CurlyShavings

My maternal grandmother lived in Erie, Pennsylvania. I visited a number of times growing up (late 70s), but I only ever remember visiting in the summer.

For someone transported from the southern parts of Texas, Erie in the summertime seemed a bit chilly. I now live in Cleveland, less than one hundred miles south and west of Erie and there are times in the summer when I'm transported back. Back in time, back to Erie, back to the front and back yards of the house with the African violets on the tables by the chair and windows.

Today, for example, my youngest and I went for a walk around the block. It's been a cool summer and yet there's something about a couple of warm days followed by a cool one that brings out certain smells.

It's that standing on someone's sidewalk, smelling their grass grow. A particular type of short, weak grass that looks nice cropped low. It might even be the exposed dirt that an edged sidewalk shows next to that grass. It's that mix of oaks and maples and sycamores (with a spruce mixed in for good measure) cooling off in the evening breeze.

And there are sounds along with these smells. Sounds of cars a few blocks away, but none on your street. It's the voices of folks from a distance, talking with one another, greeting one another as they pass on the various sidewalk slabs: sandstone, concrete and blue stone.

But mostly it's the smells.

And I'm nine, all over again.

I received an original White Box Alcohol Stove for Christmas 2008. This model is approximately 2¼" tall and 2¼" in diameter. It holds approximately 3 ounces of fuel (either denatured alcohol or methyl alcohol) and can boil quite a bit of water with just those three ounces.

My initial experience with this stove was rather disappointing, since I hadn't fully read the excellent instructions that came with the stove. I didn't realize that "the fuel needs time to super heat itself and vaporize to work correctly." In hindsight, that should have been obvious since my other stoves (a WhisperLite Internationale and a two-burner Coleman) do much the same thing. In any event, I was unsuccessful and decided to head home to try another time.

After reading the instructions again, it became clear that I wasn't patient enough and that a second attempt was in order. This past weekend I got my chance.

With the stove on a flat, level, stable surface, I filled it with approximately 3 ounces of denatured alcohol from the local hardware store. Lighting it was easy and I could see why the instructions recommend dipping a twig into the fuel, lighting the twig and then using that to light the stove. It wouldn't be too hard to singe a finger or hand.

If I'd been following the instructions more closely, I would have used the small aluminum square that came with the stove to put under it, protecting the pressure-treated four-by-four. Or found a rock or packed dirt instead of the four-by-four. And technically, there should be no combustibles within a ten-foot radius of the stove.

But I was living dangerously and since I was the only one in camp at the time, I turned away for a few moments and turned back to find that the flame had settled down dramatically and was ready for my pot. (If I had to guess, I would guess that it was about a minute from the time I lit the stove to when it was ready. Next time, I'll time it.)

I have a 28 ounce Snow Peak pot which I only use for boiling water. I find that cleanup goes much faster if there's only a spork and a mug to wash.

The 28 ounces boiled rather quickly (again, I'll time it for you, next time) and I was soon brewing a morning mug of tea.

While the pot is a perfect size for my water boiling needs and it just so happens that I can pack the stove, windscreen, heat shield, 4 ounces of fuel and a couple of tea bags inside it, the pot's diameter is just short of ideal for the stove's 21 jets. It looks as though the flames are headed up the sides and not directly heating the bottom. I wonder if the White Box "SOLO" Stove (1.6" tall and perhaps a smaller diameter?) would heat only the bottom.

Snow Peak's 5" diameter pot has about the same volume and appears to be a little bit wider.

I have a few more things to try before I'm ready to head out again. I'd like to experiment with burn times per ounce of fuel along with how many ounces of water can be boiled. I'd like to see if a different diameter pot would speed up the already fast time-to-boil rates. And I'd like to find some methyl alcohol to see if there are any differences from the denatured alcohol.

Conclusion

It may be too early for me to give a raving review of this product. However, in my limited experience (I'll be sure to link any future experiences back to this page!), it lives up to the manufacturer's claims. It's fairly light, it burns denatured alcohol, it puts out a great quantity of heat and boils water quickly.

Hey, it's even made in the USA!

My Mountain Hardwear Airjet 3 has three types of seams: stitched, welded and glued. I received mine in December of 2003 and have used it extensively and carefully on many campouts. It serves me well with one exception—some of the glued seams have had the adhesive turn crumbly and I am returning it for warranty service.

Of course, that happened a few days before I was to use it on our August OA campout and I needed a tent. My nearly ten year-old daughter graciously offered me hers, a small, 2-man Eureka Tetragon 5, a tent she received as a gift in December 2008.

I was extremely grateful because staying in the cabin was going to cost a bit more. I was also grateful that we'd bought her such a sensible tent (and that it wasn't pink).

The Tetragon 5 may be small but it is sufficient—I had plenty of room for my sleeping bag and my gear. But first, the basics.

It sets up well, quickly and easily. We replaced upgraded the original stakes with some MSR GroundHog tent stakes and made sure the loops were reflective. We were expecting rain the next day so I made sure to get the tent set up tightly an a flat site with an ever-so-slightly slope. I was assigned Camp Beaumont's Ermer and while there is plenty of flat site, much of it leaves little scope to the imagination. However, I found a delightful spot with tall trees on one side and a little meadow on the other.

The evening started out warm with Beaumont's traditional mosquitoes begging to get in. The Tetragon 5's extensive mesh kept them at bay and still allowed the cooling breeze to get in. By morning, the breeze was quite cool but I didn't have the condensation problems I sometimes do with the Airjet 3's single wall design. There is plenty of room to sit up and change one's clothes. I'm not sure how I'd feel with a second person, though—we'd probably need to take turns.

The tent has two diagonal poles and two eyebrow poles for the fly. When properly staked out, there's a small vestibule for the front and a bit of an overhang for the back. The vestibule might be a misnomer since Eureka! calls it a "protected front entry". Suffice it to say that there's enough space for your boots to stay dry. Certainly not enough space for gear (backpack, etc.) outside.

Final thoughts

This seems to be a great tent for one person plus gear or two people whose gear is in the car (or, if camping in the back yard, in the house). I don't see two adults and their gear fitting in this tent. It seems to confirm my calculus that if you want a tent with room for gear, add one or two to the number of expected occupants to get the right fit.

Eureka! makes a great tent and I'm very glad my daughter is using this one. She is well-situated for family campouts with the Pack!

The Total Perspective Vortex is a device from the imagination of Douglas Adams. It was designed to give the viewer

just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here."

It occurred to me that we may not need to wait for a fairy cake to implement the Total Perspective Vortex. (Fairy cake, you'll remember, was necessary to extrapolate the whole of creation and then show all of it to the intended victim.) We don't need fairy cake because we have Google. The entirety of the known universe is stored in Google.

Why would I say something so preposterous? Well, if Google is our entry point to this universe, it doesn't really matter that a page isn't indexed because you're not likely to ever land on it. So for the purposes of this argument, Google is the known universe.

So, on one side, we've extrapolated the entire creation and into the other side, we plug YOU.

Go for it, you've done it before and you can do it again. Google your name. Your whole name, your name in "quotes", your nickname, whatever.

How many pages must you scroll through before finding a reference to YOU? Out of the more than one trillion pages in Google, how many of them refer to YOU?

Are YOU on the first page? Is there more than one YOU? Does the rest of the universe have plenty of source material about YOU?

And this is what we find:

The whole infinite Universe. The Infinite suns. The Infinite distances between them, and yourself. An invisible dot on an invisible dot. Infinitely small.*

Of course, there are other ways that Google implements the Total Perspective Vortex. Here's someone who thinks that Google has implemented a reverse Total Perspective Vortex using Google Earth. And here's another example from a different source.

And here's another example, this time, of someone who is knowingly creating a cosmos in which he (and his family) are the primary persons.

Wait. Didn't I just describe blogging in general?