I awoke the following morning in my drop dead gorgeous suite. Opening my eyes I lay there watching the fish swimming above me. What a novel idea, a fish tank surrounding the headboard of the bed, but then this is a dream and I can sleep anywhere I choose. Getting ready for the day took forever. I had brought what seemed to be a whole trunk of nothing but cameras. My 35mm Cannon 620 EOS was there, along with a pocket sized digital 14 mp. The weird thing(not all dreams are weird)about it was the array of antique cameras I had brought with me. I got the impression that what I was doing there was taking pictures of bygone days. Quite as though the age of the camera determined the period in history which I was photographing! But this was only a dream and none of that can really happen, yet.

I love sailing. I find it exciting and relaxing. Peaceful and challenging. So this is what I'm thinking about while the temperature drops to minus 15 and all of the water within several hundred miles is frozen solid. My grandfather told stories about his childhood when the folks in this neck of the woods would go out with horse drawn sleds and cut huge blocks of ice from the lakes for their ice houses(those are not houses built from ice)!!! Dug into the ground and built from stone these buildings would house the blocks of ice throughout the hot weather and provide cooling for food stuffs. About the only thing needed from town were the staples that could not be grown on the farm. Salt, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and several other items that were needed to make life on the "Great American Desert" possible. It always amazes me the lengths to which our pioneer ancestors would go to provide for their needs. On the other hand the natives lived here for thousands of years and needed nothing which the earth did not provide. Therein lies the paradox. When people are 'civilized' they depend on others to provide for them. When people are independent they need nothing from anyone else but to be left alone. I like sailing!