sights, places, memories

I cannot really call this the last post on the W(e)VOW epic. After all, we own a bus. The adventure won’t stop for some time now, I imagine. This is just an excuse to put in a few last photos. Please do forgive me for ever repeating myself throughout these posts.

Most of my pictures are from the Grand Canyon, so I suppose I will start with that. We stopped for two nights in Tusayan, AZ so that we could have a full day of banter in the canyon. Since we arrived in the same vehicle, we got a group rate: $25 for everyone, instead of $8 per person – what a deal! We all did a lot of walking around the edge, and we all attempted a hike downwards into the gorge. We caught the sunset after admiring the Abyss for quite a while. Of course we had lots of stopping to dangle our legs over the edge.

The sunset is beautiful in the striking contrast formed between the brightly colored rocks and the deep heavy shadows cast back into the canyon.

Also, this is a stick:

We decided to travel southwards through Joshua Tree National Park instead of the originally scheduled Death Valley agenda. Admission to the park and camping permission turned out to be cheaper than we had anticipated, another pleasant national park surprise! The morning found us scrambling up rolling hills to survey our desolate surroundings. We managed to find satisfactory shower facilities in the RV water station before embarking on our journey through the park.

Impressively sized rocks abounded, some towering over our not insignificant vehicle. Of course, we were all up for the adventure of climbing these monumental stones, scaling epic piles of rock and admiring the vista.

Descending upon the freeway leading towards LA, we encountered several expansive corridors of wind turbines. One of our previous encounters with these impressive beauties was leaving Austin, watching trucks transporting single turbine blades, trying to turn gracefully on undersized highways. The closeness to such a delicate looking yet powerful piece of machinery elicited gasps of wonder from all of us. However, it was not until the allegedly flat expanse that is Kansas that I managed to capture the experience in a photograph. I will let you judge for yourself the claim that Kansas is as flat as a pancake.

The Pacific coast held in store two more wonders for us. The coast itself was impressive to any Mississippian used to our sound on the Gulf Coast which prevents any wave from getting enough power to splash more than our knees. Massive waves roll in from afar and smash with great drama onto craggy boulders that decorate the shoreline. The roads undulated and twisted as we navigated gorges and mountains, they forced us to explore forests filled with towering redwoods and negotiate tight spaces with other tourist traffic. For anyone growing up in Mississippi, we imagine the high pines that populate our state as fairly impressive trees – the redwoods overwhelmed that impression, dominating over any vision of an impressive tree and altering our understanding of how a towering tree would appear.

Of course I was generally impressed with the length of the trains that travelled in the western two thirds of the nation. One hundred and twenty five car trains would parallel the highways as we raced them unsuccessfully. Trains fully a mile long could remain beside us for miles in the expanses of desert that we crossed.

It was a wonderful trip that allowed us all to explore a phenomenal amount of the country. Simply getting to be in such an exceptionally vast land, even the barren empty stretches, was the cause of our wonder as we contemplated our place on this earth.

this is how to cut a tree

I thought I was cool when i got to use dad’s chain saw. This morning, i was shown wrong. Rounding the corner on my bike, i ran into this:

A crane. In my neighborhood. What for!?

I slipped by and this slipped out of my mind for the day. Coming back from work, I was reminded when I spotted a second crane, holding up a… man… with a chain saw in hand. Cutting up a tree.

Back to the original crane, i peered around and found the man with chain saw:

Hanging by the crane, standing on a massive limb he was cutting. This is certainly the best way to cut a tree. Way cooler than just my little chain saw on a puny 30 foot cedar. I don’t get logs like this:

this is my plug for hutto’s

A neighbor walking by noticed the fruit trees with their pots carefully wrapped in plastic bags. It could only be the distinguished service from Hutto’s, our local garden center (on Ellis just north of 80) she noticed. The blueberry bushes? Hutto’s. The psychedelic colored chard? Hutto’s. The sugar snap peas planted to grow up onto the back deck? Hutto’s. Everything we needed. Also the shovel, the yard of bedding mix, the ten pound bag of zinc, and the basic slag (only a couple of dollars for more steel industry waste than we know what to do with).

Today was a big day for thinning. And a bit of planting. We managed to put one more blueberry bush in place before E and her big ideas halted further progress until a committee could convene. All of the greens by the road were thinned. Two rows of non-producing things (cabbage and lettuce) were replaced with carrots and radishes. The end of the sidewalk was re-engineered with chard. Sugar snap peas were planted in the back, near a planned okra row, so that they can climb up onto the deck for us to harvest.

In other news, it was pretty happnin’ downtown. A comedy tour was in town at the convention center, which we discovered after getting out of the screening of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal at the art museum. The King Edward had some searchlights nearby, and Thalia Mara may have had a small event as well.

the world is definitely ending

This white stuff is falling from the sky. I don’t know any other explanation. The world is coming to an end.

I woke up and looked around. It was all snowed down outside. Quiet. Its been about an hour and the kids who would have been at school are now having a great time around the neighborhood. But I actually wanted to go to work. What else am I going to do for the day?

Bonus Recipe:
Last night, I brought 2c milk to a boil, stirring constantly, then cut it off. Then I quickly added 1/2c steel cut oats, a dash of salt, and a lot of cinnamon. Let that sit overnight, then heat it up in the morning. Was fine. Great with maple syrup.
P supplied the recipe, it was easy, i made the milk modification.

So i guess the Murrah game has been rescheduled for tomorrow. Maybe ill track down one of these open local restaurants and hit them for lunch…

Lastly, pictures from the end of the world, including some gorgeous crepe myrtles. Even though all snow pictures end up looking the same, I have to take them. Its not like i get snow often enough to not bother.

this is why my garden struggles

Putting up with record freezes and any amount of snow (its snowed more this winter than in the rest of my life – its like exponential integration!) is tough. Even for cool weather plants. They struggled to get started in the late fall, and they kept getting beat back by the temperature in January. I just hope there is some sun to sort them out soon, thats all they need.

Thinning the garden, one salad at a time.

As you know, my garden got off to a late start. The front yard salad garden in particular was planted weeks after recommended. We had an unusually cold winter, and that was before we had our second longest freezing stretch in the history of our solar system.

Each freezing day (and two instances of snow!) led to the garden looking more and more pitiful. Each time the plants sagged down, I would shake my head and make plans for the spring. But the plants kept fighting. Each sunny day would perk the leaves back up, prompting me to pick a few to chew on as a walked the estate. Finally we returned to some normal winter weather (low 70′s and sunny) and the garden took off. A few rainy days really put it on a tear. Every couple of days i could afford to thin out a salads worth of leaves for lunch. Now the leaves are crowding each other out more heavily, I don’t have to be picky with the picking. So far I have only picked by thinning, hopefully they will get well spaced enough to just pick leaves.

The side garden is another matter. I have cut down (and then up…) a cedar tree nearby, preparing to plant a pear tree nearby. While cutting the cedar, i wished to take the chain saw to a certain tree across the street which is blocking a good 4 hours of sun on the garden. Only the turnips have really picked up their pace, with a few more leaves sprouting on the sprouts. Other plants, still bunched in at about 10 plants per inch, are getting thinned, slowly. I’m sure this helps too. The thinned out plants add a good bit of variety to the salad leaves.