Next to our garage, we have a ramshackle clematis. Hidden within the leaves and flowers is a sparrow nest with some just hatched babies. Meanwhile, a robin has gotten busy with a nest on top of the light fixture containing two bright blue eggs.
Last week, we managed to fit a glorious trip to Camp du Nord into our busy summer. This was our fifth visit to their summer program (see prior posts from 2023, 2021, 2019, and 2016), though we also stayed in a cabin there in January 2024.
We stayed in one of the original cabins, built in the 1930s, called Sans Souci. It was a tiny one-room cottage perched on some rocks on the shore of Burntside Lake. The cabin itself had a single full-size bed. Next to the cabin (but oddly out of frame in all of our photos) is a spacious platform tent with two twin beds.
How did a family of five manage this? Well, Griffin was only with us for the first night. On Monday we drove him and his gear over to Camp Widjiwagan, just a few miles east, where he’s embarking on a three week canoe trip into Quetico Provincial Park in Canada. We missed his lively presence for the rest of the week.
The week included a traditional “polar plunge” into the lake first thing in the morning with dozens of other families. (It’s something of a ritual to start the day… and quite refreshing, especially in the absence of showers. Note that despite the name, the water isn’t especially cold. We have all successfully survived real polar plunges into this same lake through holes in the ice in the winter.)
Maggie and Oliver joined their age groups for activities in the mornings. Sarah and I relaxed, read books, played cards, and walked in the beautiful northern woods. In the afternoons and evenings we went swimming, did art activities, enjoyed the beautiful wood-fired sauna, and played games. The week wrapped up with hilarious skits on the stage by the lakeshore.
On our final night, we experienced a phenomenal thunderstorm. There’s nothing quite like being in a tiny cabin on the short of a lake while mother nature howls in fury overhead. (Come to think of it, Griffin was probably in a pitched tent during the storm… I look forward to hearing his take!) We learned on Saturday that the storms were even worse west of us with tornadoes in North Dakota and 100+ mph wind gusts in Bemidji (about 100 miles from us).
In the pictures below, Maggie is usually wearing her purple hat.
Andrew awoke early on Wednesday morning and took this panoramic video from the rock below our cabin at 4:30 a.m. This was two days before the solstice. You can hear those “early birds” getting their day started.
Griffin and his trombone teacher, Lauren Husting, played an extended duet during a recital at the Saint Paul Conservatory of Music.
Hear ye, hear ye! By order of the great State of Minnesota, Griffin is officially permitted to menace the roads without a parent.
After much diligent practice through the challenging winter and spring, Griffin passed his road test yesterday and has his preliminary driver’s license. The official card should arrive by September. Hardly an hour after getting his license, he drove himself to trombone lessons. It’s a new era.
Today was the last day with students at my middle school. Five teachers and spouses went out for an evening on the town, culminating in an outstanding Chinese feast at Shuang Cheng in NE Minneapolis (owned by the parent of a former student and serves the best Ma Pao Tofu I’ve had since leaving Oakland).
It was a bittersweet occasion because Shannon is retiring and Matt is taking a sabbatical next year. The middle school won’t be the same without them.
Oliver invented a new way to eat breakfast: Pancake Chess!
Sarah and I finished demolishing the aging and no-longer-safe second story deck behind the house today. We have plans to replace it with a larger, safer deck. This may take a while. But taking the old one down was an important first step.
Note that Sarah did the bulk of the work on this job (she’s the handy one around here), but I’m proud to say that I contributed more labor than usual. Prying the boards up was tough work. We could use a longer crowbar.
Note the closeup picture that shows how rotted the joists were. (The previous owners clearly added wood to try to shore things up.)
The Hands Off! demonstration in Saint Paul was very well attended. Despite the outrage at the Trump regime, the crowd was friendly and in good spirits, including many creative signs.
My favorite moment was on the sidelines when an impromptu band started playing to drown out a fanatic preacher with a bullhorn yelling about how we were all bound for hell. (I don’t even think you can see or hear the preacher in this video, but he’s off to the left under the scaffolding.)
On February 1, I posted about a video game that Griffin and his friend, James, submitted to the National Science Foundation’s Game Maker Awards competition. According to the official timeline, judging should have finished on March 14 and the winners would be announced on April 2.
Imagine Griffin’s surprise when he received this email on March 30:
Dear NSF Game Maker contestant,
Thank you for participating in the NSF Game Maker Awards. We are pausing the judging process until further notice. If an entrant was eligible for the competition at the time of their initial submission but has since aged out of the K-12 category due to delays in the competition timeline, they will remain eligible for judging and prize award. Their entry will be evaluated alongside current K-12 participants, ensuring fairness and continuity. No additional action is required from the entrant to maintain eligibility.
Please check the Game Maker Award website for updates.
Thanks,
The NSF Game Maker Awards team
Going to the website didn’t provide any additional information, though the contest pages have this information posted in the header of each page:
Also at the top of each page is a link to “Learn about NSF’s implementation of recent executive orders.”
Although it is not explicitly stated anywhere on the linked page, we assume that the competition was paused in response to these “recent executive orders.”
This is, of course, a minor thing. Griffin and James will be fine. But in our family, it felt like an ominous sign of how quickly the new administration’s priorities can directly affect us.
This may seem trite, but I am reminded of a haunting quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, in reference to the dark lord Sauron:
“His arm has grown long indeed,” said Gimli, “if he can draw snow down from the North to trouble us here three hundred leagues away.”
“His arm has grown long,” said Gandalf.
These are the words that echo through my head today.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve chaperoned our annual seventh grade trip to Camp Widjiwagan in northern Minnesota. This year was special, however, because it was Maggie’s turn to join the adventure. She’s heard about the trip for years, so she was greatly looking forward to it.
Camp Widjiwagan is on the north shore of Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota. It’s about four and a half hours from the Twin Cities. This is far enough that it is noticeably colder and snowier than the central part of the state. We left early on Monday morning and returned on Friday afternoon, spending four nights in rustic cabins in the woods.
The only downside to the trip was that Maggie caught a stomach bug on her final day, keeping her up for much of the night. A thousand thanks to my colleagues, Cat and Mackenzie, who took good care of her in her cabin. They brought her over to the impromptu infirmary in one of the admin buildings where I was able to be with her for the rest of the night. By morning, she was over it, though I did sit with her on the bus home to try and reduce the spread of any germs to her friends. (The final pic in the gallery below is our selfie on the bus… we don’t look as sleep-deprived as we were.)
Most of the following pictures were taken by the ever-talented Bobak Razavi.
