Harry Potter and toastites
A bottle of good merlot while camping is a wonderful thing. Luckily my son-in-law Erik’s Dad, Rocky Tuttle, is a wine guy, namely, he studies the stuff. While my family was visiting Annie and Erik a couple of months ago in 29 Palms, California, Rocky was also visiting from Arizona and provided the wine for a barbecue we had at our cabin at the 29 Palms Inn. He bought some inexpensive (about $10 a bottle) Columbia-Crest wine from the local grocery store. It was extremely good. I am a merlot guy, so I know. The wine was 2004 Columbia-Crest Merlot, but it must also say “Grand Estates” on the label. I brought along two bottles for this camping trip.
Unfortunately I couldn’t open the bottles. The cork was just too tight. Luckily, I have a 
15-year-old son, Jake, who is immensely powerful, so he opened them after a bit of effort.
This has been a very relaxing camping trip. Lenie has taken to reading the boys Harry Potter’s 7th book during the day because they are within a hundred pages of the end of this 759-page book, so I’ve had lots of time to just think. I think J. K. Rowling will be remembered just like Shakespeare, who was also very popular in his own time. We know from the history that people flocked to Shakespeare’s plays, especially his comedies, and now we read him hundreds of years later.
Hopefully, the language won’t change as much in the future as it did between Shakespeare’s time and now. Shakespeare was at the beginning of 
modern English, inventing many of the words and phrases we now take for granted, but we can still understand him with the help of a good English teacher or a guide. But our modern English is evolving quickly, at least as quickly since Shakespeare’s time. Isn’t that weird? The language we speak today is changing so much that we probably will have difficulty understanding Harry Potter a few centuries from now. If we let some teachers from the inner cities have their way, we won’t be able to understand some of our citizens a few decades from now.
Rocky Tuttle, by the way, is much more than a wine officionado. He is Gold Beach High 
School’s greatest football star, prominently displayed in its Hall of Fame. He got a full football scholarship to Idaho State, then got an offer to try out for the Green Bay Packers in his senior year. He said ”no” and decided to pursue a career in banking. I asked him if he regrets that decision, and he said he didn’t. “I realized I was simply finished with football,” he told me. He ran a 4.4 forty in college. That’s fast!
We’re eating good while camping. One of my favorite snacks is a toastite made from apples we picked from our own trees at home and blackberries we picked while here. Sandwiched between two pieces of whole wheat bread, it’s very healthy, besides being delicious. I also 
sprinkle on a bit of cinnamon sugar. We spray the insides of the toastiter with Pam, but any oil will do. Otherwise the bread sticks to the toastiter. They also cook quick in the fire pit, so you have to check them often or they’ll burn.
The boys make a sour candy from the unripe blackberry kernels. They just break them out and carry them around in their pockets. I tried some: very good but very sour.
