Camping, Day 2: Out of Shape

Into the Woods

We woke late the next day, but Omaha and I were comfortable with that. I made coffee and tea. Since we were out of wood, we warmed Omaha's home-made breakfast muffins over the propane stove and had a good breakfast anyway.

We drove into the nearby town, a 45 minute trial down gravel mountain roads with death always at one edge or the other, to get adult cereals, firewood, paper towels. We refilled our water jug at the ranger's station, and asked about the conditions. The ranger was great, told us all about the mosquitos, that there weren't many bear signs, and so on.

Back at camp, we made tuna salad sandwiches, then headed out for the Hidden Lakes trail.

The trail was short, less than a mile and a half, and we didn't even get that far as the trail disappeared into a mosquito-infested swamp around the backside of the first lake, so we never got to see the other two "hidden" lakes.

We were all out of shape. The last half-mile was all uphill, but that short adventure took the wind out of Omaha and me.

Omaha took a short nap. I sat an read at the campsite picnic table, an ancient thing of sun and snow-bleached, cracked wood that still held up reasonably well. The northern half of the campground has been abandoned and is slowly rotting away; we have the entirety of the place to ourselves.

Things forgotten: the camp recipe book.

Despite forgetting the recipe book, Omaha and I were able to put together a memory of the stovetop variant of macaroni & cheese (with real cheddar, milk, and the like), which everyone gratefully ate. Afterwards, Omaha and I cleaned up while the girls played more Frisbee. They played a lot of Frisbee this year. And Boggle.

But we made s'mores over the fire, and had a few rounds of Gimme The Brain in our tent, before everyone brushed their teeth and went to bed.

Hidden Lake

Meet the new Bork, same as the old Bork

Anotonin Scalia has become Robert Bork.

Robert Bork once said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that allowed women to discuss birth control with their physicians without the intereference of the government, and which ensured that such a conversation was private, was wrongly ruled: as he famously put it, "The sexual gratification of one group is being elevated the the anguish of another group's moral gratifications. Nowhere in the Constutition do we find the imposition of a heirarchy of gratifications."

Scalia has now embraced this argument fully. There is no right to privacy to be found in the Constution.

Many constitutional scholars feel otherwise. Primarily, they argue that the Sixth Amendment, the one about being required to board soldiers in one's homes, is a specific example of a generalized case: the government may not put monitors into your home without a warrant for a specified reason.