The Slice Who Says Heaven Has To Be Packed With Excitement?

Don’t be intimidated by summer visitors who ask “What do you do for excitement around here?”

Tell them it’s the wrong question.

Watch your language: We heard about a Spokane guy who said “self-defecating” when he meant “self-deprecating.”

Slice answers: Karen Gillespie noted two big drawbacks to riding in convertibles: “Birds and what other drivers can hear you say about their driving.”

Jo Fitzpatrick nominated her own extended family, the red-haired Willard Gwinn clan of Garfield, as having the most freckles. “We even had a cocker spaniel named Freckles with freckles on its nose.”

In the matter of tree houses, Pullman’s Lois Hodgson wrote: “It wasn’t until I heard her kittens mewing that I realized my kids were boarding a cat in their back-yard tree house. They had even built on an addition just for her which they called ‘The Cat House,’ of course.”

Another reader recalled a hot night in Ellensburg back when she was about 6. Her mom suggested they go out and sleep in the tree house and they wound up talking, just the two of them, till about 1 a.m.

And Joe Kramarz told about when his son was in third grade and, for a school assignment, wrote that his favorite thing to do was make tree forts in the woods. The only problem was that he, um, chose the wrong vowel when spelling “forts.”

In the matter of the coldest local lake, Anthony Carollo said it’s Pend Oreille. Anna Geyer said it has to be Long Lake. Barbara Jones voted for Priest Lake. And a reader who nominated Lake Coeur d’Alene said it’s too cold for swimming when there are still ice-fishing huts standing.

Vince Lemus asked his in-laws, visiting from England, what behaviors marked someone as a tourist in Spokane. Among their answers were “They say ‘Please”’ and “The women wear skirts.”

Tom Ross said you can tell people are tourists when they ask how to get on the north-south freeway.

How to make a Spokane area NIMBY squirm: Say “High population density implies an inherent servicedelivery efficiency.”

Is it just our imagination: Or do just about all the local TV news types who land jobs in bigger markets tend to have cute noses?

Today’s Slice question: If Spokane were really a summer camp instead of a city, what would it be called?

, DataTimes MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. Conversations about tans kill innocent brain cells.