camping my life away...

It's not quite as snowy now, as it's mid-July, but this is Mt. Shasta, which at 14,162ft (4,312m) is the second largest volcano in the Cascade mountain range, only a few hundred feet shorter than Mt. Rainier (14,410/4,392) up by Seattle. At the Mendocino Triple Junction, the San Andreas runs out to sea to make room for the Juan de Fuca plate to jam in between the Pacific and the North American Plates, and it is that action of the Juan de Fuca plate subducting under the North American that caused these giant mountains to form -- Lassen, Hood, St. Helens, Rainier, Baker, Adams, Glacier, Jefferson, the Three Sisters, Crater Lake, and of course, Shasta.

The town in the picture is called Mt. Shasta City, and it's where I sit right now, in an internet cafe, getting my net.fix. I'll have to go back to camp in a little bit (the trip was ostentatiously for the purpose of getting jillcaligirl to print her genealogy stuff. But I can log in too.)

It's a little harder, the campout this year, because we have all the relatives that my great-grandparents left behind in Minnesota, people like my Uncle Peanut and Uncle Junior, and their families. And if you ever hear jrenken do his Minnesota Accent, well, I was listening to my relatives talk, and my first thought is "Ohmigod, Cal nailed it."

My mom is still being annoying at times, and she gets frustrated when we don't leap to attention, but that's normal. And I got sunburned, but that's pretty normal too.

Oh yeah, I meant to mention and didn't. Mom turned one yesterday. That is, it's been a year since her stem-cell bone marrow transplant. We survived the first year, and now if we could just stop the arsenic related problems, we'd be doing really well. :)

Anyway, having fun. It turns out that SMS doesn't reach me as well, either in Mt. Shasta City or out at Lake Siskiyou where I'm staying, so my phone is just a phone. Blah.