Here’s my little friend Chippy, who creeps up and stuffs his face with sunflower seeds while I sit three feet away smoking a cigar. When I’m not there he spends a long time sitting up and eating away. When I’m close he just stuffs the seeds into his cheeks until his head is nearly twice the size it was when he arrived. Once he’s loaded almost to capacity he has to start shoving the seeds in with his paws and when his face is ready to explode he rushes off to stash his loot somewhere in the trees, then returns for another load.
Fearing I may be castigated for anthropomorphism, I nevertheless feel compelled to relate a strange question that careened through my little chipmunk friend’s jaw full of sunflower seeds. “What have you been doing since I talked with you yesterday, my human friend, ummpf, mufft?”
I told him simply that I slipped out to camp with a small load of firewood yesterday. I had forgotten to set one of my security cameras when we left Sunday, so I only needed a faint excuse to head out. Once there and the work was done and I had checked my crawdaddy trap (plenty in there to combine with some corn on the cob, fresh baby garden potatoes, and a few other luxuries to make a great crawdaddy boil/cookout) I decided the afternoon was begging me to hang out in the palace with a relaxing cigar, and I felt who the heck was I to refuse?
During my pleasant daydreaming I was fooling around with my clamp-on cigar holder when suddenly a rubber disc on one of the jaws, about the size of a quarter, popped loose, fell straight down and through a quarter inch crack between the floorboards in what we used to call in basketball a “swisher” or a “swoosher” when the ball went through the basket without touching the backboard or the hoop. That rascal rubber piece fell perfectly through the tiny crack between two 2x6 floorboards.
After a shocked uh oh moment – a combination of awe from witnessing a perfect execution, and the dread from realizing my claustrophobia was about to be tested, I had some pondering to do. I have a huge irrational fear of being closed in – usually caused by having to crawl into a tight space, but also triggered by being in an airplane once it has touched down and is taxiing to the terminal, and exaggerated by the wait at the terminal for the door to open and for the exit line to get out. I even experienced a modest, but very uncomfortable, case when I locked myself in the bathroom at a friend’s house last winter.
Reluctantly, I chose the shortest route and crawled on my belly under the Palace. I probably didn’t get more than five feet, squeezing tightly under the first of two beams, when I lost my resolve and scrambled out.
For the next hour or so I wrestled with my options, the simplest being to just forget it. The little rubber piece isn’t really essential anyway. Other options were to find a friend less chicken than I am to go retrieve it, cut a replacement piece from a hunk of rubber, see if I can find a factory replacement, buy a new holder, cut out a floorboard, and a few other strange possibilities. I was especially disgusted with myself, because that was the third time that piece had come loose and I had been meaning to glue it in place, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
Eventually, I decided to try once more for a retrieval, but starting this time at the front of the deck, which is a longer crawl but starts out with higher clearance, although it still ends up the same height at my destination. So, I poked a flyswatter handle down the crack where my missing piece had fallen, to mark the spot in hopes of minimizing the search area, grabbed a flashlight, and embarked on my mission. Had to take a couple deep breaths, except under one beam where I had to suck it all in, and then had to look for about two minutes before finding my little rubber grip that had turned into a speck about one tenth the size I remembered and was exactly the same color as the muddy clay/dirt it was sitting in.
Once topside, I mixed up some epoxy and glued both little rubber feet into place on my cigar holder, and sat, muddy and bruised, admiring my handiwork, exceedingly happy and satisfied in the warm afternoon sun.

This is how long before the potatoes are cooked.
We don't have an hourglass timer filled with sand at camp, and I really hate the raspy ding of a mechanical clock, so I have invented the "wine timer."
For each meal course I put an appropriate glug of Cabernet in my wine glass. When it reaches the "mud in your eye" level I know it's time to refill the glass and turn on the next burner.
Supper - timed to perfection...

This delicate little thistle fluff flew into an invisible web between the deck rails beside me.
For hours it has graced me with a private performance, dancing with a gentle breeze, glistening, radiating in the soft afternoon sun-glow.

My old Broil King is working wonders on a rainy Saturday morning.
Peach/rhubarb pie, a little loaf of rye bread, and a breakfast biscuit baked with the leftovers.

Years ago, on a fly-in fishing trip, my friend Glen and I were in the process of battering and deep frying a catch of walleyes for our group of guys lounging, beers in hand, among clouds of lies stinking up the air in our outpost cabin.
An apple, forgotten on the counter, caught our attention at the same time and, giggling like Sunday School kids playing a prank at the church picinc, we grabbed it up, skinned it, chunked it, and tossed it in the Bisquick, along with a couple dozen delicate morsels of walleye sliced from fillets.
In the spring I planted some potatoes in my garden at camp. It was a new venture. Part way through the summer my plants died. They turned yellow and wilted away.
The rhubarb plants I scooped into a shallow hole beside the garden last fall have flourished like ferns in a rain forest and while breaking off a few stalks to mingle into a peach pie tomorrow, I dug up the dead potato plants, curious to find out what was underneath the surface.
Wow! What a great surprise! I unearthed about three dozen of the most beautiful Yukon Golds I've ever fondled. Those potatoes made my heart sing.
I set up a batch of bread dough mid afternoon, mixed my peach/rhubarb pie filling to marry overnight, and whipped up a big jar of blue cheese dip to dance the night away, awaiting tomorrow's HERF ( cigar smoking get-together with "the boys").
In the morning I'll bake a loaf of dutch oven bread and the pie in my barbeque, then when the guys, and all our wonderful and intelligent wives, are here at the Palace I'll fire up a hot burner topped with five gallon cast iron kettle to cook up Buffalo Wings, Sweet Pickerel, and french fries from garden fresh potatoes, to accompany hot bread, smokey pie, wine, single malt, fat cigars, and some of my finest friends.
That fishing trip... part way through supper those many years ago my buddy Pete, puzzled, blurted out over a half bitten hunk of deep fry, "Hey. This one tastes different..."
Smothering a smirk, Glen commented, innocently, "Oh, that's a sweet pickerel."
To this day, Sweet Pickerel, discovered accidently, by us anyway, is a traditional delicious part of many cherished meals. Battered, deep fried apple slices...
For those who may think I'm a sissy weenie, cooking and all that, I've included a picture of me and my pitchfork. Digging up the potatoes I busted the goddamn handle off the sonofabitch with my bare hands.
And then I stuck it back together with duct tape.

These crab apples grow every year on a tree I pass frequently on my walks.
Every summer at about this time I engage in a stupid ritual. These beautiful little charmers look good enough to eat.
Tonight was my 2016 stupid crab apple ritual. The setting sun was shining brilliantly on the tree bowing with fruit as I passed on my way to Rotary.
"Those look delicious," I tempted myself. "They can't possibly be as sour as I remember. They're brilliant. They're beautiful. This crop must be as sweet as maple syrup in March."
Tonight I set a new record for distance spitting a bite of crab apple pulp.
Seems like somebody ought to warn about the perils of apple temptation.

Rich,
This afternoon was as perfect as they come around here late in the summer. I smoked a Macanudo cigar, part of a variety pack received with my last order, the first Macanudo I've enjoyed for a quarter century, as I reveled in the sunshine on my home deck overlooking Pelican Lake, sipped some smooth shiraz, and gave in to a lazy, dreamy, mid-August haze.
Twenty-five years ago your dad brought me a box of Macanudos on his first visit. Today's cigar was wonderful, but richly enhanced with my fond memories of the times he and I spent together.
As the Macanudo smoke hung deliciously over my spot on the deck today, I recalled our moments at camp, the stories (many of them probably true) your dad belted out like a great piano player, and our elbows-on-the-table discussions that went on and on, as if inspired by some kind of magic.
I think your dad had a beautiful balance between wisdom and humor, and combined them as only he and Samuel Clemens could get away with.
Ain't it funny... a special cigar, a wonderful setting, and memories that spread like warm chocolate on a biscuit.
Your dad, Dick Belding, was a gem.

It may be time to resuscitate my diet.
Buttoning the waist band of the pants had been a challenge. Red faced and panting, thumbs blistered, belly sore from five minutes of trying to squeeze a 40 inch waist into size 34 slacks far enough to persuade the button and the button hole to make friends, I finally relented and stretched out upside down on the bed, like a teenage girl inserting herself into jeans so tight you could see the bump of a petite pimple growing on her butt, and wrestled myself, writhing and twisting, engulfed in flying clouds of cat fur, into my only pair of fancy pants, got them closed up and buckled shut.
Clean, fresh pressed long sleeve shirt holding in a slightly bulbous torso, tucked tightly into blue khaki slacks with pocket openings puckered out like conch shells escaping from both hips, I looked pretty dapper, if not a little stiff and pained.
I think my elegance, complete with my finest slip on tennis shoes that hardly showed the water stains from an unexpected dunk in the lake a couple days before, went unnoticed by the people in the room who seemed - every one - to be distracted, as we spoke, by the plastic lens of my glasses that hung like a Picasso painting from my left eyebrow, created that very afternoon by a slightly misdirected four inch flame from the butane torch I was using to light a cigar.
It was a wonderful evening out, but I'm glad we don't have to get all prettied up very often.

Retired for less than a month, and she's already reading my cigar magazines at breakfast.