This is my favorite weekend of the whole year, because everyone and their brother comes up to the lake: there are ten cars on every piece of property; dogs everywhere; the sounds of children playing; the pop of pellet guns being fired recreationally in the woods; tents pitched, campers chocked; fire pits blazing, the smell of hot dogs and hamburgers in the air. Yesterday, there was even a vintage World War II airplane doing faux strafing runs on the lake-- swooping way up to great heights, wing-over, then down again, skimming mere feet off the water, big plumes of smoke released to the cheers of the swimmers and fishermen nearby.

When I see data like this, it's no surprise to me. I'd be interested to see urban-to-rural charts. When I bought this property in 2016, the lake was an abandoned place during the week, only to liven up during weekends. Now? It's practically a small suburb, with cars parked on gravel driveways year 'round. Everyone has done what I've done: "Why not just move there permanently?" With the kind of growth the nearby city and surrounding area has been having, I wouldn't be surprised if in twenty years this area looked like an outer-ring Twin Cities suburb, for good and for bad.

In other news, I'm leaning towards building a new PC this fall. For architecture, it will be a toss-up between Intel's "Meteor Lake" and AMD's "Ryzen 7000"; for GPU, it will probably be an "RTX 4080", in spite of the disappointing TDP numbers. Of course, I could scrap this plan: similar to my plans for a "GR Supra", there is no practical purpose to it-- my daughter is getting braces soon, and I need to soon pay for a new deck as well. So we'll see... one interesting thing is, given my age and Lefty regulation the "Supra" would be the "car of forever", while due to economics a new computer would be the "PC of forever".

Finally, my son is really interested in the concept of "liminal spaces". A couple of days ago, he made a custom Minecraft texture back, so he could re-create "the backrooms":