Surf's Up!

Darcy's birthday celebrations are over (other than gifts that are still coming) and she had a good time. I'll post some pictures and more information over the next couple days, but right now, here are some pictures from last weekend. It was a busy one, with lots of errands, short hikes, and a trip to the interior of our neighboring Oregon.

The surf was high all last weekend and we had a lot of company taking pictures of it at one of the overlooks. This is taken from one that is just a few hundred yards down the road from where Darcy and I watched whales the week before.

On Sunday, we went further north up the coast (by about a mile and a half). There are beautiful paths along the bluffs. This rock is almost a natural arch, so the waves were coming through the center of the rock as well as smashing against the sides.

The cliff sides were covered in small plants, and I tried to get a close enough look to figure out what they were, but wasn't having luck at first. Then I got over to the edge and realized it was a cute little succulent, which I didn't expect at all. All of the light green/gray in this picture is colony after colony of these:

The plants are different and there's not quite as much variety, but the ecosystem on top of these bluffs remind me a little of the tundra. When you look from a distance, it all looks the same, but when you get right up close, there are dozens of different tiny plants.

We also drove through an old-growth redwood grove to a point with access to the Smith River. Darcy and Michael skipped rocks for quite a while, and then we walked along the river and watched the mists rise and saw perfect raccoon tracks in a mud puddle. It was a very pleasant afternoon.

Whales! Sunshine! Picnic!

I know that Crescent City is supposed to be all cold and grey and foggy and wet, but there are exceptions and the last three days have been quite delicious and sunny. Today, we started out our sunshine appreciation with a trip to the playground. A family showed up about fifteen minutes later with take out sandwiches. Darcy, ever the shy girl, went up to them and announced that she wanted to have a picnic with them. I took the hint, went home and made sandwiches, and we took them to an overlook a mile or so from the house to have our picnic.

It was a very beautiful spot with great views of the ocean and the "sea stacks", small rocky outcrops just off shore. There are quite a few flowers blooming and lots of birds flitting about, so it was a great place for a picnic. But it had another draw for us: Whales!

Whales migrate past Crescent City every year and Michael's boss reported that he'd seen some on Sunday. Darcy and I tried to find some yesterday, but had no luck. Today, however, we (or at least I; I'm not entirely sure Darcy really saw the spouts) saw several or many whales, depending on how many spouts belonged to individual whales. (You might want to click on this picture to really see the two water spouts in the center of the photo.)

Many thanks go to our friend Missy in King Salmon for sending our girl the most girly thing she owns. Yesterday, we got a package that had this be-flowered tutu and wings outfit. Darcy enjoyed dancing around in it and then stripped down to just the leotard until bed time.

"I Don't Want The Candy To Go Away!!"

Despite being alive through three Halloweens now, this was Darcy's first real experience with all that goes with Halloween. Her first one was spent in King Salmon and we sort of trick-or-treated to two of our neighbors. Last year, we were in Cima and we did take her into Las Vegas to a Halloween event, but she didn't actually go trick-or-treating and, of course, nobody came to us to trick-or-treat. She's been very excited about the whole concept and was thrilled when the first trick-or-treaters knocked on our door while she was still getting into her costume. She helped put candy in their bags and then was even more motivated about finishing getting dressed herself.

Darcy inspects our candy stash before going trick-or-treating.

A couple months ago, she had decided she wanted to be a box kite for Halloween. It's the Wright Brothers' influence, of course, because they made (and sold) box kites when they were kids and some of their first model gliders were nothing but oversized box kites. She has cloth boxes for toy organization and she's fond of putting one over her head, running around, and yelling, "I'm a box kite! I'm a box kite!" But as the great day grew closer, she announced that she wanted to be a bat. Still not entirely sure why, but she was firm in her choice and so she was a bat. She also firmly decided that I was not to make bat ears for her, but that she would wear a headband with a bat on it. And so she did.

That was pretty much ok with me. I had already had my costume-making adventures with the wings. I'm not much of a seamstress. I like the idea of being a good seamstress. I have hopes of being a seamstress. But the sad reality is that I have owned a very nice sewing machine for five or six years now (a Christmas gift at my request) and yesterday when I took it out of its box (which I've done before), it still had it's test bobbin and test-sewing strip in it. Just sad. But I managed to thread it, change the bobbin, and sew the wings. I figure that puts me well on the way to master seamstress status, right?

So off went our little bat for some early-evening trick-or-treating with Michael/Orv/Daddy while I stayed home to give out the early rounds of the TEN POUNDS of candy we gave away last night. We had been warned that we'd get lots of kids and it was true. I had the best parental intentions of getting Darcy well-snacked before she left, but she was chomping at the bit, so no snack. We paid for that when they got back with a bag full of treats and a bat full of the hunger-grouchies. While I scrambled to get dinner finished and in her belly, she cried about giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters. At one point, she sobbed in the hallway near the kitchen, saying, "I don't want the candy to go away!" A big plateful of mac and cheese (with our local award-winning aged jack in the mix of cheeses) later and all that was forgotten. I took her out for another short round of trick-or-treating, stopping the first time she asked to ride rather than walk.

When we got home, we gave her a bowl for her candy and she was content for a very long time to just move the candy from bag to bowl to other bowl back to bag in an endless loop. Just like at Easter, the candy is just as much a toy to her as something to eat. She was whining for her candy this morning and stopped when Michael took the more securely packaged and unbreakable candies from hiding and put them in her basket. She added some of her wooden cookies to the mix and then made her dinosaurs play the role of trick-or-treaters.

All in all, a very successful Halloween!