Retrospective, Part III

No Darcy, but a great sunset as viewed to the east of Cima House.

Darcy in the snow at Cima.

A trip to the Quiet Canyon wouldn't be complete without a stop at the Echo Place.

My laundry line! I'm going to miss it so much! Darcy loves to play in the blowing laundry.

Oh, those weird, alien Joshua tree flowers. This year, found only at Cima House!!

The Cross In A Box On A Rock Goes To The Supreme Court

Here's Darcy climbing on the rocks across the road from the parking lot for the Teutonia Peak trail, one of the few official, maintained trails in Mojave National Preserve. The rocks and the parking lot are right on the side of Cima Road and the rocks -- and the box on top of them -- are clearly visible from the road in both directions and from the trail itself. The box covers up a cross that has been the center of a legal debate for a decade or more. The cross is claimed as a veterans' memorial by regional veterans' groups, but has been challenged as violating the separation of church and state because it is on public land, Mojave National Preserve to be exact.
A judge ordered the cross covered with the box while its fate is decided in court.

Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about the Mojave cross. The article continues the myth that this is in a "remote" part of the preserve, which is far from the truth. It is 10 or 11 miles from the intersection with Interstate 15, on a paved road. Considering how few paved roads there are in the preserve and how much of the preserve requires miles of driving on dirt roads, this is hardly a remote part of the park. Mojave National Preserve is 1.6 million acres of land, with only three paved roads entering from the northern side. The cross is about 30 feet from one of three ways people can enter the park from a major interstate.

I have some sympathy for veterans who have visited the cross as a memorial over the decades and I could get behind a compromise solution that allowed some other kind of memorial (a flat plaque, for example) to be placed in the same spot. Without the cross. I've driven past the rocks when someone had (illegally) removed/destroyed the box. It's out of place in the middle of a national park property, especially because so much of the land around it is federally designated wilderness. It is a jarring sight and it is very visible from a distance, with or without the box.

I do hope that the Supreme Court decides that the cross be removed, both because I think it shouldn't be there and because of the larger question of religious symbols on public lands.

If you have the stomach for it, there's a video on YouTube about the cross from the "other side" of the argument. It's blatant propaganda as far as I'm concerned because it works very hard to make it seem like you have to drive across miles of salt flats and dirt roads to get to the cross (so how could anyone be offended by it?!), which couldn't be farther from the truth. It also carefully avoids mentioning Mojave National Preserve, describing the land only as "federal" public lands.

Let me just add that Michael is not going to see this post before it goes up on the blog. As an employee of the preserve, he has to be more careful with his opinion than I do with mine. My opinion does not represent Michael or any other employee of Mojave National Preserve.

Retrospective, Part II

Along with a retrospective of Darcy, the next two posts will be a tribute (mostly) to Mojave National Preserve. In a week, assuming that the movers actually come when we think they will, we'll be driving north to our new park. Enjoy the scenery as well as our ever-growing girl!

Early spring flowers, Razor Road (technically, just outside the Preserve).

Darcy's first trip to the "Quiet Canyon", officially named Banshee Canyon.

An early rock-climbing expedition off the Teutonia Peak trail.

On the trail to Eagle Rocks in the Midhills region.

Not at Mojave, but a classic camping breakfast on Darcy's first camping trip.

Darcy's first visit to Yosemite. Can't leave this out!

Darcy-as-butterfly hugging a Joshua tree near the old corral on Morningstar Mine Road.

Pause For A Joke

Darcy knows one joke. It comes from a Baby Einstein video friends gave us and goes like this:

Why did the bee go to the doctor?

Because he had hives!

She tells it without a good sense of comedic timing, but she's getting better. At dinner tonight (made much more delicious by a gift of roasted Hatch chiles gifted to us this morning), jokes came up and I prompted her to tell her joke. She did. And then did again. And again. And made us tell it to her. To get out of this rut, Michael searched his brain for a toddler-appropriate joke. He found one and posed the question to Darcy.

[Before I tell the joke (Darcy's way), I need to describe a page of her ABCs de Babar book. If one spoke French, each page is illustrated with many things that start with the letter for that page. On the "N" page, there aren't many (politically correct) words that start with N in English. It's supposed to be all about swimming (nager). But for us English speakers, there's a nest and there are some naked elephants.]

So, Michael asked, "Why did all the elephants decide to go swimming?"

And Darcy answered, "Because they were naked!"

Post One Hundred: A Retrospective

Our blog will reach the grand total of one hundred posts when I hit "Publish Post" this time around. I thought I'd give you a little retrospective of Darcy. It's going to take a while to choose pictures, but I'm going to work on it off and on today in between wiping Darcy's nose, which is trying to run right off her face this morning. She found a cold while we were among people.

Ok, here's the first year plus a month or two. It was hard to choose because digital cameras let you take way too many photos and keep them in an easy-to-browse format! I'll do the next two years (that's right, she'll be three in just over a month!!) later because apparently a girl with a cold can only nap for twenty minutes at a time.

The First Hours: With Betty (Granny Mimi) in the birthing room.

First Christmas: Asleep on top of her car seat fleece in New York.

First Playdate: With Nia, in King Salmon.

First "Interactive" Play: With cousin Liana in North Carolina.

First Time In Play Center (King Salmon)

First Car: And with it, first independence! (In Baker.)

The Wright Family Portrait

The Wright family (in real life) consisted of one father (Milton Wright), one mother (Susan Wright), four brothers (in descending order of age: Reuchlin, Lorin, Wilbur, and Orville Wright), and one sister (Katherine Wright). In Darcy's world, however, there are four Miltons (at left, the shaggy dog, the large blue octopus, the large white teddy bear, and the green plastic bug with pink wings), three Susans (at right, the blue elephant, the multi-colored dog, and the blue and green medium-sized octopus), no Reuchlin or Lorin, two Wilburs (Mickey Mouse and the turquoise nightshirt hanging behind the Wright Brothers -- please, just don't ask), one Orville (the blue doll with hat sitting next to Mickey/Wilbur), and an almost endless number of Miss Katherines (the rest of the dolls/animals in the picture).

These roles are pretty much fixed and unvariable, although sometimes the Miss Katherines are pulled into other story-lines. One is missing from the picture because she is busy acting the part of the dinosaur-conductor on the Dinosaur Train.

This is our life.

Bye-Bye, Las Vegas!

With our move (in theory) approaching in two weeks and our schedule between now and then pretty packed, we realized that our trip to Las Vegas on Friday might well be our last as a family. Darcy and I will make it in at least once for grocery shopping and to return our library books, but Michael probably won't be back unless we find a time to reschedule the tapas night out originally scheduled for Friday.

So it seemed fitting that we should drive the extra mile north on Las Vegas Boulevard from our library to pay homage to the oh-so-famous Las Vegas sign. For all those people (and there are lots -- I've seen long lines of people waiting their turn for pictures, whole wedding parties, wedding parties with an Elvis impersonator along for the ride) who want this classic snapshot, Las Vegas provides handy-dandy drive in/drive out parking. Very convenient!

Most people want the view featured in the first photo. We (ok, maybe I, because Michael seemed surprised when we got there) wanted the other side. The side that you see as you are leaving Las Vegas. Because that's pretty much what we'll be doing soon. We might not live in Las Vegas, but a lot of our public lives center on that city. Virtually all of our shopping and errands happen there. We use the Las Vegas parks and libraries. Darcy has play dates there. And all that is coming to an end. I don't mind that it's coming to an end; it's a long and not particularly exciting drive from Cima to Las Vegas. But it did seem fitting to mark the end of our odd relationship with Sin City. So here we are, with the sun in absolutely the wrong place, being wished Happy Trails by Las Vegas.


On the book front, I've now finished the heartbreaking, but beautifully written Grapes of Wrath. I knew most of the story from the movie, but it didn't stop me from having heart ache, both for the fictional Joads and for the hundreds of thousands of people who lived through many of the same things the Joads experienced. Ah, greed! What could our world be without your presence?

I'm taking a break from the more reading-list-like books for my next book. I've just started The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It's a fairly light-hearted (at least so far) mystery narrated by a young man with autism.