America missed the sword era. By the time colonial America got started, firearms dominated battlefields. We had Bowie knives and tomahawks – arguably high on the coolness factor, but they’re not swords. There were cavalry sabers, but they weren’t main battlefield weapons for the average soldier. The romance of the sword just doesn’t exist much in our own history.
Fortunately we have history nerds and renaissance festivals!
I was a latecomer to these. West Texas festivals were more about the western pioneering cowboy/homesteading/Indian wars. There were plenty of cap guns and lassos to be had, but no swords. More’s the pity.
But now I live in the Midwest, where European roots are celebrated. And that includes medieval weapons! Yay! A history nerd myself, I can finally immerse in the bizarre fantasy of brutal hack and slash warfare, without actually participating.
And the internet has made this pursuit so much more feasible than the first time I convinced my father to order a sword online from a random website. Hey, I didn’t have a credit card yet. And the internet was more innocent then. Now I do, and I can buy things myself. The difficult part now is convincing myself.
Here he is, the old man who lent me his credit card. Now we’re persuading him to buy wizard apparel.
Of course, that first sword was a cheap stainless steel non-functional wall decoration meant for ignorant dorks…like myself, circa 2001. Now I have a better idea of what to look for. And while I’m aware of the large festival price markup, I wanted the experience of examining and buying a hand-forged sword, in person, from a weapon vendor. So I did.
From Legacy Forge.
And if one is to buy an overbuilt sword guaranteed for sport combat, it only makes sense to go Viking.
It did not come sharpened, which an evening with the bench grinder and whetstone solved. And to which the manufacturer cautioned against on their business card, blaming me for any upcoming stupid injuries. That’s fair.
Earlier this year I saw an increase in my FICO score. Because I’m awesome. Or lucky. Or boring. Or some combination therein of uninteresting life choices that has led to good credit. I’ve been out of the dating game for a long time, and with zero interest to return, but I wonder if people put minimum credit scores on their dating apps requirement list, much as I hear they do for the oft-discussed educational or…height requirements. Didn’t find that 6’8″ bodybuilder M.D. with an 850 FICO in your hometown who responded with a match request? Because there aren’t good men anymore? Reddit’s a funny place.
But my own short-comings notwithstanding, I did finally manage a perfect FICO, even despite my lack of M.D. status!
No longer must I endure the taunting of factors that might be lowering my score. At least not for the moment.
Owing to the combination of revised gardening techniques and tons of rain, my prize tomato for the year turned out to not be the usual first fruit the vine sets. The brandwine churned out many others, and one of particular note exceeded my premature title-granting. This, as it turns out, is the prize tomato of 2026:
20.1 oz! Much bigger indeed.
Here’s the recap:
2019: 24.8oz
2021: 16.8oz
2023: 19.3oz
2024: 14.2oz
2025: 17.2oz
So while still not the record, it came much closer.
…we returned to the cottage this year. The building itself aside, the general area has taken on a new vibe. The “you can’t go home again” phrase is applicable here. The combination of time and place with its distinct parameters is simply now non-existent. There are no longer cellular dead zones. Getaway nooks on the lake have been replaced with AirBnBs and permanent residences whose gauche edifices offend the very essence of what a small lake neighborhood in Wisconsin should be, and once was. Family-owned and operated supper clubs still exist, but are losing ground to the invasion of chain restaurants. The area isn’t becoming gentrified, but rather being ground slowly into sameness by the inevitable march of investment capitalism. The cottage resists the onslaught for the time being, though as a result it now also exists out of time – the present one. It has a future, but it will be vastly different from the memories of Liz’s childhood.
However, that’s not to say such a fate is all necessarily bad. I have great hopes for its future, even if its present state is a work in progress. It needs more manpower, but I myself am too far away to regularly contribute, and when I am there I hesitate to make any executive decisions out of fear that I lack the background knowledge to do so safely, e.g. the electrical.
Oh well. I’ll do what I can. This year was pulling Romex and ductwork through the ceiling.
How old is that switch?
This is partly why I’m afraid to touch the electrical.
I hate fiberglass insulation soooo much.
But there’s a bathroom duct at long last! Just waiting for a fan to be wired.
And a kid’s old enough to do the needed yardwork! Just don’t let her touch a hedge trimmer.
Sadly, events conspired against enjoying any outdoor activities. Even if the stairs to the waterfront were completed to allow safe transit, which they aren’t yet (that’s my sister-in-law’s project), the heat index for the week hit triple-digits. And even if I were willing to tolerate that level of discomfort, fish wouldn’t be biting in those conditions either. So I paid the Wisconsin DNR $45 for nothing. You’re welcome, Wisconsin.
Then Canada started burning again.
I had never before been under “Hazardous” AQI conditions. I also haven’t been near an erupting volcano. I imagine the experiences are similar, with the exception that Wisconsin’s flatness precludes any incidences of pyroclastic flows. We didn’t auto-ignite and get buried under ash for future archaeologists to discover with plaster molds, but that fate would have seemed kind compared to the omnipresent suffocation we endured.
Look at that haze
But any day not working beats…any day working. There were some highlights. Relaxing, some sightseeing:
And yes – a genuine supper club.
To try a new place, the girls decided on Sky Club. The claim of this place, which I found to be an odd bragging point posted on the signage, was that they had the first salad bar. Even if that were true, I would still be indifferent because it’s a frigging salad bar. Whenever a restaurant offers a salad bar, I decline, because I didn’t go out to eat to have someone send me off to a counter with chopped lettuce next to a bowl of ranch on ice and make me mix the two myself. It’s very similar to my disdain for breakfast restaurants: 3000% markup on eggs and pancakes (water, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, buttermilk, butter, syrup). But, when in Rome, right? Or Wisconsin, rather.
In terms of salad bars, it wasn’t too bad. Different greens mixes, their own greasy bacon dressing for the spinach, cheese sauce (which didn’t make much sense aside from it being Wisconsin), and a quivering gelatinous bunt-pan mold of unknown ingredients. The latter itself made the experience worthwhile, just for the novelty. It turned out to be a quiche with chicken organs. It certainly gave us a good laugh. But even by my standards…why?
The kid, bravely giving it a try – chicken organ quiche in center bottom.
Then there was a trivia night at some other random place. We did reasonable. I hate sports.
Any place with food in Wisconsin, if not a chain, is a supper club.
And there were deer, for which every driver should watch out for. The deer we passed were noticeably more street-wise than their Ohio counterparts, I’ll note. One in particular repeatedly looked both ways before crossing. Apparently it had been paying attention in gradeschool. It probably knows about stranger danger too.
And they’d have to be street-wise when albino! We have albino squirrels in Ohio and they don’t last long, and there were several deer up there still kickin’.
Is it difficult at all to hunt deer in Wisconsin?
Wisconsin just didn’t seem to like us this year. And the sky agreed, as we passed out of smoke and into Illinois’ clear air, with the universal symbol of positivity:
God’s promise to never again burn Canada to the ground?
But Wisconsin didn’t stop there. As a lingering reminder that we weren’t welcome there, the night we got home Liz suffered an allergic reaction to the air and had to spend the night in the ER.
She has an epi-pen now.
There’s good family up there, but without an emotional attachment to the place itself, it’s only a symbol now. And having been denied the outdoor activities that I’d normally partake in, combined with the kid’s increasing reluctance for any activities with her parents, the primary assets of the cottage’s location were, for me at least, rendered moot. Once the kid leaves home, it may have renewed purpose for Liz and I, but that’s down the road and, unfortunately, an unknown.
No, not a concealed carry license, although that would be appropriate. I speak instead of America’s 250th anniversary.
Outside a momentary “oh that’s neat” thought, I didn’t see much in the way of gushing over this momentous occasion. Unlike the Bicentennial, which Boomers constantly talked about in a way that compared it to Woodstock, this event went by as more or less a standard holiday. I assume this is because younger generations are alive for it, which removes the “I was there for it and you weren’t” retro-FOMOism bit. Still, a few found the time to complain about events being more drone-heavy, with tech starting to supplant explosives. Remember when more people were killing themselves with fireworks and causing massive property damage? Those were the days. We were a tougher generation.
A lack of skin grafts notwithstanding, here’s some photos of the Easement Acres celebration:
Product stickers I’ve received, place on my cooler. Capitalism! America!
Burgers!
Family!
Drones!
Not a firework, but a road flare. Because I never lit one before and it seemed like a good excuse to use one.
