My parents took us on lots of camping trips and I went with them until I was about 18. Then I continued to do it on my own and with friends for a while. It’s been years since I did a full on wilderness camping trip. We’re from northern Ontario and we went out every time of year - bug infested hot summers, wet rainy spring / fall and freezing cold winter.

When you do it often enough, eventually you end up in situations you didn’t plan for … getting stuck overnight, unexpected rain storm / winter storm, equipment break down. Then you just break a quick basic camp, hunker down and wait for the morning or the storm to end. It’s the only option, otherwise you risk getting into more trouble if you keep going. But it also doesn’t mean you’re happy about it. I got stuck several times overnight in the middle of nowhere cold, wet, hungry, tired and miserable … it’s all doable and survivable, it’s just not very pleasant.

It is possible to do if you know how.

But what these videos never or seldom show is that you have to be willing to be absolutely uncomfortable, cold and miserable the entire time.

9/10 for your grandma … Looks like a dual boot setup … a modern fast core system with multiple speed settings on top … and an older OS that is manually operated that can be revealed from underneath (although once the power goes out, you’d have to lose the LEDs)

I got my side arm, my cyanide pills, my classified dossier…

…

Oh wait, sorry, I got the wrong song … :(

Usually happens when you are in a rush or are not paying attention. I have that happen to me when I’m rushing out the door and decide to drink a bit of water or a coffee but want to hurry up. Then you lose any amount of time you were trying to save by standing there imagining what they will be writing on your tombstone.

Same feeling I get when I swallow an irregular shaped piece of food or one of those elongated multivitamin pills and the object decides to go down SIDEWAYS. You can feel it getting lodged at the back of your throat and then you feel it slowly painfully sliding down your esophagus as you start imagining who will be attending your funeral and what they will be saying for your eulogy.

Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin

I just don’t value Christmas much any more … I do give out gifts but at this point, I just hand out money to the people I want to gift to because I never know what people want, especially kids and teens … and when you give them money, they know exactly what they want to do with it.

Halloween however, I do spend a lot more on. And I don’t spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on big ugly props and blow up things or store bought crap … I spend quite a bit of money building up a supply of candies, chocolates and chips. I take the month leading up to the holiday and steadily buy a little bit at a time. Then by Halloween, I’ll hand out handfuls of stuff to every kid that comes to the door. This year I had 100 kids and they each got a bunch of stuff. Then I have a tradition at the end of the night of waiting as long as possible and then giving away whatever I have left to the last kid. This year, it was a couple of teen boys who looked to be about 15/16, I filled one guys bag by dumping my box of chocolates into his sack … the other kid was just messing around and didn’t even have a bag, so I gave him a supply of old pillow cases I had ready, handed him one and told him to open it up as I dumped the rest of my chocolates and chips … those were two of the happiest guys I got that night … the bonus was that I didn’t end up with all that candy that would have made me sick anyway.

Bingo! … that is why Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a series of ghosts that visit Scrooge … it was a tradition of story telling of retelling scary ghost stories during the longest day of the year … the moment in the year known in pagan religion as the moment in the year when the dark forces are at their strongest and highest … the winter solstice, the longest night of the year when the darkness is at its strongest … but also a moment of hope, as the light has started to return and the days grow longer.

I do spend a lot of money on Halloween … more than Christmas … but it also means I don’t go crazy either. Almost all the money I spend just goes to candies, chocolates and chips … the Halloween serving size … I’m not going to start going further than that. I also don’t spend much on decorations, I put up enough to make people and kids know I’m celebrating Halloween … and I decorate five or six real pumpkins. That’s it … I put on a sound system with scary music and Halloween songs and serve candy all night long.

Gives a whole new gravity to this time of year

Because they report the news and inform the public … their content just tends to have a four or five year lag compared to reality.

If they keep talking with all their hot air and raise the temp to about 175C … they could bake themselves into a cake

China closes the airspace over Taiwan

Has a different meaning to everyone when you change the country names

Profiteering in war … profiteering in peace … which will lead to more war… which will lead to more profiteering in war … repeat, repeat, repeat

It’s our modern day version of SNAKE OIL

The wealthy already got their Christmas bonus from the US government months ago

None of us individually truly leave a lasting legacy. Maybe some get to have their name repeated a little longer than others but that’s about it.

Everything that’s happened in human history happened because of communities of people … they might have had a leader but even the leader wouldn’t have made any of it happen without large groups of people. And every single one of those people had a small part to play in making it all happen.

We all have a small part to play during our lives and together all our small parts add up to great things.

Cuts off Frodos legs and arms anyway

Gives a whole new meaning to the dish … ‘Bangers and mash’