To top
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.