Day eight.

What you're looking at there is drunken math, the product of Nick's visit and nearly a case of beer. Come 3:30 or so in the morning, we had the fantastic idea to call my sister in Australia, since Nick and his wife Peggy had just been to see them there. The math involved trying to figure out what time it was there, a simple task that we, in our loud sloshedness, could not seem to quite accomplish without writing it down.

"They're 17 hours ahead," Nick told me. "So okay, let's add to 12 to what time it is now," I said, scribbling. "That's 15:30! "That's not a time!" But it was, and is, and I ended up leaving several messages to the effect that I was my sister's doctor and that I had important information about her having a tapeworm that was bound to take over the world. She called back and I could hear her vigorous eye rolls over the phone. "I'm getting into a cab now. Bye," she said. Or something. My memory's a bit hazy. Allow this entry to function as my apology.

I had a bustling day, cleaning and getting the cabin ready. I took a trip to the Winnie Store to grab a few essentials (canned mushrooms, Milwaukee's Best) and got the van good and stuck on my way back in. After an hour of digging, rocking and squealing tires, I decided to let the snow melt around the van and went back to the cabin to haul in wood and do dishes. An hour or so later, while I vacuumed, there was a knock on the door. It just so happened that my van, blocking the entire road, had resulted in getting an entire caravan of other vehicles mired. Luckily, the Smiths, who have a cabin a few down and are now up ice-fishing, were pretty good natured about the whole thing and towed me out of the snow. The van is currently parked down at the landing, since there was no way I was getting up the driveway.

Nick had shown up in the middle of this excitement, bearing ribeyes and rum and beer, and we ended up having quite a great night, grilling and drinking and talking until about 5 in the morning. We Retkas are a good people, we are, and Nick's Talmudic knowledge of the ins and outs of fishing and the DNR laws helped fill in a lot of blanks. His dog Riley and Annyong were thick as thieves as we chatted about all things great and small (tattoos, his recent trip to Australia, our families, why you hook a minnow through the head sometimes and through the back others), and Annyong, bless his heart, actually came to be the dominant one, pushing this 100-pound lab around like he was a shih tzu. The northwoods have toughened both of us up, apparently.

It's still gorgeous today, almost 50 degrees out, and the snow is actively melting everywhere you look. My plan: to eat leftover steak and potatoes with mushroom gravy and watch Dances With Wolves to fend my hangover off. Then, if I can navigate the road without getting stuck again, maybe a trip to Bemidji.