Camping, communibus locis

I started by titling this blog "camping, et. al." but then looked up the Latin abbreviation to make sure I was using it correctly. I should have remembered it means "and others" or "and elsewhere." I didn't want to resort to etc. either because that's too commonplace. But the point is, when I looked up the meaning of et. al. in Wikipedia it opened a whole page of Latin phrases that I nerdily nerded out on. That's why today's title is "Camping, communibus locis." I am not, however, a tech nerd, so I still can't figure out how to do italics in html on my Mac browser. I do like having foreign or archaic words italicized, so if you do too, just pretend that the phrase above is tilting a little to the right. As for the meaning of the phrase, you'll have to do some nerdly sleuthing on your own, or simply not care what it means and move on.

This is another catch up post to let people know what I have been up to. Last weekend I went canoeing and kayaking on Lake Elmo with my sister Becky, her husband Ken, and my niece Miriam. Here I am taking an obligatory self-portrait:
Here's Ken bringing the kayak that I would be using down to the lakeside. This was my first time kayaking and, as it happens, I turned out to be not so bad at it. I gave my arms a good work out and was able to move fairly quickly.
I also bought a tent last weekend because after traveling around Asia, I thought it would be good to travel around Minnesota and see its parks a bit more than I have. Anyway, it's a Coleman tent as you can see and goes nicely with the Coleman lantern Beck and Ken gave me.
On Wednesday our department at work had an outing. We were all invited to go to a Saints game. The pre-game bbq highlight was watching Jean perform feats of magic:
Just after this picture, Kristin and Jean and I skedaddled into the stadium to get more beer and keep Kristin's buzz going. That's it for the game - we only lasted 2 innings before deciding to go.
On Friday after work I went on my first camping outing of the summer season with Becky, Ken, Miriam, and their dog Sammy. We went to Afton State Park and had to hike in one mile to our site. Here's our little campsite after we got everything set up:
The rest of the pictures are pretty self explanatory and I cannot think of anything else you need to know before looking at them except that I brought my tripod which explains the fact that the pictures at dusk a) include all of us, b) are not blurry, and c) did not require the use of a flash.