LBJ Chose Well

And I don't mean our former President, but rather our former First Lady, Ladybird Johnson. She presided over the dedication ceremony for Redwood National Park, in the middle of a grove that now bears her name. We hiked the Ladybird Johnson trail a few weeks ago. It was a little chilly (it had been warmish and sunny when we left Crescent City to head south), but we did ok. Darcy hiked most of it on her own and ventured off onto little side trails to check out individual trees.

Here she is "bushwhacking" through ferns taller than she is. She had a great time exploring these little trails and hearing other hikers behind and ahead of us. (We have a video of this that I'm going to try to upload in a separate post.) Here's another picture at the same place, just with a perspective that gives some sense of the massiveness of the redwood trunk taking up the entire background of the picture:


Here she is squeezing in (or out?) of a fire scar (or "goose pen" as these fire caverns are called in redwoods). There were several we could all fit in with room to spare and yet the trees are alive and well. Darcy has a hard time passing up goose pens anytime we're around redwoods!

This was a beautiful trail. It was well-maintained and most of it was reasonably flat, so those of you who visit us, will most likely be dragged to it. We have been sort of collecting drives, hikes, and attractions that will be good for our future visitors and this is definitely on the list.

News Update

Well. Where to start? I apologize in advance for the lack of pictures. Michael has finally broken down and decided that I will never blog again if he doesn't make the pictures easy, so he's installing PhotoShop on the netbook soon. I did use the online photo tool a few times, but it's true that you'd get more pictures if PhotoShop appeared on the desktop.

My job...um, year of service... is great! Today 11 baby goats argued over the right to suck on my fingers and then I got to pet a seven week old adorable ball of fuzz who will grow up to be a great big half-Great Pyrenees livestock-guarding dog. Ok, so I also worked on a brochure about the community gardens, worked on a report for the USDA to wrap-up a big planning grant, sat through an hour and a half conference call, prepared for a Monday to be spent deep in USDA reporting minutiae, and ate freshly-baked bread with freshly-made chevre from those baby goats' mommas' milk. Oh, wait. That last one probably doesn't make you feel sorry for me over my work load, huh?

Seriously, though, I'm enjoying my work a lot so far. I work with good people and I'm working on issues I care about a lot. There's a lot to be done, and I have a to-do list that would be overwhelming if I sat down and really concentrated on everything that needs to be done. Luckily, I'm pretty good at blocking all of that stuff out and concentrating on what I can do for THIS hour in between THAT meeting and THIS conference call.

The first week was somewhat miserable. I started on Tuesday and Darcy was sick. So I stayed home with her until my first event at noon and Michael took the afternoon off with her. When I left, she seemed better than the day before. When I returned at 5 for an hour before an evening meeting, she was a miserable little unresponsive human being and we decided she needed to go to the ER rather than wait for the appointment Michael had made with the doctor the next morning. So I started the meeting waiting to hear from them at the ER. It turned out to be a really bad ear infection and she was home from daycare all week.

Michael took one for the team and stayed home most of the week since I had a full training schedule. He went in a couple early mornings and late afternoons/evenings. It was a tough way to start.

This week has been much better. Darcy has been an absolute star at daycare. She's happy to go in the morning and reluctant to leave in the afternoon. Wednesday, she announced that she wanted a sister when I arrived to pick her up. Thursday, she announced that N and M (the other two kids in her daycare) were her sister and brother. I'm glad she solved that issue for herself, because fictive kin is the only way I foresee her gaining a sibling.

It's actually pretty impressive, once again, how quickly Darcy has adapted to a new situation. She doesn't seem at all unhappy about my working or her going to "school" every day. There are still times when she's unhappy about not being in Cima anymore and it's heartbreaking when she starts listing all the things she misses about Cima while little tears start welling up in her eyes and her lip starts quivering. She listed all the animals she used to get to watch at Cima for Miss L, her daycare provider, the other day, and I thought we were going to get full-on tears there for a while. She held it together.

The impressive thing, to me, is that she is able to articulate very clear preferences about the two places now. We talked about how we wouldn't live in this house forever and that we'd either move to another new place altogether, or if we stayed in Crescent City, that we'd probably try to buy a house that we could paint, etc. She told us she wanted any new house to be "like Cima House". And I thought, really? You want to live in a 25 year old double-wide with doors that blow open, leaky windows, fake wood paneling, no edging on any of the counters, and no neighbors to be seen? But when prompted, Darcy explained that she wants a house without stairs, like Cima House. I think she misses being able to run the full length of the house and have all her toys on one level, but it amazes me that three months after leaving Cima House, she can explain that preference.

But now I'm just rambling 'cause I'm really tired. We had Friday night pizza night with our neighbors tonight and my fellow Crescent City VISTA joined us. We got home not much before 9 and thanks to brownies for dessert, Darcy didn't go to sleep until amost ten. I'm tired. But I've blogged.

My First Crescent City Earthquake!

Hey! I felt an earthquake today! I was sitting on the edge of the bed and it very noticeably swayed from side to side for several seconds. Michael happened to call about ten or fifteen minutes later and I assumed it was to ask if I'd felt it. He said that someone else had just asked him that. Apparently, he didn't feel it. But I just looked it up on USGS and sure enough, there was a magnitude 6.0 earthquake centered not that far from the earthquake that we missed when we were in Portland.

This is the way I want to experience any future earthquakes here: just barely. I want no destruction of property or life. It just so happens that we finally shopped for our earthquake kits over the weekend and Darcy thinks it's the best thing ever. She piles the jars of peanut butter into towers. For the first day, when they everything was piled at one end of the kitchen table, she'd climb up on the chair and sort of hug it all and ask, "What's this for?". She'd giggle like mad when we said it was our earthquake supplies. She has proclaimed, "I love earthquakes!" I think it's the boxes of chocolate-covered peanut butter granola bars (an big earthquake or tsunami is the perfect time for such a calorie-packed snack) that have won her love, not really the earthquakes.

For the record, each kit (one large one for the house and smaller ones for each car; we're supposed to have enough for three days without power or assistance) so far contains:

large jar of peanut butter
large box of saltines
granola bars
juice boxes
flashlight
fire starter
hand sanitizer
2.5 gallons of water

We're going to add tetrapaks of milk and probably some dried and/or canned fruit. Oh! And I'm going to get a pound-plus bar for each kit from Trader Joe's while I'm in Albuquerque. If chocolate can fix a close encounter with a dementor, it's got to help with the shock of living through a big earthquake. This won't feed us well, but it will feed us enough to get through. If we're home, obviously, we have all the food that's in the house as well and at least one of the car kits in addition to the house kit.

And, of course, speaking of earthquakes, if you haven't already made a donation to help the Haitian people recover and rebuild from their devastating earthquake, please consider donating to Partners in Health now.

The Portland Report

A couple weeks ago, we went to Portland for the weekend. It was in place of being able to be with family for Christmas, and we had a good time (and saw family!). The drive went quickly and we arrived in Portland well before we could check into our hotel. So we stopped at a kids' salon on the southern edge of the city (I had looked these up ahead of time) and Darcy got a quick haircut and shampoo. Then we headed to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) where the main attraction was a T-rex fossil that did not photograph well. Their science play room, however, was where we ended up spending the most time. Darcy had a great time playing with water in the waterproof smock and crocs provided by the museum.

She also loved playing with the baby raccoons. Although I suspect they're supposed to stay near the hollow log, she dragged two of the four babies all over the play room. They took rides in a pulley-powered bucket and saw all the sights.

After that, it was time to go check into the hotel. We had splurged on a suite because it guarantees more sleep for all and Darcy, to our surprise, chose to have her bed set up in the living room/kitchenette room. After getting settled, we headed out in cold, heavy rain for sushi for dinner.

The next day was drier and we started out with doughnuts at Voodoo Doughnut. Someone had the great idea of letting Darcy choose her own doughnut and she ended up with a monstrous doughnut covered in FrootLoops. Yum! Then we wandered around the downtown area with a long stop at Powell's City of Books. (Yes, ok. We did some very tourist, very Portland things.)

After heading back to our hotel for a forgotten phone number, we then met up with my cousin Tina for lunch at a vegan place within walking distance of her house. This was after a very enthusiastic reunion with Mimi-cat. It was after lunch that things got very exciting. Tina, being the most excellent cousin that she is, had agreed to babysit Darcy! We dropped them off at the light rail stop so they could go explore the Children's Museum. Michael was tearing up just a little as we watched them walk away from the car:

With Darcy safely in the hands of the world's most well-qualified babysitter (Tina having a Master's degree in early childhood education and all), Michael and I painted the town red! Well, maybe not. We went back to the Powell's neighborhood and Michael browsed at a used record store and I browsed at kitchen stores before we met up at Powell's for some toddler-free book browsing. Neither of us bought anything, but it was very nice anyway and I discovered that a book I got really cheap sells for a hundred and thirty bucks at Powell's!! I practically own treasure. Or an obscure archaeology book. Your pick.

Following our window-shopping, we went out for an early dinner at Toro Bravo, a tapas restaurant. Oh, it was tasty! We sat at the bar after getting there when the website claimed they opened to find not a single free table because they had opened half an hour earlier. The bar was fine. We had, of course, papas bravas, plus the Singing Pig salad (no pig involved), a cheese board, and the salt cod fritters. We were feeling slightly peckish after that and the bar tender recommended the braised leeks with (the unpronounceable) salbitxada sauce. It's a romesco-like sauce of deliciousness. We ate that with a good bread and couldn't quite finish it. I think it would take a third person to finish that many leeks.

We were both anxious to see our girl (one of us maybe more than the other), so we drove back to Tina's house. The anxiety was not shared. It took a while for Darcy to even come downstairs and then she was wrapped up in her conversation with Tina rather than showing any interest in our re-appearance. Tina reported that Darcy was extremely thrilled about riding the "dinosaur train" to and from the museum and that she shouted "Wheeeee!" as it started through the first dozen stops.

The thrill has not worn off. Earlier today Darcy asked me, "Do you remember when I rode the dinosaur train to the children's museum? Do you remember?" She very fondly calls Tina "my corythosaurus" when talking about that afternoon. For some unknown reason, she calls all babies corythosaurus, and she made the leap that Tina, as a babysitter, must also be a corythosaurus. Personally, I don't see the resemblance.

The next morning was the wrap-up of our Portland trip. We spent almost an hour in the hotel's pool, which Darcy loved. After packing up, we drove half a mile to Portland's Ikea. Darcy usually just loves running around the children's section and trying out every kids' bed. This time, though, she was eligible to play in their supervised play area (Smaland). It has a lot of stuff including a big pool of plastic balls. She went there while Michael and I dreamed of furnishing a future house and bought a few small things we needed. We all had lunch there (oh, how we love their hard-boiled egg and shrimp open-face sandwiches!) before starting the drive home.

The drive home was mostly uneventful. We stocked up on Trader Joe's products in Eugene and then crossed over the coast part of the drive. It took a longer, but it inspired a day-time trip back up the coast the following weekend to see what we had missed. It's gorgeous and we can do nice, easy sections of the Oregon Coast Trail within half an hour of our house.

Now we're gearing up for the start of my job. Darcy will be going to her day care for the first time tomorrow, just for a trial run. The plan is for her to be there long enough to get the first lesson in "mommy and daddy will always come back to get you". Wish us luck!

We're Still Here

I know I haven't posted a lot in the past few weeks. Part of that is our new computer -- being a netbook it doesn't have convenient things like Photoshop on it, so I'm having to find and learn web-based applications for that sort of thing. So photos will be a couple more days in coming, but we have some very cute ones from Portland, so stay tuned!

In other news, we have storms moving through Crescent City for the next week. Tonight, the winds are high and the rain is hard. Our power has flickered four or five times already, but come back on immediately every time so far. Gusts over 50 mph have been reported today and the house is shaking when they come. The gusts are also scaring Darcy (along with some freakishly loud, unidentified noise that's come with each flicker), so Michael's just moved her into our bed so she can sleep. No bedside reading lamps for us!

Haiti

I'm sure everyone has already been reading about the devastating earthquake in Haiti yesterday. I'm feeling especially lucky that our earthquake over the weekend (we were away, so didn't experience it) was deeper, not as intense, and farther away from population centers than Haiti's.

A friend of mine is a Hatian-American anthropologist who has a lot of ties to Haiti. If you're looking for a way to help, he recommends donating to Partners In Health. They are a respected agency (were mentioned in one of the NYTimes articles on the earthquake today) and have been calling for assistance as their medical facilities are being overwhelmed.

Boy Scout Tree Trail

As part of our Christmas/New Year's outdoor fest, we hiked the Boy Scout Tree Trail last weekend. It is a gorgeous trail leading to a smallish waterfall. We started it later than we should have due to an untimely nap, but we forged ahead and managed to get to the waterfall and back before Michael's headlamp was necessary. Near the beginning of the trail, Darcy was in the backpack, but soon after they posed near this leaning redwood, she got out and hiked on her own for (we estimated) about .75 miles!

Darcy and I disappear among the trees (you may have to enlarge the picture to see us).

The fern mass on the trunk near the left of the picture is huge, but the picture I took that gave some sense of just how huge didn't come out very well.

Part of the trail ran right alongside and old redwood log. It was gorgeous.

The final destination: Fern Falls.