Toward Camelot by the service road.

[Dear Outdoor Products Manufacturer:]

Last week I bought one of your 10L water filters for a trip with my kids and dog up to the [mountains]. We spent five nights out at a camp with no potable water and I was relying on your product to provide us with drinking and cooking water. We were pulling our water from [a really pretty] Lake, which is a very clean high-altitude lake with little sediment, so it should not have been a particularly trying situation for the filter.

While the filter worked reasonably well at first (but was a total pain in the butt to backflow) by the time I ran the last load through it last night, it was taking 1.75 HOURS to filter a bagful of water. I had been running about three bagfuls per day, so with a brand new unit this should have been well within the filter's capacity.

Since I was testing this out for potential use by [my camping group], I am particularly disappointed. While so far as I can tell the filter worked, in that we haven't gotten intestinal parasites, messing around with this thing (which was supposed to be super easy) turned into the biggest gear nuisance all week.

It is possible that this filter works better if one has a large syringe or compatible water bladder to force the backflow process. I had a noncompatible Osprey water bladder and two one-liter Nalgene bottles, and I was more than an hour's drive away from anywhere that could have sold me something like that (and that would have been out of the vet supply section at the local farm store). If you are selling this as a complete backcountry water filtration system and it needs parts that are not included in the box, YOU NEED TO WRITE THAT ON THE BOX IN BIG LETTERS SO WE CAN BUY THOSE PARTS BEFORE WE GO SOMEWHERE REMOTE. Instead you have packaged this item with diagrams where someone is doing all the things I am doing (I read the directions before I left!) and yet unlike the jovial man in your diagrams, I am holding a water filter and a half-full Nalgene bottle above my head with water dripping down my arm (because I am air-gapping the lid of the Nalgene bottle since otherwise I can't get water down the fing water filter tubing) for twenty minutes. While this is a great shoulder workout and sort of tolerable in August, in October it would be pretty dreadful.

Also, the little carabiner you package it with is too small to easily hook both D-rings. I ended up subbing in a better carabiner. You should sell this with a larger carabiner.

Basically, I love the idea of this system (I can hook it into the spout in the top of the two-gallon Rubbermaid cooler and fill that in one go, which is the killer app for [group] camping) and I was looking forward to buying several of them for my [group] to use, but after a week in the woods with this thing, I am reduced to writing super cranky notes to your service department. I want a filter that does what this is designed to do! But right now this filter doesn't do those things and if I can't make it work, given my overall level of outdoors and mechanical competence, your odds of doing someone an actual injury with this piece of equipment are higher than I think you should be comfortable with.

We went off today and had a very pleasant outing to celebrate Herself's birthday, which is coming up next week -- she decided that what she most wanted to do this year was have a day at the zoo with her brother. Their father and I were permitted to escort them.

The zoo trip was about like zoo trips usually are. As evening fell softly over the zoo, the animals retired to their various barns and the humans began to contemplate their dining options. C. and the children were off looking at the sea lions while I watched the sea otter quietly swim laps around his pool. The otter went back and forth, back and forth, right under where I was standing. It was really neat, I've never been that close to one before.

And then the otter, rather nonchalantly, began sucking his own dick. Otter penises, I learned today, are bright red when erect, which really stands out against brown and tan fur.

A man and his son wandered up as I stood there, entirely bemused.

"Dad, Dad, what's the otter doing?"

"Oh, I think he's got some food there, you know they open up their food on their tummies...er, ah, um. No, uh, I think it's a toy he's playing with. Yeah. Hey, look, there are the sea lions, let's go see those."

C. walked back, at about this point, and I giggled maniacally and he pulled out his camera and filmed the otter -- he says it's because he knew I would have to tell people about it and he wants them to believe me. I may have made some remarks about furry porn. *cough*

Anyhow, the otter finished up what he was doing and took a few more turns around the pool -- victory laps, if you will. A woman and her daughter walked by.

"Oh, isn't he cute!"

"He sure is. Look how relaxed he looks!"

I swear, I'm so good, I totally did not explain why the otter looked so relaxed. I want points for that, people.

I know it's been a rough weekend for some of us, queridas, and should this have been the case for you, this is me shoving love and fond regards through the router in your direction, should I not have had the chance to do so individually just yet.

For me personally it was a nice long weekend -- I got Friday off too. I spent Saturday up in Portland, and managed miscellaneous errands and meetings (and a little holiday shopping) as well as a lovely dinner with sanguinity and grrlpup. It is always adorable to watch people who're not me doing the "we're very married indeed" thing, since usually that's my schtick.

Yesterday I lounged around and read the OTW hoo-bah and the second volume of the Finder compendium, which is fresh out and y'all should buy and read it pretty much yesterday. C. and I had tickets to that Dawes/Blitzen Trapper show for the evening, because it's my 35th birthday in a couple of days and I said I wanted songs and, um, indulgences of a personal nature to celebrate the occasion.

We mostly went in to see Dawes, and they did a good job with their material; it's mellow harmony-intensive stuff with an organ in the background and yeah, they're an LA band and they sound it. Which is charming, frankly, if that's the sort of thing you grew up with and like (they remind me of a slightly-more-retro version of the Wallflowers, to be honest -- it's that same westside sound).

But what blew us both away was Blitzen Trapper. Which, yeah, they're just fine on records, they're a Portland band so we hear them on local radio pretty regularly, and what's not to like about a group that sings about dragons and the Green River Killer and werewolves? Live, though, they are a lot better than they are recorded. They're confident and enthusiastic and comfortable together and everyone's playing lots of different instruments and...yeah, we were impressed by their musicianship. And also how much fun they seemed to be having. That's just great to watch.

Anyhow, if you get the chance to see them, you want to. I know we'll be there next time they're through here. Shoot, I even bought one of their very ugly t-shirts.

Do I want to go to Wiscon this year?

No, I don't do cons. But I keep thinking about doing this one anyhow, and I have an offer of room space from someone I think I'd get along with just fine over a weekend, and maybe I should suck it up, overcome my fear of non-work-based social interactions, and go.

If I want to go to Wiscon this year, do I want to sign up for panels, or is that just going to up my stress level so immensely that I will not have an enjoyable social time? This is actually the more-time-sensitive part of the discussion, because if one is going to be part of programming one has to tick the tickyboxes by the end of the day today. But a lot of me feels, after looking through the panel topics, like the panels in which I could be an informed participant would be...well, like painting a big target on my chest and inviting people to poke me with sticks. Which is the kind of social act I'm not usually willing to do for recreational purposes (work-related and community-work-related purposes, sure, all the time, but for anything less than that? Not so much.)

I have toyed with the idea of taking Herself but frankly on third or fourth or fifth thought, I think I am mistrustful enough about cons as a social endeavor that I am unwilling to take my minor child into a con environment that I haven't been to before that's far enough out of town that we can't go home ahead of schedule.