Charlie and I spent M-F camping with my parents at Bald Eagle State Park in PA.

We cruised around the lake and went swimming in the chilly water. Charlie loves playing in water!

We sat around the campfire and ate s’mores.

We drove all over the PA Wilds searching for elk. Did you know PA has a wild elk population? The Elk Country Visitor Center is worth a visit if you are in the area.

We visited Penn’s Cave. Pretty neat place, almost in the middle of a field. Not exactly where you’d expect a huge cave. 52F all year, which felt great on the 90F day.

We baked cinnamon rolls in a dutch oven over coals for the first time. Lodge has a booklet that lays out how many coals you need on top and bottom for reaching a specific temperature for a given sized dutch oven. Much better than winging it! I’d like to try cooking more things in a dutch oven.

We swatted off the cicadas that landed on us. Big hatch this year!

No fly fishing this week, though I took note of a few streams that looked promising for the future. I did cast a spinning rod out on the boat for a bit and caught a smallmouth bass and a large bluegill. Both on a Yo-Zuri Snap Bean that I’ve had for at least 20 years and have caught a lot of fish on.

I was curious why almost every small stream, and even some larger ones, were named “_____ Run” instead of brook, stream, or creek. Around me they are mostly Creek or Brook. I looked it up.

• “Run” is an old English and Scots word meaning “a small stream or brook.”
• Settlers of Scots-Irish descent made up a large proportion of early migrants to western and central Pennsylvania in the 18th century.

We all had fun, and Charlie was a good sport driving four hours with me. Amanda usually keeps him company in the back seat, but we listened to a lot of Twenty Trucks and Thomas and Friends Storytime, which helped keep our minds off of her absence this trip.

The above is mostly highlights, but to bring us back down to earth, I’d like to acknowledge that did have a hard time being away from his Momma for a week. We had our ups and downs, but we got through with a little help from video calls with Momma and extra snuggles with Grandma and Grandpa.

After we got home, we had a mostly quiet weekend. It rained most of the day Saturday and we hung around the house. Sunday we went to a birthday party and to the playground.

At home our Mock Orange is in full bloom!

From a walk in the woods:

---

After months of downtime because I decided to try to switch to an unstable Debian branch and botched it, I finally reflashed my FreedomBox and started fresh. I got that working last night, and as I write this am attempting to upgrade from Debian 12 to 13. Next I need to re-add my external storage and re-install the apps I had running. Say an incantation to St IGNUtius for me if you are familiar with the ways of GNU/Linux.

It is a slow process of consulting the canon (wikis) and trying different things. I am taking notes in my digital garden, which maybe one day will be linked to and become a part of the record. This is the way.