I hope, babar pal, that you're taking this in the same spirit of jolly good fun that I am. It's in my deepest, most ingrained nature to respond to a challenge. I apologize for the quality of this photo. It was taken with film, and copied from a CD provided by the local 1-hr processor at the grocery store. I'm a tent camper, but not in the ordinary sense of the word.. When my wife saw the camping rig I was making for myself, she exclaimed, "Hey, that's pretty clever, but we are going to need a trailer or something to carry our stuff!" So then I had to build a trailer. We are old people, and have come to enjoy sleeping off the ground, strowing our luggage out of the way below the cots. We like to keep our perishables in a cooler box rather than an ice chest, but also like to have an ice chest for drinks and juice. We finally added a kitchen sink with two-piece cabinet/stand to our gear, mostly as a joke, but we do find it very convenient for washing dishes. I suppose you "rough-it" campers wash dishes? This arrangement shows our old 8x10 cabin tent (I'm the one who likes to stand up to put on my clothes). You may be able to determine from the static appearance of this photo that our most serious problem with the wind on this trip was difficulty lighting the propane lantern. After a trip to Big Bend the following year, my wife requested for her birthday the 10x14 "apartment house" which we now use, and you could see if you take a look at my birthday trip 2008 sets. This typical four-day camp is nestled in the rocks against the north wall of the tent-camp canyon, across from the restrooms and dumpster (we're old, luxury-oriented campers, pal). There can be more to say about this camp, but I'll save it, hoping to be able to work it into the comments, if any.

This was cool. A piece by Joseph Cornell. The story, from the City Journal: The few Cornell boxes that are on public view in the city have no obvious Manhattan in them at all. Taglioni’s Jewel Casket of 1940 is the Museum of Modern Art’s most remarkable Cornell—a small brown chest lined with blue velvet, to be set on a table and peered into like a cigar box. Taglioni was a famous nineteenth-century ballerina. (Cornell was obsessed with nineteenth-century ballerinas, and the Romantic era in general.) Neat rows of glass ice cubes rest in cutouts like strange musical instruments in a plush case. Inside the lid, a necklace of glass stones; within the arc of the necklace, this inscription in delicate white type: “On a moonlit night in the winter of 1835, the carriage of MARIE TAGLIONI was halted by a Russian highway man, and that enchanting creature commanded to dance for the audience of one upon a panther’s skin spread over the snow beneath the stars. From this actuality arose the legend that to keep alive the memory of this adventure so precious to her, TAGLIONI formed the habit of placing a piece of artificial ice in her jewel casket or dressing table where, melting among the sparkling stones, there was evoked a hint of the atmosphere of the starlit heavens over the ice-covered landscape.” There is more to the box than I have described (and, like most of Cornell, it is indescribable anyway), but its aura is quintessential Cornell: a dazzling wistfulness and intense melting beauty that recall the slow movements of late Schubert piano sonatas and perhaps nothing else.