our two year anniversary

Yay! It was our two-year anniversary last week, and we celebrated by going back to the camping spot where we first fell in love.



Here are the highlights:
I am really good at setting up the tent, so I do that while RL set up the "kitchen" (which comprises a cooler, a stove, and a Horseshoes set. Don't ask me why.). Then we have a Jack and Coke and a good conversation.

RL bought a bowsaw on the way out of town so we could saw through just about anything. We go out to forage for dead wood, and start a magnificent pile which we later decide is too big to carry back to our campsite. RL goes and gets his car. When he returns, he's chatting on the phone with a friend (in the middle of nowhere, while camping). I assume he's going to get off soon, but doesn't so I am left piling wood in the car and giving him dirty looks. After that he decides to turn his phone off. Thank God.

Once we get our fire going, it starts to drizzle, so RL decides to put up one of the three tarps we brought with us (we even acquired a new one that someone left behind at the campsite, along with a heck of a lot trash and some basketball shorts). It's dark already, and RL is trying to cut the tarp rope with a Swiss Army Knife (well, a cheap SAK knockoff. I think it may be a Swedish army knife), but he gets the blade the wrong side out, and promptly gets a huge, bloody cut in his knuckle. A couple of dunks in the freezing stream (adjacent to our campsite) and a couple Bandaids later, he's ready to get back to it.

Later on we decide to go for a little walk and see if we can find a spot to look at the stars. A thunderstorm is going crazy over on the other side of the mountains, so even though our sky is clear, we can still see flashes of lightning from over the pass. Have I mentioned how amazing the stars are in the Colorado mountains? Milky Way and everything. And tonight, lightning flashes.

The next morning, RL gets it into his head that he needs to build a "toilet" with all of our leftover wood (there was a lot). See below.



In the end it's a masterpiece, except for he's built it basically in the middle of our campsite. I say that I need to pee, but don't really want to pee in the middle of everything, especially when a vanfull of older people (I think they were Polish) shows up and starts wandering around. Well, finally RL decides he's going to just do it, and afterwards begs me to use it too. He says he'll stand watch. Good thing, too, because I finish up about two seconds before the old Polish women come wandering into our campsite (apparently they were mushroom hunting). Yay for peeing in the middle of nowhere which is not actually the middle of nowhere!

All in all, it was a great camping trip. We tried to reenact our two-week-old-roommate conversations that we had the first time we came here, but it didn't work so well. Turns out you have other conversations as two-year-old-partners that are just as good.

Punchbug, in all its glory

RL and I pride ourselves on several things: making up silly words and phrases, blaming each other for our own misdeeds, and the most serious game of Punchbug the world has ever seen.

It's no longer just one punch when you see a Bug. It's two punches if the Bug's moving. You can punch someone multiple times if you see the Bug twice in a short amount of time (e.g. coming into and out of a parking lot), unless you have agreed that that Bug is off-limits. If you are alone and you see one you have to punch yourself, but you can also punch the other person when you get home for all the Bugs you saw without them. Lately RL has taken to just punching me as many times as possible before I scream "ow!"

Didn't I tell you it was serious?

The other day, as we embarked on a road trip to go camping, RL decided to pre-emptively punch me for all of the Bugs he was bound to see before me on our journey. I'm convinced that was why, as we slept in our tent later that night, RL woke up to ME punching HIM. Here's our verbatim, mostly asleep conversation.

Me, solidly asleep: (punch-punch-punch)
RL, waking up: What are you punching me for?
Me, groggily realizing that I have just dreamt about bugs, and that it doesn't count if they AREN'T REAL BUGS: Um, nothing, I was just dreaming about a bug.
RL: There was a bug in your dream and you want me to kill it?
Me: No, it was a Punchbug!
RL: Well if there was only one Bug, why did you punch me three times?
Me: There were two bugs.
RL, surprisingly lucid: That still doesn't count for three punches.
Me: I was sleeping. I don't really know what I was doing.

Sorry babe. But you started it.

You guys know this place is clothing optional, right? (Part II)

When we left our heroines, they were about to embark on an exciting campground adventure…

As we drove into the site, snowflakes began gently fluttering to the ground. We parked the car, unloaded the “mondo condo” (the only tent left at the rec center) and began blindly trying to put together this unknown and ridiculously large tent in the pitch-black, near-blizzarding mountains of Colorado. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight, and the batteries in the tiny keychain light that we had brought died within minutes.

So we ditched our tent-erection attempts, and decided to hunt down some firewood. If we could get a fire going, we’d be able to see much better, right? We wandered over to the campsite’s designated wood pile, consisting of a rather sizeable log in a trough, which we were meant to cut with a rather less sizeable hacksaw.

Cold, tired, and not really knowing what we were doing, we made our first few feeble attempts at hacking. Suddenly, out of the nearby sauna building came a gray-haired man with a pot belly and a cigar. Naked. He sat outside the steamy enclosure for a few minutes and watched as we struggled in our frustration. Finally, Mr. Pot Belly gets up, saunters over our direction, and tells us we’re doing it all wrong. Naked. Then he proceeds to pick up the saw and show us how the saw is meant to be used. Did I mention he was naked?

Daisy and I stood back, stifling giggles and giving each other “is this really happening?” looks. Finally, once Mr. Pot Belly felt he had sufficiently demonstrated his sawing prowess, he left us and went back into the sauna. We stood there for awhile, incredulous, frustrated, and ready to give up.

And give up we did. As it turns out, we didn’t have the skills, equipment, or patience to finish the job. Hanging our heads in shame, we packed up the car and headed home. In hindsight it was a good thing we did—the storm of the decade dumped on Colorado that night, closed roads and stranded hundreds of students on their own adventure. If we hadn’t been so ill prepared, we might have been stuck sleeping in the sauna with Mr. Pot Belly, smoking cigars and eating the last scraps of our PB&Js.