How to Carbonate Ice Cream

But first, a sponge bath. (You'll just have to eat your ice cream neatly!)

You would think that living in a Boy Scout camp, complete with log cabins built in the 1930s by the CCC, tall trees, a well house to tend, and a very good trout stream, my parents would have enough of the great outdoors when they decided to take a vacation. And you would be wrong.

While we did take some edu-ma-caysh-con-al vacations to museums and things, we took a lot of camping vacations. We went up to Lake Superior and camped. We camped beside tiny little lakes full of enormous tasty fish. We canoed, we picked lowbush blueberries, we flopped on our stomachs on air mattresses and read.

That's where I learned useful skills like making morning coffee when the power is out.

And because even in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, August can be hot and humid, at least once a day my mom handed us a washcloth and some hot water, pointed to the tent, and said, "Go wash up."

It's amazing how much cleaner you feel after washing all over with just a little hot water. It's easier in your own candlelit bathroom in the bathtub, because you don't have to keep the floor of the tent dry.

In order to keep the clean hot water clean as long as possible, I like to use two basins and two cups. The clean-water cup stays in the clean hot water and is used to dip out fresh cupfuls. The second cup stays in the used-water basin, for pre-washing and rinsing the grungier parts of the body.

If you're in a hurry or only have cold water, wash in the bends of the elbows, behind the knees, and the neck and face. If you have the luxury of hot water, get wet with the wash cloth, soap your wet self up, then rinse by re-wetting the washcloth with clean water and wringing it out between times.

This was really useful with a husband who had been chainsawing in humid weather and came in smelling of chainsaw exhaust and sweat. I heated about a gallon of water on the Coleman stove and handed him the washcloth. A sponge bath really makes you feel human again. Also you can go out in public and not scare people.

If you have long hair (I have thick waist-length hair), first dilute your shampoo and keep that handy. Get your hair wet by bending forward and pouring the same couple of cups full of water over it repeatedly (you're catching it in the used-water basin) until it's wet all over. Then pour the diluted shampoo water over it slowly, bit by bit, working it in so it's all soapy.

Last, rinse in stages: pour the same cup of water over it, catching that water (I know, normally, yuck: but in the case of one gallon of hot water, welllll) and re-rinsing until you've hit equilibrium, then dumping that batch of water and starting over with the clean. Repeat until squeaky and soapless.

And now, as promised:

How to carbonate ice cream

• Buy a gallon of ice cream at the store just before the big storm.
  
• Put ice cream in freezer. Yum, yum.
  
• Have big storm and nearby tornado.
  
• Lose electric power.
  
• Let ice cream warm up a little in closed freezer for about 20 hours.
  
• Drive through a second major storm and buy dry ice.
  
• Put dry ice in freezer with slightly-melted ice cream.
  
• Close freezer and leave closed until sublimating carbon dioxide suffuses and re-freezes melting ice cream.
  
• Open freezer much later to find this:

Fizzy Ice Cream