Unshaven and smelling of smoke. That’s a vacation.

Life’s just been absurdly busy lately, and I’m pretty far behind on posting. As an example of what I mean, I present to you my vacation photos. From the camping trip we took over the Fourth of July. Like I said, I’ve been busy.

Here’s the regular old Flickr slide show, and here’s the set in full geotagged glory. The latter should pretty much tell you everything you might want to know about where we went, and the comments in the former will fill in the details of what we did when we there there.

It was a great trip, even if it was pretty cold and rainy for a good portion. It had been five years since we’d been camping, and nine since we’d been to the north shore (Isabella was only about 10 months old back then). I don’t want to let it go that long again. It was the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time, and it’s the first vacation in years that I wasn’t ready to have end. I’ve never camped for two weeks at a stretch before, but I may have to give it a try next year.

Would you like to play a game?

-Love to. How about Global Thermonuclear War.

-Wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess? 

As a matter of fact, I would prefer a nice game of chess. How about you?

It’s been far too long since I’ve played chess against anyone who was over nine years old. Through a post over on Metafilter I ended up signing up for an account at Red Hot Pawn, a pretty good correspondence chess site (even if the name seems to suggest something less wholesome). I’ve started a couple of games against anonymous opponents but would love to play against a friend or two.

If you’re interested, head on over, create an account and look me up. My user name, as you might expect, is Ickster. Hope to get a couple of challenges soon!

Safe and Sound

For what it’s worth, everyone in my world is OK today. It was a close thing, though.

Yesterday Amanda dropped the kids off at her mother’s house and then headed back home, taking 35W south. She was right about here when police started streaming past in the other direction and she looked back to realize that the road was completely empty behind her.

Neither of us knew what had happened until her mother called to check on her.

So, we’re all safe and sound. I hope that’s true for all of you and wish that it were for everyone else crossing the river yesterday.