boom

Boom.

It's late here, almost midnight, and there was just a boom.

I really dislike the 4th of July in the city. It's been worse, back when we had neighbors who regularly attempted to catch our alley trees on fire every 4th of July. But it's still a tad bit terrifying to hear those booms in the middle of the night.

I love my neighborhood. I love my city. But let's be honest. It can be scary and it can be a little gun-happy in the summertime. And when you hear a boom or a crack, that's what you think first. Someone just shot somebody else. Then you remember that it's almost July and people are just getting a headstart on their illegal fireworks displays.

And that 11:30 isn't late for everyone.

Who Knows

I sat at the Powder Valley presentation at camp today, the Missouri Department of Conservation come to talk to us, and they were talking in general terms about habitats and then got into some specifics. Turtles, for instance. Owls. She had an turkey wing and flapped it in the air near us so we could hear the stiff feathers move. Thwat thwat thwat. Then she brought out the owl wing and did the same thing.

Silence.

The girls were impressed, which made me happy. They are a good group, girl scouts who go to summer day camp. The presentation went on to a little dramatic scene with girls pretending to be owls and trying to compete for habitat but I was still with the owl wing, the silent owl wing.

I sit on the trunk of Troy's car, twenty years ago, leaning up against the back window in the dim light of post-sunset Houston. The orange lights from the oil refineries are blocked by the live oak trees all around us, the summer heat never lifts, and me and a boy are on the back of the rusted yellow orange Datsun. The air smells like the still water on the other side of the railroad tracks, something poor, something stagnant. It infuses the gravel driveway, the wooden porch, the house, the car. I rarely ride in the car; I rarely visit the house. Most times I pick him up and we drive someplace more familiar, suburban, middle class.

So many things I couldn't see then that I see now.

We lean back, not touching, looking up towards the breaks in the trees. So much of the time I filled with talk, he filled with movement. But now we are silent and still. And there it is, the floating flash of feathers as the owl passes overhead. Time passes, and we hear the who-who-who. I don't know until much later that it's probably a great horned owl--it was a large creature, it didn't have the spooky barred owl call, it didn't shriek. Just "who".

Who.

The naturalist continues on, habitat, habitat, habitat, troubles for turtles, coyotes, cars, development. I'm wondering who. Who was that girl? Who was that boy? Who did we think we were? Who did we think we could possibly be? Who are we now.

The good, the bad, the girl scout day camp

I'm a counselor at a Girl Scout day camp this week. It's kind of an old-school camp, with a council and opening and closing flag ceremonies, we cook lunch every day, even the tiny little girls. Not a lot of BS crafts. Archery. And so forth.

The good thing about this camp is that it allowed Daisy and Fiona to go half price and Billy has free child care.

The bad thing about this camp is that the child care provider is a blast from the past, my old friend Cookie Mom.

The good thing is that she was just as nervous about meeting me again as I was about meeting her and it's gone really well.

The bad thing is that Billy really likes camp because of the one-on-one attention and next week will be a big bummer of a boring time for him.

The good thing is that the girls really seem to be having a great time. They each have friends in their units. Fiona's friend is my coleader's daughter.

The bad thing is that my coleader goes to work early in the morning and her daughter arrives at my house at 6:30. This is early for me.

The good thing is that I'm getting a lot done between 6:00 and 8:15, when we leave for camp.

The bad thing is that I'm later and later each day because I'm so busy in the mornings to make up for my utter exhaustion the night before.

The good thing is that I'm just a coleader, not a leader, for my unit of junior girls.

The bad thing is that, if you haven't noticed, I'm more of an alpha than a beta. I like to lead.

The good thing is that the leader is easy-going with me, seems to like me fine, and let me run the show for leatherwork and lunch today.

The bad thing is that the reason for this is that she is involved in a visiting program to different units so a couple of times I've been flying solo with 16 girls. Not really solo--the yellow unit is right next door--but it's a lot of jugging.

The good thing is that I'm getting to flex my teacher skills.

The bad thing is that I've been standing up for 3 days straight, pretty much, in 97 degree noon times.

The good thing is that your body adjusts to the heat, especially if you start in the mornings when it is cooler.

The bad thing is that each day involves building a charcoal fire to cook over.

The good thing is that I have a few of my troop's girls in my unit who know how to cook and do work.

The bad thing is that we don't have power over the menu. Beanie weenies anyone?

The good thing is that the heat makes me not very hungry.

The bad thing is that every night I eat whatever Jake eats and then crash into bed. The really bad thing right now is that he's at a meeting until 9 and I'm stuck awake with 3 crabby kids.

Overall, it's been a great time. Except for one of the women at "headquarters", who told me the very first day, I had Billy, I was coming up to HQ at the end of the day for a meeting, we were all exhausted and hot, and I sat him on the picnic table, the picnic table in an open air pavilion, sitting down on the bench in front of me, and she told me, "Tables are for glasses, not little boys' asses."

Yep.

Then today she barked at me and my unit leader for getting our own snow cones after the girls had theirs--and after the aide had gone back to HQ and there wasn't anyone there to serve us--telling us if the girls saw us doing that, they would think they could do it that way too. I noted that my unit leader completely ignored her. And so I did too.

But I think she'll keep me away next year. Which kinds of sucks. But I don't need to be treated like a 7 year old in front of other adults. Or anytime, frankly.

But the good thing? The best thing? It's Wednesday evening and I'm more than halfway through. Whee.

Ten of the Little Things In Life

Stolen, stolen, stolen. From Mali and LisaS. Things from the last two hours of this day.

1. Blueberries in the car listening to Nirvana on the way home.
2. The sharp smell of tomato plants as I pinch off suckers.
3. Waffle sundaes for dinner? Waffle sundaes for dinner.
4. In the mirror, noticing my neck and collarbones. The weight isn't shedding perhaps but it's moving around?
5. French braiding my hair and tucking it under with a bobby pin.
6. Wondering about bison funerals.
7. Little girl Daisy, no front teeth, telling me my hair is all fancy. She's tired from camp. We all are.
8. That voice, that NPR nameless man's voice, announcing the national sponsors between the hours. Who is he?
9. "Look at this picture of Mom when she was five, Daisy." "It looks like me!" "You're going to have her nose!"
10. Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other's gold. In sign language.

The Transit of Venus

Jake stood outside with Travis, both our families, and talked about the transit of Venus, the last time we'll see it in our lifetime. 2117 is a long time from now. Don't know why we didn't notice in 2004, but here we are and it's the last time and so forth. Somehow when I was a kid, I never saw Halley's Comet, and I always regretted it, in a small minor way.

It was a bright partly sunny day. The transit was to begin just after 5:00 our local time. Jake made a pinhole camera out of a cardboard tube and we could see the projection of the sun on a piece of paper. But I wanted a picture.

You can't just take a picture of the sun. Maybe at sunrise and sunset, with the polarization of light. I can take pictures of the moon with pretty good success, but this was my first attempt. 

So I did some thinking. How could I block out light? How could I get just the sun there, the orb of the sun?

Jake has a set of dental x-rays he needs to take to an oral surgeon to have his wisdom teeth out...sometime...and luckily he's procrastinating because I put the dark exposed part of the film over the lens and got this result:

Since the x-ray is quite large, I doubled it without having to fold it, and was able to get this picture with the pretty clouds around the sun:

I fiddled with the F-stop and ISO (I have 2006's top of the line regular digital camera--not a DSLR, nothing fancy compared to even my phone these days, but it has manual stuff I can play with, and from my regular 35mm camera experience in high school, I was able to knock some things around. So with the speed as fast as possible, the F-stop and ISO set for the least amount of light being let in, and a double layer of x-ray film, AND zoomed in as far as I could go:

 

Voila!

Busy Weekends #3: Columbia MO MKT/Katy Trail

We set out from Flat Branch park in downtown Columbia. My sister met us there after work. Did I mention that my sister Colleen doesn't drive? She's never gotten her license. No medical reason, just hasn't. She lives near downtown Columbia, works downtown, and doesn't really need to drive. Her boyfriend does if there's something that needs to happen (like coming to visit St. Louis). Otherwise, no. The two of them also play bike polo, which is just what it sounds like.

Anyway, we set out from downtown Columbia on the MKT, which is a rail to trail bike trail that runs south through the city and out beyond. Lots of tunnels and bridges and pretty, pretty scenery in the Columbia section of the trail. Several nice water stops, too, with restrooms.

We'd made the mistake of coming all the way from St. Louis with 3 bikes on the roof, a bike trailer, and a trail-a-bike (a tandem converter for Jake's bike)--that wasn't the mistake, but the mistake was that we'd left the seat for the trail-a-bike at home. So Daisy had nowhere to sit. As we were bringing all this stuff off and out of our car, I started to freak out, but I realized our bike trailer can fit two, and I used to pull Daisy and Fiona together. I would pull the trailer. With 110 extra pounds behind me...for fun...but I did.

The MKT is a fine gravel path, and it's traveled so much that I didn't even notice the difference much on my vintage road bike. I love my bike, have I mentioned that? Here below you can see how it hitches onto the bike trailer. And below that, you can see Daisy and Billy snoozing away, 6 miles into the trip.

The friction and the breeze knocks them right out every time. Sleeping, they missed our first stop, where we ate blueberries and strawberries and enjoyed this awesome old railroad bridge.

After the bridge, we continued south (I assume south) on the MKT, past the water treatment plant, which has wetlands and redwinged blackbirds and although obviously a water treatment plant, was nothing like the ones I have seen before. Below, Colleen and Fiona have headed out ahead of us. The whole evening was beautiful like this.

We were aiming for the junction of the MKT and the Katy Trail, which is a rail to trail that runs from St. Charles out somewhere west of Columbia. Now that I've done a bit of it, I want to do a lot more.


We only did about a mile on the Katy, heading towards Rocheport (west), when the Katy crosses a thin country highway. Colleen turned left onto the highway to take us to "The Big Tree", which is the Missouri Champion Bur Oak (the biggest bur oak in Missouri). It has a circumference of 287 inches, a height of 90 feet and a spread of 130 feet. The guess is that it's about 300+ years old, but that's oral history, not fact. It's a big tree.

The Big Tree is 10 miles from Columbia, and you can see how the light is waning and beautiful here at the tree. With three long stops (twice on the old bridge) and a couple shorter ones, it took us almost exactly three hours to do the 20 miles. Not bad for hauling 110 extra pounds behind me, and with an almost 11 year old who really, really wished she had been in the trailer herself. Almost dark when we made it back to the car, we let Fiona pick dinner.

I was sore in the morning.

Busy Weekends #2: Columbia, MO, The Pinnacles

We visited Columbia, Missouri, this past weekend. Jake wanted a break from our regular scenery, and I never say no to a short road trip that involves a hotel and someone to make breakfast for me. We had Shakespeare's Pizza with my sister Colleen on Friday night and then headed back to the hotel. In the morning, someone else made breakfast for me and then we went to the Pinnacles Youth Park, which is a piece of private land 13 miles north of I-70 on US 63 (directions: turn right on Pinnacles Road, make an immediate right hand turn, follow road to the gates). It's a tiny bit of land that is open to the public. I think the goal is to make it available to youth groups--scouts, 4H--but it is open for day trips to the general public.

We spent the first 20 minutes or so confused. We walked around, but all trails seemed to lead back to the car, like some naturalistic Alice Through the Looking Glass kind of arrangement. The girls and Jake did see a mole, which they pet and oohed over (now Daisy wants a mole for her birthday, which will not happen unless it were a birthday gift for our cat Jake). But we couldn't figure out how to get across the creek, which was a bit stagnant and definitely deep. We were headed for the pinnacles themselves, these big towers of limestone right across the way, but unreachable.

So we headed down towards this overhang instead:

Saw this bird, who was unhappy with our being there, since she had babies to feed in the crevices of the roof of the overhang. I think bank swallow? Maybe? Thoughts? There were many of them, circling and zzzzt-zzzeeet noises. It looks more like a northern rough-winged swallow but I'm still debating in my head.

Finally we realized we needed to cross the creek somewhere, and near the overhang was a shallow area that I was able to get myself and two girls across. Jake had Billy in the hiking backpack. This was confusing not only to us but to the three other people who were in the park with us at the time (seriously, no one else was there).

We crossed the creek and there on the other side was the trail, going quickly upward towards the pinnacles. It wasn't really that much of a climb, it seemed, until you looked down and realized it was quite high up. This picture below, that's the creek there in the middle, the one I just crossed.

Fiona was very very nervous about being up so high. I was too--not for myself, but for Daisy, who has no fear and no sense. The trail changes from just increasing in altitude to becoming narrow, with a cliff on one side and a drop off through steep woods on the other. Daisy's hand was held tight.

We got to the top of the pinnacles, though, no tragedy, and this is the view:

Daisy wanted to go further. I wouldn't have gone further even if I didn't have kids with me. Before we got up here, I was thinking this would be a great place for the scout troop to stay a night on the way somewhere west, but I have pretty much changed my mind. And I took girls to Shawnee and Garden of the Gods...but this seemed even more treacherous along the trail at least.

But it's beautiful! If you go, park your car in the turn around. Go down into the little valley with picnic benches and cut down trees, view the pinnacles from below right in front of you. Then turn right and take the trail to the overhang. From the overhang, backtrack to the smaller picnic area (it had a blue trash can when we were there), and take the little trails down to the water's edge and cross the wide creek where the rocks form paths. On the opposite bank, look for a washout bank that leads to a trail (we made a slight left turn). Go up.

Busy Weekends #1: Rock Eddy

Horseshoes were played. Nature was enjoyed. Naps were taken. Creek was explored. Lessons were taught.

 We spent Memorial Day weekend at Rock Eddy Bluff Farm, a different sort of bed and breakfast in the northernmost Ozarks. There is a traditional B&B on the property, with Kathy's breakfast and a bed on their second floor, but we stay at the house on the property that has running water and electricity (and A/C--we are not roughing it). We've been going there for 12 years now and we've come to see it as our own place--we note when things change, we take comfort in the sameness. We play the board games and do the puzzles that we've left behind on previous trips. We know how the oven works. We know where the spare towels are. And so forth.

It was only us this time--friends couldn't make it down, so we were alone for the first time in 12 years. Of course, we had three kids so not "alone". But it was weird on Friday night, and then on Saturday when we came home from the weird Amish farmer's place with buckets of blueberries, and Mary wasn't reading at the table, Mal wasn't bent over in the kitchen making something wonderful for dinner. In fact, we ate frozen pizza and spaghetti and the kids had pop tarts one morning. I did make a blueberry pie, so it wasn't too pathetic. But it was definitely less than we usually partake in. We even went to Dixon to the drive-in for hamburgers Saturday afternoon.

And Jake had no challenge at the horseshoe pits, beating me quickly.

But it's ok. We'll go back in October and again next May...