Caveman Barbecue: creating a fire by rubbing sticks together… sort of.
Jan finally got to try out the lowest of low-tech activities: making fire by rubbing sticks together. To make things more interesting, he invited over guy friends Joe, Brian, and John for a Caveman Barbecue. The plan was to spend an afternoon trying to make a fire in order to light a grill on which to cook dinner. Everyone’s families were invited for dinner, so there was some real pressure to actually get the fire lit. In the spirit of various survival shows, the general parameters were to try and make fire using only a pocketknife and materials that could easily be gather in the woods. From various Internet sources, it seemed like the bow drill was the more straightforward and reliable way to make the fire. Jan had Anya and Liya help him gather different pieces of wood on a recent camping trip and at a local park: the handhold, fireboard, spindle, a sapling for the bow, and various bits of bark and pine needles for tinder. It took a while to get set up, carve a good spindle, string the bow, etc. The first attempts produced nothing, but we tried changing things like using different pieces of wood or trying a stiffer bow. At one point we smelled smoke, but couldn’t see anything coming out of the fireboard (the big piece of wood on the ground we were drilling into). We eventually realized the smoke was coming out of the much smaller handhold one of us was holding in our hand. We put the handhold on the ground, and held the bigger piece of wood as a handhold, and moved on. It began to rain, so we moved into the garage. We eventually did get pretty good at generating enough friction to produce smoke and the hot wooden dust that eventually forms an ember. After many attempts, however, we began to feel like we might not have had the right kind of wood. Rather than give up, we decided to cheat. Setting aside our bow drill, we substituted a somewhat higher-tech drill: a cordless Makita hand drill. Brian jammed a stick into the chock, then drilled the stick into the fireboard. This worked rather better. Even cheating with a power drill, though, it was still remarkably hard to produce a concentrated lump of dust that was hot enought to form an ember. After many more tries, we finally had a clump of smoking hot dust that Jan tapped into the tinder bundle. Holding the bundle in his hands, Jan blew into it over and over again, and the dust finally began to burn as an ember. This still wasn’t enough to ignite the tinder, so Jan kept blowing on the ember, with help from everyone else. It seemed like nothing was going to happen, when suddenly the whole bundle burst into flames. Yay! We weren’t actually quite prepared for the appearance of actual fire, so we ended up dumping the flaming ball into a paper bag full of bits of wood, then throwing this outside into the driveway and tossing some more sticks on it. We finally managed to light a candle from this fire, and after several tries got the candle flame all the way around to the back of the house where, in the spirit of Olympic opening ceremonies, we could finally light the grill. All the families arrived shortly thereafter, and we could feed them hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on the hard-won fire. While we did have to cheat at a key point, we did get pretty far by hand, and were able to follow through on our own. In the end, we all felt like we had learned a bunch about how to make a fire, to the point where the right wood and a bunch of persistence could see the job through.
Caveman Barbecue video: tinder bundle bursts into flame
We hosted a playdate for Liya’s incoming SCDS kindergarten class at Madison Park–and the weather actually held. There was a band that started playing around dinnertime, and they were pretty good.
Anya made a friend while we were there. At dinner time, Anya told Liya: “When you make a new friend, the first thing you have to do is… introduce them to your mommy.”
Jan took Anya canoeing again on Union Bay. This time we were looking for two geocaches. It was a sunny day, and we saw several great blue herons. We reached the location of the first cache, but couldn’t find it anywhere. The second one appeared to be near or under a small dock off the wetland boardwalk. We couldn’t find that one either. While we were there, we figured we might as well clean up some of the floating cans and other garbage around the dock. In the course of reaching some of the more inaccessible garbage, Jan saw the location of the geocache.
1st grade party/playdate at the Morgan’s house on Bainbridge Island. Beautiful place, although it rained most of the afternoon. Anya, Liya, and the other girls running around outside didn’t seem to notice.
Sabriya has developed an unfortunate mealtime habit of using her food-caked hands to pat her head and rub her hair. This evening she had peach glop all of her hands, and rubbed it into her hair like shampoo.
Sabriya likes to walk! She holds onto the Radio Flyer walker wagon and gets going. Zoom!
Liya’s 5th Birthday! Angel and Leah came over to drop off cool chi pao presents from China for all three girls, and they stayed for dinner. E-moon made a huge bowl of bi-fun, which Bree liked too. After dinner we all had cupcakes–even Sabriya, who ended up completely covered in chocolate cupcake and frosting. After dinner, Chris called from San Francisco to wish Liya a happy birthday, and Anya and Liya joined him on Skype for a session of “What are you doing?” improv.
Birthday party for Liya at 3-2-1 Bounce in Bellevue.
Nice but breezy day–feels more like fall than August. Jan took Anya and Liya for a walk all the way to the little dock at the north end of Madison Park. We looked for and successfully located the geocache hidden there. Since Anya had been there for the first one, Liya had the privilege of removing it from its hiding place, and we traded a small butterfly toy for a little ladybug toy. Before heading back we picked blackberries, which were still pretty good. Unfortunately Anya ended up standing somewhere where ants crawled on her feet, and she was quite certain the sharp pain she felt was ants (and not the blackberry thorns that lay everywhere).
A story written by Anya and Liya, August 2007:
Pip goes up.
Pip goes down.
Pip climbs all the way up to the top of the hil.
Pip looks down.
Pip falls down.
Pip lands on the ground with a bump.
Pip gets hurt.
Pip looks up.
Pip says, “I will never climb up this hill again. This hill is too dangerous.”
The End
Geoching with A-kon in the Arboretum. He found the first one! Found three altogether. Stopped off for some blackberry picking on the way home.