Summer workers, some are not

While the installer from the phone company is stringing a phone line across a mosquito-laden swamp, the guy from the heating company is making the final connections on our gas range, and my father is learning how to set up voice dialing on his new cell phone, I'll be trying to get something that looks like a day's worth of work at the camp. Think it'll happen? Me neither.

This week we learned that lightning hit a tree in a neighbor's yard at the lake. This is the second strike in a few years. I'm not glad it's them, but I'm glad it's not us, too. One time we were expecting company at the camp. My mother had laid out the food on a table in the middle of the room. Lightning blew out a lighting fixture overhead, exploding the light bulbs and spraying the food with broken glass. We liked the people who were coming to visit, so we threw the food away.

The camp is at the edge of what was, a 100 years ago, a farm. There are still pieces of barbed wire along the back edge of the property. Lightning hit a tree, travel down toward the ground, jumped on the barbed wire, ran the length of the wire and knocked some boards off of the back of the sauna.

In Massachusetts, you have Cambridge and Amherst. In California, you have Berkeley. Coloradans, jumping up and down to catch the attention of coast-to-coast flights, shout out, "Hey, you want loopy. We got loopy right here." Hofu, human-flesh-flavored tofu.

Happy 1st birthday, Russell.