Pearls Of Wisdom From Darcy Jo

Last night after dinner it had cooled down enough to be pleasant outside, so we went out to play, water the garden, bring in the last of the laundry from the line, and watch the moon rise. Darcy, despite her love of almost all green vegetables, has been resisting trying any of the cherry tomatoes from the garden. I picked two last night and offered her one, which she took, but "just to hold it". I ate the other and told her how sweet it was, kind of like candy. So she popped hers in her mouth, bit down, acted like it was instant death, spit it into my hand, and proclaimed with a wobbly bottom lip:

"That is very different from M&Ms."

She speaks the truth, but I'd prefer she liked the tomato and wasn't so fond of M&Ms.

Darcy running across the meadow on Mt. Charleston.

For those of you who do not know more about the Wright Brothers than you ever wanted to know, the well near their original bicycle shop was contaminated with typhoid in 1896 and Orv got sick and almost died. Wilbur nursed him through it and read books about flying pretty much non-stop. This morning, Darcy asked for a cup to give one of her elephants a drink. She specified that she wanted one without typhoid in it, which I thought was a good decision. Unfortunately, she then put a ball in it to represent typhoid and drank it herself. This led to her being all bundled up in blankets on the couch while I read to her, just like Wilbur did. Right now, she's typhoid-free. I suggest you all try to stay the same.

Darcy and Michael on the log that was Darcy's goal in the first picture.

On Thursday, while it was 107 in the Las Vegas valley (and we "enjoyed" some play time at a park in that heat), it was a cool and lovely 72 at the meadow on Mt. Charleston. It's amazing that a half-hour drive can bring that kind of change, but we were very grateful for it and had a lot of fun playing in the meadow and hiking through the trees. Darcy played a wonderful game in which she would dive off a tall stump into our arms; I'd put up the video, but she got a little reckless as the game progressed and it might make us look like Very Bad Parents.

Darcy and Angela at the other end of that log.

Our Next House!

Hey! We have a house! The manager of the complex emailed today to say that they have a Model B available starting the 12th -- just perfect for our moving plans! And they've already approved us! This model is almost 1300 square feet, so the rooms are big. The living room is 21 x 14. The kitchen is actually a U-shaped kitchen, with the sink on the back wall with a window (so I'm told); I'm not sure why the whole thing wasn't shown on the floorplan, but it also doesn't show a pellet stove in the living room and all units say they have them. It doesn't have as much storage as the other model we were interested in, but the manager said that they had a few choices and she chose this one for us because it has a grassy area in front and is on a corner, so there's more outdoor space for Darcy to play in. There's also a patio off the dining room with a sliding glass door on that back wall.

One less thing to worry about in the next six weeks!

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.)

And The Next Park We'll Be Around Is...

... Redwood National Park! Yesterday morning, Michael accepted a job at Redwood as a park ranger/visual media specialist. It was a hard decision because there was another job possibility we were weighing and both options are truly wonderful places.

We'll move to Crescent City, CA, sometime in October; the parks haven't negotiated Michael's start date yet. We are excited by all the new opportunities living in a town will bring. There's a multi-screen theater! There are TIDE POOLS! (When I was Darcy's age, we lived just a block or two from the beach in Wollongong, Australia, and there were tide pools we loved to play in and near, so I'm thrilled that I'll be able to share that amazing experience with Darcy.) There are playgrounds! There are supermarkets! Neighbors! A post office! Harbor seals piled up on the piers! And, of course, really, really tall trees.

With any luck at all, we'll be living in a rental duplex that is already home to some park service employees and has its own indoor pool and playground equipment. It's on the opposite side of town as Michael's office, but it's not a huge town. It won't mean a super-long commute. Michael's office is in an old house overlooking the ocean. One of his soon-to-be coworkers said that she can sometimes watch Roosevelt elk and whales from her office window!

I Confessed To My Librarian

In a further effort to make myself follow through on my reading quest, I confessed to my librarian at the Bookmobile this morning. She is keen to see the list and make sure I get the books I need. Next up is Dickens. Yikes!

I loved The Color Purple, by the way. Finished it yesterday afternoon.

Big news is on the horizon. Watch this space for a big announcement in the next two days. We're in the middle of some heavy-duty decision-making.

Fun In Baker? It Turns Out To Be Possible!

Please forgive the lack of photos; I didn't think to grab the camera for our temporary residence in Baker. I probably should have, given our activities last night.

I was on the phone with Amy, planning the menu for a fungus conference we're going to cater for in October. I mentioned that we were thinking of checking out the Baker Community Pool in the evening. Pool? Did somebody say pool? A little over an hour later, Amy and family were at our door, ready to swim. Michael had to work late, unfortunately, but the rest of us headed over to the pool, which lives across from the high school and share its parking lot.

There were more people working there than swimming, but for a buck each per adult, it was hard to beat the surprising cool water, diving board, and very shallow end that Darcy could stand up in. We swam, dove, and splashed for a while and then headed back to Baker House for a big veggie dinner and some dancing to the I Like Yaks song.

Two future social events are coming out of this as well. On Wednesday, with the other adult residents of the Granites away, we're going to watch a kids movie projected onto the side of a building. Movie still to be determined, but there will be lots of popcorn. On Saturday, I might go with Amy and Matthew when they head to Vegas to contradance. Yes, you read that right -- there is contradancing in Las Vegas! Woo-hooo! Who would have thought it possible?? If this Saturday doesn't work out, I'll probably try another week, as it's a twice-a-month dance. I miss contradancing.

In other news, I've finished Wuthering Heights and didn't love it. I didn't even like it, except for the last four or five chapters. Bleah. I've started The Color Purple. I know I saw the movie a long time ago, but I don't remember all that much of it, so the novel still has the capacity to surprise me and I'm not constantly comparing it to the film because I just don't have a clear picture of that. I like it. There are actually many miserable characters (either in misery or handing it out), as there were in Wuthering Heights, but it feels that there is hope for better (within the characters, not just in the narrative) in The Color Purple and that was absent in most of Wuthering Heights.

The Book List (And My Quest Begins)

Those of you on Facebook have probably seen or been tagged to copy this list into a note and mark which books you have read. I have no idea where this list came from originally or exactly what it is supposed to represent, but I was surprised at how many of these books I haven't read. Most particularly, to be blunt, how many of the books that were probably on my summer reading lists in high school I have managed not to read.

(An aside: I looked at the summer reading list shelf at the library yesterday while looking for the next book in my quest [it wasn't there, but on a nearby "Classics" shelf]. My how summer reading lists have changed! It is no longer peopled mostly by dead white men and women. Many of the authors are alive and well and still writing, which was not true of most of my summer reading lists.)

So I am beginning a quest to fill in the blanks. With a few exceptions (I don't feel the need to sit down and read the entire Bible or every scrap of anything Shakespeare ever wrote, although I'll hit some high points I've missed), my plan is to read all the books on this list that I haven't yet read. I'm not presenting a marked list here, but you can figure it out if you follow the notes I'll make on my quest.

I had planned to go more or less in order, but I didn't have the list with me yesterday and had to just get a second book that I knew was on the list and unread. So last week, while in Simi Valley, I read Jane Eyre. I enjoyed it, or at least the parts that you're supposed to enjoy. I think the malnourishment and neglect Jane encountered at the boarding school were not meant to be enjoyed. The introduction to Wuthering Heights taught me that two Bronte sisters died of malnutrition while away at boarding school. Easy to see where Charlotte came by those scenes, once you know that.

I'm almost half way through Wuthering Heights now and enjoying it much less than Jane Eyre. It's a little over-dramatic and gloomy for me so far. If there's a sympathetic character in the book, he or she has not been introduced to me yet. On deck is the out-of-order The Color Purple.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy-
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Water? Who Needs Water?

Apparently, we don't. And we're not on the need-to-know list for getting information about the status of our water supply, which is much more frustrating than just not having water. And that's saying something, because not having water for the past 36 hours and finding out that we won't have it until Monday at the earliest? That's pretty frustrating.

So. We. Are. Moving. To. Baker. Tomorrow. Again.

In case you were wondering, Baker hasn't gotten any better since my last post about the ridiculous temperatures. In Cima, tomorrow's high is supposed to be a glorious and delicious 81. In Baker, it is supposed to be 103.

Which would you prefer?

Play! Play! Play! Sleep.

Darcy gets a lot of opportunities to play when we're in Simi and this trip is no exception. She almost continually asks to go "somewhere with lots of kids". Here she is at the Topanga Mall, home of the famous rabbit carousel. She rode the rabbit twice, played in the play area with gusto, and made me take her up and down the escalator four or five times in a row. She had fun.

Darcy has had some sleep issues since we got here, especially at nap time. I needed a day off from the struggle, so I took her to the LA zoo (we've never been) in the morning with the hope that she would get worn out and fall asleep on the ride home. I had my book with me, so I figured I'd just park in the shade and read for a while. Other than petting the rabbit, Darcy's favorite part of the zoo was this play area. She played here for a long time before agreeing that we could continue our quest to find the "monkeys" that were, of course, straight up the hill just about as far from the entrance as they could be.

We saw gibbons. We saw chimps. We saw an orangutan. She pet the rabbit. She ate a lot. She did not fall asleep on the way home. Not one bit. We got home, washed, rested, talked to Michael who was sweating in the un-air-conditioned Depot, and then: "I want to go some place with lots of kids." As if none of my attempt at wearing her out had ever happened.


On the theory that she would fall asleep on the way to the Oaks Mall, off we went. She did not fall asleep. She was wide awake and playing instantly. Lots of climbing, lots of running around, lots of hugging of random strangers. We took a break to ride the elevator and visit the puppies. We had a snack. She played in the hanging carpets and drapery at Pottery Barn (she said, so truthfully, that she was "snug as a bug in a rug"). We went back to the play area. She played for another fifteen, twenty minutes.

Surely, I thought, she'd sleep on the way home. No. She whined about a bottle that she dropped and I couldn't reach. She screamed when I told her to stop whining. And then, silence. Five minutes from home, she fell asleep. She stayed asleep while I carried her into the house. She slept on the couch with a baseball game on the tv and five adults carrying on a conversation in the room. She stayed asleep while I carried her upstairs and changed her into a pull-up and put her in her bed. She is still asleep almost two hours later.

I can count on one hand the number of times she has ever stayed asleep when taken out of her carseat and carried into the house. I think I wore her out.

The Prodigal Camera

Our camera loves to go walkabout. It once spent two weeks hanging on a coat rack underneath one of Michael's coworker's jacket. In between our two summer trips to Simi, it was hiding in Dan and Betty's garage. But once again, it has returned and so here are some pictures of Darcy's last haircut.

If there's a phrase dictionary out there, they might consider this picture as the illustration for "grin and bear it" in the next edition.

And here's the finished product, complete with bow. Or ribbon, anyway. All the important things are there -- Baby Orv (the doll) and a lollypop. What more could a girl need?

I Can't Resist

Darcy's in the process of not really going to sleep right now, but I had to post the exchange she had with herself before I left the room. We're going to a party tomorrow at Ryan and Carly's new apartment and she was asking me about it and if there would be music for dancing. We also agreed that we would watch for airplanes after the party when it will be dark outside, so that she doesn't have to look out her window for them now. I continued singing her bedtime song, and she talked to herself:

"Maybe the airplanes will come down to say hi. Maybe they will come inside the house. I wouldn't like their loud noise inside the house. Maybe they will want to dance with me."

There might be a little confusion about the size and role of airplanes in the world.

Darcy Goes To Town

Careful, Simi Valley. Darcy's in the house and she is ready to have some fun. On the second night in town, Darcy, Mimi, and I went out to dinner at the ever-kid-friendly Souplantation. Darcy ate her usual hearty meal there, with chickpeas, black olives, peas, radishes, and mac-n-cheese forming the bulk of her meal. After dinner, we walked over to the mall's koi pond where Darcy crawled around the wall to check out the fish from every possible angle. She also lay down on her stomach with her chin propped in her hands to stare at and covet another girl's chocolate ice cream. As if she hadn't just ended her meal with a small bowl of ice cream.

On our way back to the car, we passed a restaurant with a live band playing in its outdoor seating area. Darcy was fascinated and the band noticed her and invited her through the bar to come dance. And dance, she did, to the delight of just about everyone enjoying the beautiful evening on the patio.

The next morning (Monday/yesterday/whatever) brought the first day of nostalgia. Or swimming lessons. I will try to scan one of the pictures Betty found of Michael taking his very first swimming lessons in this exact same pool 29 summers ago. The photos are very similar. Darcy got in pretty easily with her instructor, Chantal. Happiness did not completely last through the whole lesson.

This picture makes it look like Darcy was more or less ok with the kickboard, but that is just an illusion. The kickboard was not the highlight of the lesson. Quite a few "Please may I get outs" reached my ears from the sidelines.

The picking out of a good floatie toy to "swim" after was better. She also enjoyed jumping off the edge of the pool both from sitting and standing positions. And, given her love of ice cream, she loved learning to "make ice cream scoops" in the early stages of learning to doggie paddle. The last five minutes of the lesson was spent in a wading pool, which Darcy liked a lot until she went underground (somehow, this is what she calls going underwater). Then there was some spluttering and tears, but she recovered quickly and her narrative of the lesson for the rest of the day consisted mostly of enthusiastic claims that "I went underground!!" Unfortunately for Chantal, this morning, Darcy has announced that she doesn't want to go underground today.

After her nap, Darcy wanted to go to the pet store. I'm not sure why, but she's been talking about going to the pet store for a few days. I'm sure that few people think of a pet warehouse as a tourist destination, but we were there for almost an hour looking at the animals and playing with the pet toys. Darcy's favorite was the cat towers.

Twenty-four hours of fun, fun, fun!

This week's blog theme, by the way, is "Daddy/Michael/Orville is missing all the fun and has to be kept up to date via the blog". So you can probably expect more frequent posts and lots of pictures. I hope.