where they’ve been tunneling. We’ve left no food for them. They must simply be sheltering from the cold.

Daniel, who seems constitutionally squirmier than Samuel (and he is plenty squirmy), has been hurtling himself out of his chair and slithering over the ground, either backwards until he gets stuck or, like a hurricane, in a spiral pattern. He leaves little spiral-paths of puke. Or he stays in his chair and rocks his legs so vigorously that it lurches, a foot at a time, across the room.

Samuel leaves out uncapped dry-erase markers, and Daniel sucks them.

I’m gradually weaning the children off YouTube, to interest them in soccer (which will be necessary for them when the World Cup is played). It helps that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, ViX broadcasts Champions League matches. Samuel is familiar with the halftime commercials. “Drink responsibly,” he says when he hears strains of Handel, who composed the Champions League refrain.