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Some of the photos I took last week at EAA’s AirVenture in Oshkosh are now available in the photo gallery.

If you are a hero, an evil overlord, an evil overlord’s accountant, or any of several other common roles in science fiction and fantasy, the Viable Paradise writers’ workshop has some tips to help you with your work. Some examples for evil overlords:

• My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
• I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.
• I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.
• My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

If you enjoy pictures of airplanes and their cargoes, you’re sure to enjoy these photos of a toilet bomb employed by US forces during the Vietnam war. Perhaps the North Vietnamese were expecting us to drop the kitchen sink next?

As part of our training for our fifty-mile ride next weekend, Sarah and I determined that we needed to ride at least forty miles yesterday. Conveniently enough, the town of Mt. Horeb is roughly twenty miles from our house and a cafe there serves excellent lefse, a traditional Scandinavian flatbread made from potatoes.Since the Madison area was expected to see temperatures in the nineties with a fair amount of humidity later in the day, we made an effort to get started early. The plan was to get up early, walk the dog, hit the road on the bikes, eat breakfast in Mt. Horeb, and arrive back in Madison by 11:00.

Unfortunately, we didn’t hit the road until just after 08:00, and the temperature was already approaching 80 with a cloudless sky overhead. Regardless, we had a decent ride out to Mt. Horeb without any real complications. The last two miles into town are all uphill and the thought of eating tasty lefse is what kept me pedaling towards the top.

However, after reaching the outskirts of downtown, we noticed that traffic was being detoured, and the side streets were all filling up with parked cars. The town was having an arts fair! We’re suckers for arts fairs, so we happily strolled the streets looking into booths knowing that we couldn’t buy anything larger than a deck of cards because we were on our road bikes with extremely limited carrying capacity. In addition, whatever we bought would have to be pedaled twenty miles back to Madison, rather than simply being thrown in a car trunk and driven back.

Eventually, we found ourselves in front of the Blue Sky Cafe, which was our lefse destination. Unfortunately, the art fair had drawn a fairly large number of people downtown and so there was quite a line outside the Blue Sky Cafe.

All was not last, however, as we noticed signs for Kaffee Stue, which was inside the Community Center. The food at Kaffee Stue had all been prepared by the members of the local Sons of Norway lodge, Skjold Lodge, and it was all traditional Norwegian fare. There was smørbrod, lefse, krumkakke, a variety of sotsuppes, smultringer, rosettes, and a number of other treats. We loaded up our trays (though we passed on the hotdogs wrapped in lefse) and enjoyed an even better breakfast than we had anticipated.

Our stomachs full of tasty Norwegian victuals, we headed back to Madison. The ride back to Madison was scorching, but we arrived back in town shortly after noon. We had such a good time on our ride that we decided to make it an annual event. Skjold Lodge, keep the lefse grill warm because we’re already looking forward to next years Kaffee Stue.

Dalla and I went hiking last Monday evening after work along a segment of the Ice Age Trail relatively near our house. While Dalla was busy making life miserable for squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits, I discovered that the wild blackberries along the trail were in season. Since it seems that wild blackberries are in season for approximately fifteen minutes every summer, I took advantage of the fact by picking a pint or so. While I was picking them, I occasionally popped a couple into my mouth and enjoyed the taste of fruit taken off the vine and popped directly into my mouth.

Dalla eventually noticed the fact that I was feeding myself and she naturally wanted to try what I was eating. So, after I tossed her a blackberry. After a careful and deliberate inspection the blackberry was deemed Food, and hence, worthy of consumption. After that, if I didn’t regularly throw her one or two, she would pick the blackberries off the vines herself. Of course, dog snouts aren’t really set up for berry picking, so she would often get a couple of ripe berries, a couple of nearly ripe berries, and one or two quite green berries. The flavor of those less ripe berries would then dissuade her from picking more berries herself for a few minutes.

Eventually, we picked enough to have with yogurt and on cereal, so we came home. Since our raspberry patch has yet to produce berries this year, the surprise harvest of the wild blackberries was even better.

The episode in which I learn not to taunt Mother Nature.Much like last summer, we’ve been having a very dry June and July. That’s
not to say that we don’t ever have rain forecast to fall, it’s just that
rain never does. As such, we’ve been doing plenty of watering. Last night,
as we were getting ready to sit down to dinner, the National Weather Service
broke into the radio program to which we were listening with a severe
thunderstorm warning. The warning promised quarter-size hail, strong winds,
heavy rains, thunder, lightning, and the threat of tornadoes. After going
so long without rain, I told Sarah that I was going out to stand in the
yard, “naked with a golf club” because we certainly weren’t about to see any
of the dreadful effects of a storm, much less the needed rain.

Suffice it to say that one taunts Mother Nature at one’s own peril.

Shortly after my little show of bravado, the skies darkened and filled
with clouds. Then, as I was assembling my sandwich, rain started to fall in
torrents as though someone had flicked a switch. I muttered something about
how it probably wasn’t rain, but actually was a mis-aimed sprinkler and went
on assembling my dinner. Then the wind started blowing and our kitchen was
filled with an unearthly blue glow. Sarah had been watching out the back
windows and she said that a large limb had fallen off one of our trees and
on to the power lines that supply our neighborhood with power. As the limb
fell there was all manner of unhealthy electrical arcing. Two of the three
power lines snapped, but the third held strong and the limb of non-trivial
size soon started to smoke and burn, even though it was caught in a
torrential downpour.

Of course, as soon as the power lines snapped, the power to our house
went out so I called the local electric utility and put our house on their
outage list.

The rain stopped shortly thereafter, but the limb continued to smolder
and burn, so I called 911. The limb seemed satisfied to continue
smoldering and smoking, so we sat down to our dinner. Just as I was about
to take the first bite of dinner, the back yard was filled with a bright
orange light that scared the bejesus out of me. The third power line had
finally snapped. At least that finally stopped the smoking and the
smoldering.

At that point, it was just a waiting game. The police came by and told
us not to touch the downed wires. The fire department came by (twice) and
told us not to touch the downed wires. The electric utility came by and
told us not to touch the downed wires and that a line truck would come by in
the near future and fix the mess.

We eventually finished dinner, got out the candles, and contemplated how
Abraham Lincoln did all that legal reading by candlelight without going blind. We crawled in to
bed around 23:00. About 23:45, the local utility showed up and started
fixing the mess in the back yard. They started with a good half-hour of
running a chain saw. After that, it was a solid three and one-half hours of
talking, walking back and forth from the yard to the street, generally
making men-fixing-things noises. Dalla, of course, woke up periodically to
warn us that men were outside the house. Sometimes, these warnings
consisted not just of barking, but also jumping on the bed to bark out the
window at the men, who in her mind, had no business being there.

Finally, about 03:30 this morning, the work was completed, and the power
came back on. Once it was light this morning, I went out to inspect the
damage to the yard caused not only by the tree dropping a giant limb, but
also by some utility guys mucking around in the dark.

There is a large, blackened limb lying amongst the hostas at the back of
the yard that I’ll have to move tonight. The banana tree we recently
transplanted into the back garden which appeared to be in imminent danger
from the limb managed to survive the ordeal unscathed. I’m sure that some
of the hostas will suffer badly, but we can replace them.

All in all, we came out of the experience not too badly considering my
hubris and Mother Nature’s power.

What else have we been up to these past few weeks? Sarah and I have been
piling up the miles on our bikes of late as we get ready for our fifty-mile
ride in a couple of weeks. Yesterday, we put on another 37. Sarah will
probably put another twenty or thirty on her bike today as she rides with her
club. While she is doing that, I’ll probably take the dog hiking on the Ice
Age trail as Dalla didn’t get any good chances to run this weekend.

The house needs to be painted, so we finally decided on a color scheme.
We bought the paint over the Fourth of July weekend as we found a good sale
at Sherwin Williams. Now we just need to find the time to get started. Our
weekends are basically booked from now until the second week of August.
Then we have a couple of free weekends (maybe only one) before we run in to
scheduled time again into September. So, it’s looking like late September
and early October for house painting.

Our softball team has two games left in its season. One this week and
one next week. Then our Friday nights will be available to us once again.
We’ve been playing on the curling club team, so it isn’t just an hour of
softball and then home again. Like any good curling match, we head out to a
bar afterwords and visit, drink, and eat after the match. So, each game
takes one hour and the obligatory socializing afterwords takes at least 1.5
hours, in playing again next year. However, the last few weeks have changed
my mind as I’ve seen the ball more and we’ve had more fun at the post-game
festivities. We lost last week after I mis-played a drive to center and it
went to the wall for a bases-clearing, in-the-park, grand slam. Not my
proudest moment, but in my defense, that was the first game I’ve played in
the outfield and I’m just not used to how the ball comes off the bat. I
started in on the ball, but it ended up over my head and I was forced to
chase it to the wall instead of catching it. Fortunately, no one on the
team seemed too bent out of shape about it as everyone else has made
unfortunate mistakes this year.

Sarah and I are each biking a fifty mile course on Saturday, 22 Jul 2006, to benefit the Dane County Boys and Girls Club. If you can make a pledge to help us reach our fundraising goal of $75 each, we would appreciate it. You can make a pledge by clicking on our names below.

• Sarah Bogen
• David Bogen