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12 Aug

Come On, Leave The Noise

So we’re headed off into the woods again. Heading off into the woods has become what we do to relax, because what’s more relaxing than taking two small, hyper children into remote backcountry by canoe and chasing them around there for a day or two?

It is relaxing, just not in any of the ways that one usually associates with relaxation. It’s relaxing because it takes away from all of the noise of our life: it takes us away from televisions and satellite radio and iPads and computer games and all the buzz and hum and distraction that goes along with those things. It takes us away to somewhere where we can be by ourselves, with each other, with nothing to distract us from each other but the lap of waves and the music of the wind through the trees and the brightness of the stars. And also mosquitoes, but you can swat those.

22 Jul

Where The Wild Things Are

So we’re headed out to the backwoods again, because we love peace and quiet and mosquitoes and space for our feral offspring to run around just that much. Any last minute advice on how to kill bears, catch fish with one’s hands, get the conch away from the tyrannical preschooler, etc, etc, would be much appreciated.

Oh, and e-reader recommendations. I am totally taking my Kobo this time – risk of e-reader drowning be damned – and I need to know what to fill my library with. Nothing featuring forest-dwelling maniacs, please, or anything by Jon Krakauer. Although maybe a witty survivalist manual might come in handy. Are survivalists capable of wit? YOU SEE THE THINGS THAT I WORRY ABOUT.

20 Jul

If You Go Down To The Woods Today

The other week, we went camping. Like, in the woods, which is where you expect to go camping, except that this was really in the woods, the kind of ‘in the woods’ that you only get if you get in a canoe and paddle for two hours. Yes, we did this with two children under five. Yes, we’re crazy.

The craziest thing about the whole exercise was not, however, the fact that we wandered into the woods with our wee rabid honey badgers (the biggest concern there being, of course, that they’d recognize their true home in the wild and revert to their feral natures and overpower us. That was a very real possibility, do not doubt.) No, the craziest – the totally batshit crazypants craziest – thing was that the whole exercise required us to go more or less completely off the grid. There are, after all, no electrical outlets in the wild, no charging stations, and certainly no WiFi. There was, if we paddled out to the middle of the lake, a faint 3G signal, but that required taking electronics out onto open water, and iPhones, as we all know, don’t swim. So, yeah. We were unplugged.

1 Jul

Unplugged

It's Canada Day today. Most Canadians will be celebrating by drinking beer and watching fireworks and stalking the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Me, I'm celebrating by going off the grid. Well, going mostly off...
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