In Which I Avoid Living The News Story

You may have read about California's sky-high gas prices in recent days. Crescent City always has higher-than-state-average prices, but over the weekend at least one gas station in town posted a $4.89 price tag for regular unleaded. It was just a little bit crazy and I actually had to pay for a few gallons in Arcata at $4.79/gallon. Not fun.

So today, being that the truck and both gas cans were empty, I did what sensible people living on the border do: I drove half an hour to Brookings, OR, where I paid $3.96 for each of my 23 gallons. And like my days growing up on the New York/New Jersey border, in Oregon, it's illegal to pump your own gas. Double bonus: I saved almost 20 dollars (and, yes, I did use gas getting there, but there are three other staples that I buy for much less in Oregon than California; I've done the math and it is worth the drive) and I didn't have to pump the gas.

And that's how I avoided becoming part of the CA gas price woes today. Thrilling blog post, right? If you were in Crescent City, you could get your thrills from the non-stop thunder we're having. Most of you aren't, however, so you'll have to find your thrills elsewhere tonight.

"You Should Choose An IPA"

So Michael likes beer. I don't think this will shock anyone. Certainly, anyone who listened to his Death to Classical show this week knows that he loves the beer. Our friend Connor joined him to pair beers and music. They had to taste every beer, of course, and so cabbed it home that night. (Drink responsibly!) There should be a recording of it archived at some point, so you can share in the joy.

Darcy notices everything. Nothing escapes that girl's eye. So it shouldn't have surprised me when, several months ago as I was trying to choose a beer from the co-op to bring home, Darcy's piped up, "Dad loves IPAs. You should choose an IPA." Ok, sure. Yes, he does love IPAs, but why do YOU know that?? One day last year, I opened Darcy's school folder to find this:

Really? My child is 16 years away from her first legal drink and yet she already knows what kind of beer Michael likes to drink? And she makes beer-themed art IN SCHOOL? A smart child is a double-edged sword.

Almost Forgot!

Yikes! Here I was, about to turn off the light and go to sleep when I realized I hadn't blogged yet today. Can I blame not enough sleep last night? Or Michael being off hiking in the Trinity Alps? Or the fact that we have a dog visiting for a few days?

All of those things are happening. Darcy and I went to the Arcata Saturday market this morning and hit a few highlights of Humboldt for one of the last times. She got a hair cut in preparation for class picture day this coming week. Michael headed out this morning for three days of hiking, while Lola moved into our house for four nights. It's all good.

Here's a picture of Darcy from late spring/early summer in Ashland, OR. She had just figured out how to hang by her knees a little before this trip, so she wanted to show it off a lot. Her hair seemed so long then, but now she has enough for pig-tails and other "fancy" hair styles. Once again, today, I had to struggle to answer questions about how I wanted her hair cut. One of the benefits of being back in the Northeast will be not having to answer them any more. Duane will just decide. Right, Duane? I'm counting on you, not just for Darcy, but for me. I don't want to decide any more.

The Hidden Blog

I might be cheating slightly today. It's not much of a cheat because I have written a long, complicated, well-illustrated blog post. Just not here.

Some very few of you know that I used to have an active food blog. It's been about two years since I wrote anything at all on my food blog, but yesterday, I was inspired to do so. A friend of mine here in Crescent City is participating (and helped plan) Ferment Del Norte's Local Food Challenge. For most of October, he is trying to eat only foods that are grown in our region. This is a challenge that requires a lot of forbidden foods, since there are so many foods that simply do not grow here. 

The one ingredient that is not produced and sold here that I could not give up is salt.

We were discussing this yesterday morning and I asked why you couldn't just make your own. We do live right next to a rather large bath tub filled with salt water, after all. So I promised him I would make him some salt. If you want to read the story of how three random gallons of the Pacific Ocean became beautiful bowls of salt, you can check out part one and part two on my food blog, Isolated Foodie. I have never cross-posted from one blog to the other before, and even my own mother claims that she didn't know I had a food blog, because I did it for me, not for an audience. Although I did start using my first name on the blog, I use pseudonyms for the places we've lived and the two blogs are on different accounts. In other words, if you'd like to comment over there, please don't say, "Hey, Angela GLORE, I didn't know you could make salt in CRESCENT CITY. Glad I read about it on GLORES AROUND THE PARKS." Otherwise, enjoy!

Nearby Pleasures

Crescent City and surrounds have lots to offer, but we do go further afield at times. One of my favorite places to look for wildflowers in the spring and early summer is a trail along the Rough and Ready River near Cave Junction, Oregon. We stop there occasionally on our way to Grants Pass, Medford, and other parts of Oregon on I-5.

Here are a few pictures of this year's blooms:

The other plant-of-interest at the Rough and Ready are a handful of Ponderosa pines. We learned last year during our first trip to Bend that Ponderosa pines smell nothing like what you'd (or I'd) expect a pine to smell like. They smell something like the intersection of vanilla, dried orange peel, cinnamon, and something else. If you ever find yourself near a sun-warmed Ponderosa, act like Darcy and stick your nose in a crack in the bark to sniff deeply:

Early Stumbles

Well, this is sad. It might be because Michael and our friend got home from doing Michael's radio show and I'm very distracted by conversation and the tv show they're watching, but I am striking out on a good blog topic for today.

So, let me share some of the highlights of our planned drive across the country. There will be links, but no pictures. We'll start out in Lake Tahoe to see the kokanee salmon spawning. Michael and I got to see them seven years ago on our honeymoon and Darcy's excited to see them.

From there, we'll drive across Nevada, stopping to see Great Basin National Park for a few hours. We know some folks who have worked there in the past and we want to hit a bunch of parks on the way. It is kinda middle of nowhere, but that's ok. We'll stay the next night in Moab, which we think might be like Bend ("the place to be"), and spend the next morning in Arches National Park.

As you might be able to tell, I'm trying to find one major activity for each day and then minor stops for stretch breaks as well. From Moab, we'll drive to Denver to visit with our friend Gretel for an evening. We've both driven across Kansas on Interstate 70 before and, no offense meant to Kansas, but we're not keen to do it again. So from Denver, we'll head back up to I-80 and go across Nebraska instead. Kearney, NE, was a cross-roads for most of the major trails west and promises a couple interesting museums. The following morning, we'll skip south to hit Homestead National Monument, with the plowshare-shaped visitors center.

Then comes ST LOUIS!! We'll spend two nights in St Louis! We'll go to Friday Archaeology. We'll take Darcy to the zoo, to MoBot, and possibly to the City Museum.

After St Louis, there are still a couple of great stops of interest. Recalling Darcy's very first obsession, we will be stopping at the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historic Park. For those of you who don't know the Wright Brothers history as well as we do, while the first flight was in Kitty Hawk, their airplane was perfected outside of Dayton, OH. We have the Martin-Sheen-narrated film to prove it.

And then, just like that, we'll be arriving in Pennsylvania for house-hunting, start of work, and the transition to a new school. (Whew! With half an hour left in this day, I have a post! I'm going to try my best to get a picture a day while we're travelling, so you WILL get images of all these places.)

In Which A Previously Unpublished Post Sees Light

Regular readers of this blog know that Darcy can get a little obsessive about one particular thing for months at a time. Right now, we are in the midst of ocean obsession. This has been going on for a very long time now. I think it's been close to a year and it shows no sign of stopping, even as she lets smaller obsessions come and go. Birds are one of the minor interests these days, and she spends time reading bird books, using iBird to look birds up and listen to their calls, and musing about the birds we see out and about. Like everything else she turns her mind to, she is building an amazing wealth of knowledge about birds. But, in keeping with the major obsession of the moment, ocean and shore birds have an edge over all others.

So earlier this summer, I spent a week driving her to and from Trinidad so she could go to Marine Lab Day Camp at Humboldt State University's marine lab. I started to write  a very long post about that week and never published it. It was supposed to lead up to the last day of camp, when Michael and I got to the lab to pick her up and discovered that she had lost a tooth during lunch! There had been no wiggling, no looseness...she bit into her sandwich and out it came. I had tried to take a picture of it without success and that's when I put this post on hold, thinking I would fix that. And there it sat, unpublished. But now I'm dusting it off and adding some more pictures of the marine camp.

This was definitely a highlight of our summer. Amazing that our small child got to play in a college lab, feed fish heads to sea anemones, and walk to the ocean for science every day. Crescent City readers take note: Other than figuring out rides (carpool!), this was ridiculously affordable. I think it was $40 for the whole week, five hours a day. Watch for it next summer. So here's the original partial post:


It's been quite a week in our corner of the world. Quite a looooong week. 

Monday was my birthday (and a very good one, too, thanks to the many wonderful people in my life who sent greetings, birthday wishes, and gifts). I got up at six so I could finish moving us our of our friends' house. We had been living there while they were away for ten days so that Michael could put new flooring in our bathroom, entry, and kitchen, and install a new-to-us wall oven. Darcy and I left at 7:30 to drive an hour and twenty minutes to Trinidad for the summer day camp at HSU's Marine Research Lab. This is the view from thirty steps away from the lab:

Not so bad, huh? While Darcy was at camp, I spent five hours drinking coffee at a nice cafe, window shopping in Arcata, chatting with friends and family on the phone, and generally just being relaxed. It was lovely. 

I got back to the lab a bit early to pick Darcy up and they weren't yet back from their daily field trip, so I walked around Trinidad's hilly streets for a while admiring the views and gardens. I was across the harbor when I saw kids starting to descend from Trinidad Head and spied Darcy (in the orange top with a hat near the utility pole):

She had a great first day at camp and we hopped in the car for the drive home. And once home, we changed into soccer-appropriate clothes and went to her first soccer practice:

Home again for a very quick, simple, but completely delicious dinner of bread, apples, avocados, and a variety of lovely cheeses, followed by molten chocolate cakes made by Michael! End of Day 1.

(Here, the original post ends.)