Here’s the view from our tent flap last weekend. Notice the little girl and puppy footprints from a weekend filled with digging in the sand, playing in the water, and enjoying a campfire. One last weekend sleeping under the stars before the weather cools.

Today, dear hearts, let’s dabble in Dolbear’s Law.

Oh, no—don’t run off!

Dolbear’s Law is neither as lofty nor as boring as you might think (c’mon, now, you know me better than that).

Forget gavels, girls, and take the hint:

Mind you, the clue is not so much “Jiminy” as “cricket.”

That’s right—Dolbear’s Law concerns crickets. More specifically, it reveals the relationship between air temperature and the rate at which crickets chirp.

It’s true. When crickets are singing in the evenings from spring through fall, you can actually figure out the temperature outdoors by counting chirps. Here’s how, according to The Old Farmers Almanac:

Count the number of chirps in 14 seconds, and then add 40 to find the temperature in Fahrenheit.

For example: 30 chirps + 40 = 70°F

It works for Celsius, too, in case you were wondering. Metric mavens can count the number of chirps in 25 seconds, divide by 3, then add 4.

The cricket sound clip below plays for only a few seconds, but you can play with it to get an approximation:

As far-fetched as it sounds, this is an actual scientific fact proven by 19th-century physicist Amos Dolbear. At the time, he mistakenly believed that the number of cricket chirps determined the temperature, but he did come up with a factual formula. How he noticed or even thought to test his theory we may never know, but he published his findings in an article called “The Cricket as a Thermometer” in an 1897 issue of The American Naturalist.

And, as if THAT cricket fact isn’t mind-tickling enough, there is a rumor floating about that says a slowed recording of cricket chirps sounds like a human chorus. Listen:

Lovely, but can it be true? Read more about the mysterious music on Snopes.com.

 

 

I took Lily out glampin’ a few weekends ago to a Forest Service campground near a beautiful Idaho lake with white-sand beaches. I have to say that I have a new appreciation for campgrounds. I’ve always tried to avoid them, but this was a Butters family reunion, and so a bona fide campground seemed like the easiest thing to do.

As it turns out, I loved it—the sounds of all the people coming and going, the voices of children, babies laughing, people singing around their campfires, guitars, even dogs barking! Walking around the campground at night, I saw every kind of nationality, family size, RV style and size, kids on skateboards, people on bikes … and in thinking about it afterward, what I loved most about it was how happy everyone was. They were, for a tiny fraction of their lives, exactly where they were hard-wired to be. Outdoors.

My Airstream is named Lily because of a beautiful vintage painting that adorns her bedroom partition.

As were leaving the farm and getting on the road (my husband driving his own truck/camper), I looked behind me to see if we were still a convoy, but he’d disappeared. My son and his wife were in a Jeep with a teardrop trailer in tow and my daughter and her husband were in a truck pulling our Tabitha. As it turns out, my husband had hopped out to pick a matching pink lily from my garden for me to enjoy all weekend. What an aroma they give! My lily smelled like a lily all weekend. (And my husband is a big ole sweetheart!)

Slacker came too.

And four of my grandgirls.

Here are some glamour shots of Lily adorned in her vintage gelatin molds. They always put a smile on people’s faces.

And some interior shots I’d taken earlier. I actually bolted a 4′ cast-iron bathtub to the floor. I use a propane on-demand hot-water heater to fill it. Luxurious! And the floor is a portion of a basketball court that was up for grabs from our local building recycler.

The linen curtains and bedding are made from some rather ugly curtains on sale at Bed-Bath-Beyond that had big 2″ grommets in the tops. I cut those off and used an entire extra curtain to make the ruffles. Love linen fabric that is gauzy like these are!