The Flower Search Continues

Flower season, while not as spectacular as last year's so far, is upon us in force now. A couple weeks ago, we had reason to be in Baker and took advantage of the proximity to Rasor Road for some flower hunting. We didn't find many exciting displays, but the lupine out there were just about to pop into bloom.

Michael and Darcy climbed rocks, of course, as they do when rocks are there to be climbed. They didn't find any flowers up there, but Michael spied some flowers on rocks on the other side of the road and I scrambled up to take a closer look because they didn't look like something we'd seen before. Michael is in uniform because he had just given a talk about Mojave National Preserve in Baker earlier in the morning.

As, indeed, they were not. These are beautiful Mojave asters, which we did not see at all last year except in our flower guides. They are a really beautiful flower and this bunch was situated in a little rock crevice at full bloom.


I get to go do our taxes now, so y'all will have to wait for the next flower installation. It is Flower Hunt: Teutonia Peak. Your sneak preview: we really, really wanted to find the recently-spotted resident mountain lion, but didn't.

Day Five of The Adam Obsession

So it's happened. Our little girl has her first full-blown crush. It's on Laurie Berkner's bass player, Adam (he's in the second photo). Adam wears a green shirt in one of the photos in the liner notes for their newest CD. Darcy has worn green shirts the last two days. Today, she carried around the liner notes almost all day. She held conversations with Adam. As in: "Let's play in the tent, Adam." "That sounds fun. I'll try it." She turned the pages in the liner notes and pointed to each picture: "This is the picture of Adam where he wears his green shirt like Darcy's." "This is the picture where Adam says whoa."

She runs on grass whenever she's near it because Adam says something about running on the green grass on the CD. When we were at Kelso Depot the other day with our friends Amy, Matthew, and Miles, she kept asking the "boys" to run on the grass with her -- like Adam.

Today, I convinced her to do several things by invoking Adam. She wore jeans because that's what Adam wears in his pictures. She put shoes on to go outside because Adam wears shoes. She walked to meet Michael on the dirt road because Adam runs on the sandy beach and our road is made of sand, too.

Our poor bookmobile driver/assistant had his every move monitored and narrated because he's a "boy" and everything that boys do these days is fascinating.

Train Play, Darcy Style

Trains belong in high places, apparently. When Darcy plays with her trains, she plays on top of this bookshelf or on my dresser 90% of the time. On the dresser, the trains often go to the piggery (she learned the term from a book), which means that they all cluster around her piggy bank at the far right of the picture. She will play like this for long periods of time, chatting to herself and the trains non-stop.

There was supposed to be more to this story, but Darcy got interested in the process. Gotta go!

Resident Assistant Gardener

Darcy has stepped up as the number one garden assistant this year. She has her own shovel and hoe. When she uses them, she says that she is "just like the Care Bears" because she has a book in which a Care Bear works in his garden with a shovel and hoe. She doesn't quite have the concept yet, but she tries and she has fun doing it, which is the most important thing.

I made a solo shopping trip to Las Vegas this "weekend" and visited, um, several Starbucks locations to collect used grounds. It looks like a lot, I know, but it just disappears once it's in the garden, I swear! My soil has its pluses -- hardly any rocks -- but also minuses -- not much organic matter. The coffee grounds are really upping the organic, water-holding content.

So that coffee got split between two beds, one of which I had done nothing to yet, and the other one has significant amounts of cow manure, grass clippings, and some coffee grounds already. This somewhat prepared one got a good topping of coffee grounds. Looks like a lot, right? Darcy, as you can see, LOVES the coffee grounds. She likes to crumble the individual discs. It makes her coffee-covered from head to toe, but she's washable.

But after five minutes of turning the soil over, you can hardly tell it had that many coffee grounds earlier. It's the one in the middle. The whole garden is smallish -- about 11 by 14 feet in total, but it's a good start and I have modest hopes for production this year: greens, herbs, tomatoes, snap peas, and maybe some hot peppers and/or cucumbers.

Flower Season Begins!

Welcome to Flower Season 2009! Darcy and I hiked from the post office back to our house the other day and our rewards were a fox or coyote jaw complete with teeth and a little fur on the chinny-chinny-chin and the first flowers of spring! These purple lovelies are a carrot family member called purple cymopterus. Apparently, there's no common name for them. There are two plants hanging out together, but I can't find more, even though I've tried.

Darcy and Michael took their own hike a week ago to the "Quiet Canyon" (Darcy's name), aka Banshee Canyon (the name that appears on maps). This is the land of holes in rocks and the place where the echoes live, so Darcy loves it. Anywhere she can play with rocks and dirt is a good place for her.

Stay tuned for more spring pictures of Darcy exploring the Mojave and flowers popping up everywhere!

Dark As A Dungeon

We recently went to hike around one of the many abandoned mine sites in Mojave National Preserve. I believe this one is Evening Star Mine. There are multiple mine shafts, a few old buildings, and a lot of Joshua trees. And a big rock that smacked the bottom of our car.

Michael and Darcy explored some of the infrastructure while I took pictures. I did not see it happen, but Michael carried Darcy up the first flight of stairs and said they were pretty solid, all things considered. I'm glad I didn't see it.

I know nothing about mining, really, but I assume this was a chute for loading up -- buckets? barrels? carts? -- of ore.

This mine shaft was particularly deep. Michael was demonstrating this fact to Darcy by dropping rocks down the shaft to hear when they hit. We had a difference of opinion about whether we could see the bottom, or if we were just seeing a debris pile being held by fallen beams. Either way, this is deep.

I can't really imagine going to work every day by climbing down ladders into the ground. I know that they were no doubt more stable when they were in use, but even so, it would be a depressing start to a work day.

Michael recently started reading a book about the history of Cima that he really brought home for me, but I've been ignoring it in favor of fiction for a few weeks. It turns out that we don't really live in Cima. We live in a "residential suburb" of Cima called Hockersville. Four families had homesteaded four quandrants that meet at the corner of "our" property where there is a sort of intersection of two dirt roads. They all built their houses on the corners so they would form a small community and the Hockers (two brothers) owned two of the four quadrants, so they were honored with the name. All but our quadrant were still owned by descendents when the book was written and at least two still are, we think.

Three houses are still there (although I think the one on our property was a replacement for one that burned, but I can't remember who told me that) and there's a roof that may be the remnant of the fourth, so I might try to put together a photographic essay about modern day Hockersville.

"We Have Forks With Tines On Them!"

Specifically, Michael and I had forks with three tines, and Darcy had a fork with four tines. She counted all of them after asking what they (the tines) were called.

In other words, her vocabulary continues to grow quickly. As do her culinary borders. Tonight was baked tofu with a broccoli/mushroom/zucchini/noodle stirfry. About half-way through, she asked to eat "mama's zucchini" because hers was all gone. The spice level of both was moderate and she ate it up. It's a good feeling.

And in other news, we have new friends! Who live in the preserve! And have an almost-toddler! They live about twenty minutes south of Kelso Depot and work for the research center there. They walked into the Depot and asked to meet Michael last week because they had heard there was a couple with a toddler there. They followed up quickly with a dinner invite, which we had to decline because Michael was under the weather.

I asked Amy to come with us to a toddler playgroup in Vegas yesterday and we had a great time despite some teething crankiness. They stayed to play for a while when we got back to Cima and stopped in to see Michael today, inviting us out to their place over the weekend.

It's very, very nice. We seem to have a lot in common, besides small children and talked pretty much non-stop during the drive.