It's Summertime...

Cold and wet is miserable. Warm and wet isn't half bad. Especially if you aren't hungry at the same time. After breakfast on Saturday we went fishing. Why not we figured, the rain wasn't too terrible, and fishing is usually pretty good before a heavy rain. This is by far one of my favorite photos that I took this weekend. It was a drizzle when we got to the lake. Then it stopped for a bit. And then the rain picked up, and Mr. Man came out of the water shortly after I snapped this photo. He's a very quiet, shy kind of kid. Not into sports or outdoorsy things. He loved camping. He told me eleventeen hundred times. He enjoyed fishing with my brother a lot. He didn't catch anything on Saturday, but he didn't care. Didn't complain one time (on Saturday that is LOL) that it was raining or mention that he was having a bad time.


Saturday afternoon it was rainy. The rain got harder and heavier as the afternoon wore on. Around 2pm the boy lit me a fire. Underneath that fabulous tarp that B brought along. It burned until the wee hours of the morning. Around 7pm I plunked down in a chair in front of that fire, and by 11:30 I was dried out. The warmest and driest I had been all day long. I went to bed around midnight, and my brother plunked himself down in the boy's recliner chair and fell asleep in front of the fire. He awoke sometime later and it was raining again and the fire was down to embers and he went to bed. When I got up at 7am, the coals were still throwing heat, enough to keep my coffee water hot and steaming. That's a good fire.
The men rigged this tarp up so that it had a low point. They tied a rope to one of the grommets and staked it down to the ground so that when too much water accumulated on the tarp it was pour off near the screen tent and the tarp would rise back up to it's crazy height. During the heaviest of the rain Saturday afternoon the tarp let out water every minute or so. It poured off with such a fury that it left a pit in the ground right under where the water hit the ground. It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen, and it was so loud that sometimes it caused me to jump a bit. The boy snapped this shot of the water draining off the tarp. It kept the tarp from getting too heavy with rain, and collapsing on us. It also kept us dry and warm next to the fire. At one point during the worst of the storm, the wind whipped the tarp up and we thought for sure that it was going to blow away. Forget that it was tied around 4 trees. Or that it was bogged down with water and rain. It was like a freakish scene out of the Wizard of Oz, but fortunately for us it stayed put.

Unlike today, which was warm and sunny and dry (humidity was next to nothing).. yesterday was chilly and wet and dreary. But it didn't rain. So of course, Ms. Thang, who had been planning what she was going to do while we were camping for weeks, went swimming. Then we went fishing. And we caught fish! Not great fish. Not even big fish. But fish none-the-less. Ms. Thang caught the most.. half a dozen various fish. I caught a few, Mr. Man caught a few, B caught 4 or 5, and The Boy might've even caught some as well. Unless you're fishing in a big lake, shore fishing usually doesn't yield big fish. But the kids, in all the times we've gone fishing, have never caught a thing. So I was happy that they were able to do so while we were camping. Even though it rained they had a great time.
This is the average size of the fish we caught. Ms. Thang caught the first fish. She asked me what it was and I told her. She didn't believe me so she went and asked B. She stomped over and said, "He said the same thing you did! A crap weasel!!" HAHAHA. When we were growing up, that was our catch phrase for small dumb fish that weren't even worth catching. They were just too dumb to not grab at worms that fell in front of them and got caught. And that is exactly what we caught.

Today after I got home from school, I spent the afternoon setting up the tent and cleaning and hanging our stuff out to dry. Everything was wet. We hung our sleeping bags out this morning.. tarps.. buckets.. coolers. Nothing worse then getting to the campsite on the next trip and finding your gear has mildewed. Maybe next month we'll have better weather.