It’s Friday night and the salads for the first Tailgate are chilling, the tea is made, the coolers are clean, and the corned beef and brisket are sliced– thanks to Kat– and so what else I’m I going to do?

If you are among the randomly chosen readers who are seeing new content here, bless your hearts. I do not want to disappoint.

If you are among the randomly chosen readers who are not seeing new content in a timely fashion, this will catch you up– someday.

The good news is that Kat and Tony are here on the Farm, and that they are very smart people who will not be un-smarted by caching glitches. So stay tuned.

Let’s get to new content, shall we?

We have a two-overlapping-pronged long weekend things going on. Mr. Big Food and I are cooking for the tailgate. Kat & Tony are here retrieving their stuff out of storage in S’vegas (turns out it costs less to store stuff in S’vegas than in FLA).

Kat & Tony have been traveling the world the last few years. And now, here they are on the Farm. During Tailgate Cooking Weekend.

A vignette that captures what life is like right now.

All of The Girls are Nature’s Buddies. They all like to go plunking around in the woods. Kat left all of her fancy photography equipment here. And so re-armed with her camera, some pruners, my phone in the event of a bearcat attack (she has no service here), and sprayed with Deep Woods Off, she went off to explore the watershed that feeds the lake. To The Summit. Keep Walking. Turn Right where the pile of old carpet is. Keep the pines to the right and left, follow the deciduous trees.

She returned some time later with this little bouquet, a lovely piece of chard wood, some photos of tiny frogs, and a piece of mineral / rock. It was about a cubic inch– maybe less. Irregularly shaped.

What is this rock?

Neither my various rock identifying books, nor the internet, were of much help. We didn’t have enough information about the rock’s properties. I swear to God, Kat spent time working on this. “Mom. Where’s the strongest magnet you have?”

I suggested we might discover the … dangit… what’s the word that is the same thing… MASS. I suggested we might discover the mass of the stone, given its volume. That sent us on a real journey down measurement lane. I am pleased to announce that, while we saw no point in actually doing it, we figured out that we could use the 10ml micro-beakers and the pipettes in the storeroom to determine the amount of water that the stone displaced, thereby determining its volume. You remember. At sea level, 1 cubic cm of water has a volume of 1 ml and a mass of 1 gram. Surely we could work that to our advantage.

It was about here that we went to Dollar General to pick up a few things.

Not to slight Tony,

We’ve known him for a considerable time.

In other news, SIL Joran The J-Man is babysitting Grandson ‘Phen. ‘Phen could not be in better hands.

J– I did share that pic around the picnic table. It’s awesome.