The Dinosaurs

Many of you may remember this picture of the Wright Family, taken last fall at the height of Darcy's Wright Brothers obsession. All animals and toys were available to play a part in Darcy's fantasy of the 21st century Cima branch of the Wright clan. The Wright Brothers have waned as play objects these days, although the blue baby and Mickey Mouse are still Orv and Wil about 50% of the time. You might be tempted to think that all the animals could now go back to being themselves, but you would be wrong.

Instead, they have been drafted into Darcy's current dinosaur enthusiasm. Almost every night after dinner, she asks if we can all go up to play with her "dinosaurs". She does own about a dozen solid plastic/rubber/whatever dinosaur figures and they occasionally get to play dinosaur with her. Tonight, they did not. They stayed put in the toy storage bin. The teddy bears (mostly giganotosaurus), dogs and cats (triceratops[ies]), octopi and monkeys (oryctodromeus), and assorted other dinosaur stand-ins do most of the heavy lifting. It's a little disconcerting, but then it's also disconcerting to watch Darcy page through a book about dinosaurs, get to a particularly fierce T. rex and hear her coo, "Oh! A T-rex! Isn't he so cute?"

Those of you who play Facebook have already heard this story, but for those of you who don't, Darcy was recently at a playground next to our community garden. I was working in the dirt while she and Michael went to play. A little boy was playing there too and he took out a dinosaur and showed it to Darcy saying, "Look -- a dinosaur!" And Darcy looked at it and said, "Oh what a cute parasaurolophus!" And she was right! When I asked her about it tonight, she told me that he had a hadrosaur. That's also correct, because parasaurolophus was a type of hadrosaur.

I figure that we have about two months left of the total fascination with dinosaurs before she moves onto something new. The Wrights stuck around for almost exactly six months and we're now on month four of dinosaur everything. It will be very interesting to see what gets her interest next.

Picnic At Yontocket

Today was sunny and actually warm. I was out and about for work during the afternoon and the thermometer read 74! In Crescent City! So I got a picnic together before Michael got home from work and we all went out to enjoy the evening sunshine. A coworker had told me about three hikes that share a trail head in the dairy lands of Fort Dick, so we decided we'd try those. One trail leads to Yontocket, a historic Tolowa village site. In the 1850s, the white settlers of Crescent City and Smith River attacked the Tolowa and Yurok tribes in a series of massacres. At Yontocket, local tribes had gathered for an annual world renewal ceremony and 600 people were killed.

This might seem to make for a strange picnic site, but it is an absolutely beautiful place and there's a picnic table just outside the fence for the memorial site. We weren't exactly expecting the picnic table, but we took advantage of it. Looking out over the mountains, dunes, Smith River, flowers, and incredible trees, it's hard to imagine how people could come to such a place for the purpose of killing other people.

The sun was still warm while we ate. Darcy enjoyed her standard sesame seed bagel with butter. Adventurous eating -- in other words, not-starch -- is not in her game-plan these days. She tried a bite of strawberry under great protest and then moved on to starchier and better things.

And then it was time to go play in the flowers. These rolling hills are really grown-over beach dunes and some of them were covered in these white flowers. After we packed up, we followed a second trail to the Smith River, almost at it's mouth. I have more pictures, but they'll have to wait. It's too late and we have another indoor farmers' market tomorrow morning followed by a haircut for Darcy in the early afternoon. It's going to be a big day.

Famous Glores

Ah, the World Championship Crab Races! Crescent City had a crab festival a couple weeks ago that was fun, but a little underwhelming. Considering the crab bounty that comes across the docks here, it should be a much bigger event. But Darcy had fun, Michael ate a lot of crab for not much money, and we all got to watch near-stationary crabs be judged as racers.

And, as you can see, we made the front page of the newspaper! A slightly different picture of Darcy at the crab race was in the paper a few days later. And then I was in the paper with the other new VISTA in town last week, too. We are just all over the paper these days and soon, Michael or I will also be recording a radio ad, too.

This is what happens when you become a VISTA -- everyone in town starts to get to know you! It's all good.