Rainy Places Should Have Something Like This

This is a very purposeful blog post. At the north end of the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area (our current park) is the town of Milford, PA. There's a place there called Have a Hoot Family Fun Center and the times we've taken Darcy there, I am always overwhelmed by how much a place like Crescent City needs one of these. So I took a lot of pictures to show this point.

There are many elements at Have a Hoot. I spent one visit searching out manufacturers tags on some of them because, well, they're awesome. Most come from a company called Prime Play and, in fact, Have a Hoot is the featured photo on their Family Fun Center page. It's a better picture than any of mine for showing the overall set-up and a raised view of the high ropes course. But here's Darcy on the ropes course, too:

And a picture showing a few more of the high ropes elements from the ground:

There's a climbing wall in one corner that can be seen clearly in the linked picture, and then, on three walls of the building, is a multi-story human habitrail of fun. (If you don't know what a habitrail is, check one out here.) It's hard to show how completely amazing this is (I don't even have a picture of the trampoline part, for example), but here are some images:

Fun!! There's also a laser tag area (seen in the last picture; the top of it has more habitrail (or Ballocity, as it's properly called, I believe) and lots of arcade games, although they're definitely secondary attractions. Overall, it's an amazing, active, indoor play space that is even affordable! I think it's six dollars for a two hour session. This place also has a concession stand and a party area, so a lot of people have kids' birthdays here. For a place as rainy as the North Coast, it would make a world of difference!

An Unconvincing Day

I had a surprisingly unproductive day at work today. I had anticipated selecting two candidates for the VISTA positions I'm recruiting for right now. A rescheduled interview with one of my top candidates derailed that. I got a few small tasks off my desk, but the day was just so unmotivating. Gray skies. Wind. Rain. My office never really got out of the original gloom. My overhead lights buzz, so I don't use them, and the floor lamp I bought to replace them doesn't give off all that much light. Most of the year, that's just fine. But today, I felt like I was in a hibernation cave all day and got about as much done as a hibernating bear. 


Now, that's probably not quite true, because I answered a lot of emails and took many calls, so it seems likely that I accomplished something over the course of the day. It just doesn't feel like it.


Tomorrow will have to be extra-special-productive to make up for it. It would be more likely if I had made a to-do list before I left today. But again, it was a very unconvincing day. I think it was really just one long twilight. With heavy rain. And wind.

Rain: You Knew It Would Come

It is that time of year again. The weather forecasts now show much more rain than sunshine or even just plain old clouds and today was no exception. We woke up to rain, played out our day through showers and rain, and now it's raining hard. 

I'm not sure what our plan for the rain will be this year. Our first winter here, we lived in a very small rental, so finding entertainment inside was very difficult. Last winter, our house was a constant construction zone. This year, the house is a little closer to complete, although Michael has some designs on our bathroom that will involve us not being able to use it for a long stretch of time. But other than that, we have space to be inside and less pressure to be painting, installing trim, etc. Darcy is fond of board games now and played hangman successfully for the first time in the car today, so there are more options of indoor activities this winter.

The real joy is that Darcy can read books by herself now. I'm waiting for her to be able to spend hours reading novels so *I* can spend hours reading novels. She's not quite there yet, but it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that one of the first books she sat down and read by herself, cover to cover, was one of her Wright Brothers books.

Practicing For Crescent City (And Other News)

We had an overcast, cool, off-and-on damp day the other day. We never managed to get real precipitation for more than a minute or two at a time, but it felt like a practice day for our new life in Crescent City. Darcy passed the test with flying colors; it was everything I could do to get her to come inside once her hair was verging on wet rat.

Her sleeveless dress might not be appropriate in the northern rain, but she's got the right attitude! She started out with just the hat and moved on to the umbrella when she wanted to play peek-a-boo. It wasn't at all to keep the rain off her, just for the play.

As you can see behind her, our summer rains have left a green wash behind. The video for Mojave says that the water from summer storms runs off quickly and "does little for the fabric of life" in the desert, but you couldn't prove that around our house. There are several kinds flowering plants that are in a second full burst of bloom. A lot of the green on the ground is just grass from the hay seeds in our resident cows' poop, I will admit that. But there are a lot of natives having a second hurrah these days.

In other news, Michael will officially work for Redwood National Park as of October 11th, so our move should start the 12th or 13th and take three to five days, most likely. The movers will be done in a day, if our experience in King Salmon is any measure. Then we'll drive north. And drive north. And then drive north some more. We'll keep everyone posted.

On the book front, I've just finished Rebecca today. Somehow, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca have always been linked, loosely, in my head, and I still think that's not unrealistic. Rebecca had a modernized element of suspense, with the sinister housekeeper playing a more active role than the insane wife in Jane Eyre. I felt this book ended rather abruptly, but I need to go back and re-read the prologue to see if that sheds a bit more light on what happened next. I like it in a fairly vague way. Not something I'll feel compelled to read again, and I read a lot of books multiple times.

Next up is Middlemarch by George Eliot.

(For those of you paying attention, Dickens should be coming up next, but I've requested it through the Bookmobile, so when I was at the library in Las Vegas yesterday, I skipped ahead.)

Flowers! Flowers! Flowers!

Coming into Baker on Interstate 15 now means passing through corridors of yellow flowers. What are they? Various species of sunflower and daisy relatives, mostly. But off the highway, there are more colors...
Lots of purples and whites abound in and around Mojave National Preserve. We had abundant rains over the winter, continuing into this spring, and the desert is coming to life. This is just one of many places with fields of interspersed hairy sand verbena (the lavender), dune evening primrose (the large white), and brown-eyed primrose.

The dune evening primrose merits a picture all by itself. This photo was taken just outside the Preserve boundaries.

I really love all the small flowers that are appearing. These brilliant purple ones are called, appropriately enough, purple mat. I don't know what the small succulents are. They don't appear in our flower guide; we have a list of almost a dozen now that aren't, so it's time to look for a better guide! The flowers on the purple mat are a little smaller than a dime.

These beauties are lilac sunbonnets. They are tiny, spiny, and low to the ground. They're not all that easy to spot, but it's hard to turn away once you've found them. I'll share more flower photos over the next month or so. I'm hoping that the Joshua tree bloom will be spectacular once it starts. Maybe even more than that, though, I'm excited for the cactus blossoms if and when they arrive.