In my youth, this was the month college students returned to their dorms for another year of spartan living. My college was all-male, which probably accounted for much of its plainness. The double rooms came with two desks, two chairs, and two cots or a bunk bed.  Read more

As September kicks off (high school football is back!), we are still enjoying the long daylight of summer, 13 hours on the 1st, but will lose more than two minutes of light each day as our tilted orbit moves us steadily into fall’s growing darkness. Fall begins at 3:21 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the 22nd, the Fall Equinox, the moment when our nearby star is directly over our planet’s equator. Read more

Remember folding paper maps? I suppose in the age of GPS, most of us don’t think of them, and if we do, it’s to recall just what a pain they could be. Unless you pulled off the road, they were impossible for the driver to use. If your shotgun partner was your navigator, he’d take up most of the front seat unfolding a map. Then he’d have to partially refold it to highlight just that part of the country you really needed to see. And of course, he’d have to shake it out to full size to begin refolding it. It wouldn’t take many openings and closings before it would begin to tear along the creases, and that would create new problems. Read more

Although the official 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics are over, medals are just now being awarded in the Schupp household for their personal Olympic competitions. Without further ado, below are the categories and results. Read more

Television commercials make rustic tent camping look like such fun. The weather is picture perfect. The adults are smiling. Children are laughing while toasting marshmallows on sticks and making s’mores. Everyone is decked out in fashionable outdoor clothing. And the tent and all camping gear is brand-new and top quality. By the time the commercial concludes, you just want to pack up the car and hit the road. Time to take the whole family to one of those picturesque locations and commune with the great outdoors! Read more

Some summer I am going to take a REAL vacation, where I laze about and read and travel and do nothing more strenuous than feed the dog and mow the grass. I might not even plant a garden. I haven’t had a summer like that since I was a very small child. Between the home garden and the farmwork and Daddy’s sawmill and working on neighbors’ farms, there were no summers off. Read more