A Lazy Saturday at the End of June. . .

A sleepy first half of the weekend here at Totleigh. Warmer and quite humid ahead of an approaching cool front here in Mid-Michigan. Perfect for yet another pair of chino shorts an a seersucker shirt -- tucked in of course -- with the usual leather deck shoes and ribbon belt. Otherwise, not much accomplished beyond a page or so of writing and monkeying around with audio settings for an upcoming podcast episode.

However, I was not completely useless yesterday! I made a huge fruit salad for dinner, which the Grand Duchess and I enjoyed a short while later at the table on the back porch. The Young Master, as is his wont on Saturday evenings, took his dinner on a tray in the TV room upstairs where he whiled away a couple of hours on Flight Simulator, flying some sort of commercial airliner to some destination across the Atlantic or Pacific.

I would have loved that sort of technology at about nine or 10 way back during the late 1970s, aka The Stone Age. As it is, my sister and I spent the better part of a summer pretending we were 747 pilots after an article on the plane appeared in National Geographic, which, coincidentally, followed a three-week visit to our uncle in England via TWA. And of course we flew to and from London-Heathrow on a 747-200.

Once stateside again, we took over the front room of the summer kitchen just beyond the back door of our grandparents' house in southeastern Pennsylvania and turned it into our own flight simulator. Over a couple of days, we fixed up the space with several large sheets of cardboard on which we drew various and sundry cockpit details and the windshield, using Legos to model the throttles, yokes, and various other physical controls. We also commandeered a couple of captain's chairs from the sideyard.

We must have done that for two months easy. It was an absolute blast, and my sister, at nine years old, was the most hilarious copilot/flight engineer/head stewardess/obnoxious passenger you have ever met. We kept each other in stitches for two months playing quite happily without any blinking, chirping personal electronic devices. 1977. What a summer it was!

-- Heinz-Ulrich

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Four Little Words. . .

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