Pacific Northwest Gardening: The visit to Dragonfly, Second trip., 0 by

wrote:
Here is the Devil's Club, and here is an article telling about this great plant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Club

I imagine that if you don't need healing before you encounter Devil's club, you certainly will afterwards.

Airsoft is the new paintball. I think it's mostly an American thing. Everyone else in the world knows how much we love guns in the good old U.S of A. We indoctrinate our children early. Airsoft guns shoot little plastic BB's. They are harmless if you wear eye protection. But some of them look very real, and at hour house we have a bit of a problem with that. But Andrew is really interested in the historical reinactments that happen in the airsoft community, so this weekend, Memorial day, he spent two days out in the mountains all dressed up in a WWII uniform, participating in a reinactment of the Battle of Normandy. They camped in wwII tents, they ate 'c rations', they studied the battle plan, trained for a day, then reinacted the battle with as much historical accuracy as possible. Many of the guys are veterans, or active duty military. Personally, if they have been on an actual battle field, I don't know how they can stand participating in this kind of reinactment. They have sound effects, pyrotechnics, helicopters, jeeps, etc. Supposedly it sounds very real. I imagine none of the vets suffers from PTSD or they wouldn't be able to stand it. The younger guys learn much from the older ones (probably not always things I would want Andrew to learn, but that's how it goes when a kid is 16). I took a bunch of photos while Andrew was getting into his uniform. Here's a link to a photobucket site where I stashed them. You will see a few things that give the date away here and there - like the sargent who is holding a digital camera. Otherwise, it's hard to know when the photos were taken. Andrew learns a whole lot about history participating in these events. And afterwards, he probably gets really tired of me inserting reminders about how different this is from a real battlefield, and how people did actually die and worse. But I consider it my duty to remind him. Being the parent of a boy is a very interesting experience.

http://s292.photobucket.com/albums/mm4/Pixydish58/Andrew Air...
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