On Saturday, The Girlfriend and I attended a family reunion/celebration in honor of her maternal grandmother’s 90th birthday. The following items are just some things that occured to me as I sat in a public park on a sweltering hot day:

• The temperature on Saturday was somewhere north of 100 degrees. As much as I love this valley, surrounded by mighty peaks and deep family ties and my very own dead sea just outside the city limits, days like this make me seriously consider where else in the world I might be happy living. Seattle, maybe, or Vancouver, or London, or Edinburgh, or Anchorage. Anyplace that’s cool and green…
• On the positive side, however, I adore the evenings that follow those sweltering days, when the sun has fallen behind the Oquirrh Mountains but the sky remains bright overhead and the breezes start to pick up. That’s the perfect time to put the top down and drive, or at least just to stand in a doorway and let your eyes unfocus for a few minutes.
• During the party, I naturally had to utilize the public restroom there in the park, and as I was, ahem, utilizing, I saw the cliche’d graffito on the wall in front of me: “FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL XXX-XXXX.” I found myself wondering, “Has anyone in the history of Alexander Graham Bell’s marvel ever actually called one of these numbers? And who writes these things on the walls, anyway?” For the record, I have never been tempted to write anything on a bathroom wall…
• This, of course, reminded me of something I read years ago in a book about Herculaneum, the less famous of the two Roman Empire towns that were destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Apparently, among the spectacular mosaics and decoration wall paintings that were preserved by the falling ash, there was also some latrine graffiti that remains perfectly readable after 2000 years. And it’s pretty much the same drivel that we’re still writing on restroom walls. Well, that somebody is still writing there. Only we have telephone numbers to include with them now…
• And finally, Anne had the thought to take the small photo printer her parents gave her for Christmas so she could take pictures with her digital camera and print them out on the spot for everyone who wanted them. It was a great idea and most everyone present was impressed, especially Anne’s grandma, who was quite frankly blown away by the idea of a camera that can take hundreds of pictures without film (she kept asking if the roll was getting full yet). But it occurred to me that my father was able to do pretty much the exact same thing in 1965 using his Polaroid.
  I guess what they say is true: the more things change…

That is all. You may now move freely about the cabin…