We're back from my parent's cabin a day early so we can do some work around the house. It was a glorious, long weekend and Gambit's first visit. He got to explore the woods, swim as much as he wanted to and take his first boat ride. He was very well behaved and we're pleased to have a dog we can actually swim with instead of having to watch for claws and fend off attempts to climb onto us. He's very fast and can beat me in a flat out race, although he has a tendency to keep circling back to cut me off and make my front crawl into a much slower breaststroke. There was very little barking, which with the swimming, helped win my dad over. The last few years with our old dog had involved lots of senile barking at anything that moved including every boat passing on a busy lake. Gambit's passed out next to me on the couch right now and the cats are having a little peace because he's so tired.

Being Wisconsin, where these things are legal, we had lots of fireworks. They've done amazing things for the home market and we had couple nights of professional quality shows from different cabins. It was a beautiful sight from the boat after dark and at one point there were alternating explosions from both sides of the lake. I was going to bring Mentos and Diet Coke to duplicate Greg's experiment for our fireworks but didn't need to and will save that for a weekend when we have kids at the cabin.

There were all these new buoys around the lake which my dad said were marking Eurasian milfoil outbreaks. People raced right by them ignoring the problem and chewing up the plants to spread them to other places. Lake residents formed a lake district over the last two years and have gotten funding to work on the problem, but it's going to be an ongoing thing. Once it's in the lake, it's there for good, I guess, and it still might get completely out of control ending up stifling all the native life. The other big topic was the number of large muskie on the lake and the lack of the smaller northerns. Muskie don't bite very often while northerns do so the fishing has changed. We had a number of boats just off the point by our dock saying they were tracking some huge fish on their radars there. The water gets really deep fast and a couple times I wondered what was sharing the water with me. Muskies were always the monsters of legend on our lake.