Growing my own vegatables

I still don't have any.  Vegetables, that is.

I bought tomato, radish, purplette onion, and a chocolate variety of sweet pepper seeds in the spring from Johnny's Selected Seeds.  (Love them!)  Oh and lettuce.

I thought I had the makings for a pretty nice salad.

My seedlings got off to a nice start.  This time around, I even took the time to harden them off--a step I usually skip.

After all that, my tomato sprouts are thriving.  That's about it.

Since the spring was unusually chilly, I didn't want to put out the radishes or lettuce for fear the chill would kill them off.  So I waited for warmer weather.  Turns out, I waited too long.

The intense heat from our deck fried the radish and lettuce sprouts to nothingness.   Even though our deck has great dappled morning sunlight, by 3pm, it's hot as hades out there.  The tomatoes love that but not much else.

I have one pepper sprout and one purplette onion hanging on.  I need to transplant the pepper seedling and see how it goes.  I have a basil plant limping along.  The mint is slowly growing.  The rosemary?  Long dead.

In the fall, I'll try planting radishes and lettuce again since they seem to like the cooler temperatures.  In the meantime, I'm gonna germinate another batch of tomatoes since that seems to be the only thing I'm capable of growing.

I'm imagining the bountiful harvest of sweet tomatoes right now.  Good thing I love a caprese salad.  

A trip to the zoo!

Yesterday, we gathered ourselves and drove down to the Smithsonian National Zoo.  We left just after 9 am, so traffic wasn't too bad.  It took us just over an hour.

Joseph is the picture taker in the family.  He didn't waste any time.  You meet this triceratops very quickly entering the park, and we needed a picture.  (It's not everyday one meets a triceratops).  I don't know what Ethan is looking at off camera.

The weather forecast called for a partly cloudy sky and little humidity.  They got that wrong.  The humidity was stifling and the sun was full on bright.



Joseph got some really good pictures of the lions, especially of this young one frolicking in the pool that surrounded their habitat.  There were four lions altogether.

 

 

 

There is a female lion in the foreground and a male lion against the wall, though it's difficult to see him since he blends into the concrete wall and the spotlight of sun.  Joseph didn't get a picture of the fourth lion.

A tiger looking regal.  

 


Both boys emerging from the water misters.  Believe me, it felt so good on such a humid day.

When we emerge from the Small Mammal House, we saw this:

 

Those are two orangoutangs walking on those ropes above the trees.  There are platforms at strategically placed intervals for the orangoutangs to climb on before moving along the ropes to the next platform.  They can access the platforms and ropes from their habitat.  What isn't pictured is the way both the orangoutangs helped each other.  One of the orangoutangs reached a platform first, he (maybe it was a she?) reached behind him to help the other one get onto the platform!

We were at the right place at the right time to catch this.

 

Here is another orangoutang inside her habitat.  She is playing with pooh in case you are wondering what she is doing.  That's the back of Ethan's head.  Like most of the kids surrounding him, they were enraptured with the pooh playing orangoutang.

In the same building, there were gorillas, although they were in a different room.  The gorillas were being fed by the zoo keepers.  One male ate very quickly, gobbling down banana slices one after the other.  I guess he was afraid someone was going to steal it.  Another male gorilla took his meal up to the tallest part of a tree and gobbled it down.  He seemed quite particular about not sharing it with the other gorillas.

By the time we got to the cheetahs, it was mid afternoon.  The sun was sweltering.  The humidity oppressive.  The cheetahs were sprawled on the grass of their habitat, napping in the shade.  Then, one gets up and trots over to the shade in another part of the habitat (pictured below).  Two others follow that cheetah.  Their bodies are so sleek and slender.  Did you know that a cheetah's stride is 23 feet when running at top speed during a hunt?  Yes, 23 feet!  (I know, right?)  

We tried following the cheetahs, moving along to another side of the habitat.  By the time we got there, however, the cheetahs were hiding in either tall grass or a den.  We weren't sure which.    But, we were still in for a nice treat.  In the next habitat over was another cheetah by himself (or herself?) pacing around.  Joseph caught it on video, although I'm having difficulty uploading the video to this blog.  (I'll try posting it to FB instead).  

A elephant house and the surrounding habitat was under re-construction.  We got a glimpse of one elephant hanging out amidst the construction.  No giraffes.  No rhinos.  No ostriches.  Not sure if those savannah animals were displaced during construction or what.  

We saw two giant pandas, one male and one female, in different rooms.  Both of the pandas sat with their backs to us gawking humans, noshing on bamboo.  

We skipped the bird house.  By this time it was late afternoon.  The heat was sweltering.  All of us were tired.  The boys were perilously close to a temper meltdown, so we decided to leave.  

Elias's favorite thing about the zoo was everything!  Ethan's favorite thing at the zoo?  Nothing!  I think he inherited the contrarian attitude from his mother.  

We had a good day all in all.  We'd like to return to the zoo once the construction is complete.  And I have a new family rule: no zoo visiting during the summer. It's just too darn hot.   I'd like to go back in the fall instead.  

Summer Vacation

On the second official day of summer vacation, we visited the Smithsonian Aerospace Museum near Dulles Airport.

Seeing the space shuttle Discovery was awesome!

Here is another picture for perspective.

Aside from the space shuttle, there were all sorts of planes and helicopters, ranging from early models to a stealth jet and a Concord.  The Enola Gay was there too.  It's so massive.  It's difficult to imagine that hulking plane ever getting off the ground.  Some of the early versions of helicopters were little more than a seat attached to rotors and a mechanism to steer it.  The person who flew that was seriously brave. 

Later in the afternoon, we went up to an observation tower, which was a former air traffic control tower.  Since it was raining, we could barely make out the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Unfortunately, we didn't see any planes coming in for a landing at Dulles Airport.  

We also watched an IMAX film about the Hubble Satellite, seeing pictures of the furtherest reaches of space known to man.  Some of these pictures were simply amazing.  The film also revealed a little about how astronauts train for space flight and showed actual footage of an astronaut crew repairing the Hubble.  

The boys had fun.  They were fascinated by all of the planes.  Ethan wanted to take some of the planes home.  He said Daddy could fly it home and then we could keep it in the living room.  (Oh sure, no problem.)  

Getting home was a headache.  It took two hours to drive 50 miles.  We got stuck on the Capital Beltway.  I'm glad I don't have to drive that everyday.  

Next week, it's the National Zoo. 

Rurally Screwed.

That's what I want to be.

That's what a gal named Jessie Knadler is.  Rurally Screwed.

In her memoir of the same name, Jessie K. recounts how she fled the very rurally screwed life of Montana for Manhattan at the age of seventeen only to return to that rurally screwed life, but this time in southern Virginia with her cowboy husband Jake.

See, I had similar aspirations.  I wanted to flee podunk, redneck Winfield, MD, although Manhattan wasn't my destination.  (Instinctually I knew I wouldn't survive there, spiritually speaking.  Wouldn't thrive there is what I should say.  You get my point.  Anyway.)

After I graduated from South Carroll, I fled Winfield and headed straight for southern Virginia to Southern Seminary College for Women in Buena Vista.  The college wasn't a seminary in the traditional sense.  It was a private, all girls junior college with a history dating back to 1868, not far from Lexington--home of Washington & Lee University and Virginia Military Institute--precisely where Jessie K. and her family reside now.

While at Souther Sem, I was gonna make myself over.  I was gonna transform myself from a socially awkward wallflower whose shyness came across as aloof.  I was secretly ashamed of how my dad and uncles had dirt permanently lodged under their fingernails, my grandmother's canning, the redneck trucks.   I never felt like I fit in.  I was gonna find myself a fine man who came from a long line of southern gentlemen.  Never mind that a college boy from the oh so preppy, private, very monied Washington & Lee University would have been attracted to me, in part most likely, to piss off his mother since my background no where near matched the expectations she would have had for her son.  No matter.  And forget about a VMI boy; they were way too patronizing.  (Sorry, Jessie K.)

In my mind, when I returned to podunk Winfield, no one would recognize me. They would be quietly stunned by my metamorphosis.   I had grand plans (and a rich interior life that doesn't always match reality).

I didn't last two months at Souther Sem.  I despised it there.  Here's the thing.  I went to the college because my mother wanted me to. I knew I wouldn't like it there, wouldn't fit into this monied world where we pretended rigorous academic life when in truth my seventh grade science class had been more challenging than any of my classes combined at Southern Sem.

For Pete's sake, the campus had a barn where the students could board their horses.  (To be fair, they did have an excellent equestrian team.)  You could take an equestrian class for your gym credit instead of the traditional gym class.  Not me, though.  We couldn't afford the extra fees associated with gym-class-as-equestrian-riding.

I share this with you to give you an idea of the level of gentility of this college.    

Students came from all over the South.  I think I was as "Yankee northern" as you could get even though Maryland is, technically, south of the Mason Dixon line.  Most of the students had been riding and show jumping since the age of grade school (if not sooner) or cheerleaders too stupid to attend any college but their parents, bless their hearts, couldn't condescend to enroll their precious daughters in community college.  Such a thing would be disgraceful and appearances meant a great deal.

I found the unspoken goal of finding a husband at nearby W&L University or VMI--the very goal I had, mind you--to be suffocating.

I didn't last two months.  I couldn't carry on the charade.  I despised myself.  For leaving Winfield in the first place, to think I could be better than anyone I left behind.  For coming to Southern Sem when deep, deep down I knew I wouldn't fit in.  For dropping out, that I wouldn't thrive there.  I personified self-mortification.

In February of the following year, I enrolled in community college.

What does this have to do with Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed?  


Not a cotton pickin' thing.

But like Jessie K, we have learned not to make ourselves over in someone else's image, according to someone else's expectations.  Motivated by the belief that the self we have couldn't possibly be good enough so we transform ourselves according to the expectations that we think the other person has.  

This is a very difficult lesson to learn.

I will probably never be rurally screwed in southern Virginia or Oklahoma or Colorado, raising hens and writing in the attic of an old farmhouse because Joseph wouldn't be comfortable living in a place where people are outnumbered by cattle.  (I keep telling him that Oklahoma needs teachers too, but it falls on deaf ears.)

Jessie K. has made a life for herself on several acres with her husband and baby girl, a rescued dog and chickens.  Her memoir Rurally Screwed is engaging and heartbreaking at times.  But goodness and grace spring from that despair.

Stop what you're reading.  Set that book aside for now.  Instead, read Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed.   It's that good.

P.S. Southern Seminary College for Women is now Southern Virginia University, a liberal arts college that "promotes the standards and values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints."  That's so not even remotely what the college was when I was there.  For two months.  Just sayin'.

What's in a name?

Sebastiana Telphusa.

That was the name I conjured to be my pen name way back in high school when I day dreamed about becoming a writer.

I thought the name sounded sophisticated.  Cosmopolitan. Like I lived in Paris instead of podunk Winfield.

I practiced signing it over and over again, making sure the flourish of my contrived name looked just so.  Not too much flourish otherwise the name would be illegible.  But just enough to give it a je ne sais quoi kind of allure.

I know.  Ridiculous.

But now I really do need a pen name.

Any suggestions?  
  

Which is better?

The first paragraph of a book either invites you in to read more or kills it dead.  Furthermore, if the writer doesn't hook you in by the fifth page of the novel, then the entire book is dead on arrival.  Here's where you come in.  Here are two different openings to my current manuscript.  Which is better?  Which one makes you want to continue reading?

Option One:

        Seventy-eight cats.  That’s how many cats Alexandra Merriweather was going to die with.  Maybe a dog or two just because.  

She was certain of this despite the clichéd image of an old lady dying surrounded by too many cats.   

She wondered, too, whether or not she would ever marry.  Remarry, that is.  

A part of her knew that even thinking about the idea of remarriage was ridiculous, especially since her first marriage had ended in divorce.

Option Two: 

       Alexandra Merriweather wondered if she would ever marry.  

Remarry, that is.  

A part of her knew that it was futile to borrow trouble from the future by considering such an idea as remarriage.  Especially when her first marriage ended in divorce.  

And yet, here she was hiking up a steep trail in the state park where she and her now ex-husband had exchanged vows, overlooking a waterfall with their families and closest friends as witnesses.  Today, she had taken a personal day from her newspaper job to hike this very path she tread as a new bride three years ago.

Which one do you prefer, avid readers that I know you are.  Which one makes you say, yes, I want to read this novel?  Of course, you may not like either option and that's okay too.  Tell me so.  You won't hurt my feelings.  

Let the voting begin. 

This is how we play the game Candy Land at our house

Yesterday afternoon, Elias suggested that we play Candy Land.  Good idea.

Both boys clear the kitchen table of their toys while I grab the Candy Land box.

In a few moments, the board is spread out on the kitchen table.  Elias wants to be the red gingerbread boy.  Ethan chooses blue.  I want yellow.

At Elias's suggestion, we don't use the cards that come with the game that tells you how far to advance.  Oh no.  Instead, he dumps all of his piggy bank money onto the table and meticulously places all the pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters along the colorful Candy Land path.  We will use the money to advance in the game.  I'm not sure how the money will indicate how far or how little each player will advance during his turn, but suddenly, we are in a free for all grab of piggy bank money with strict instructions to avoid Lord Licorice.

Then Lord Licorice captures two gingerbread boys, casting an evil Zombie spell on them so the gingerbread boys are now Lord Licorice's minions.  In their Zombie state, they capture Lolly, Princess Frostine, and Mr. Mint.

Wait for it!  Army men to the rescue!  But some of the Army men are bad and side with Lord Licorice while others side with the remaining two good gingerbread boys.  Now, we have a civil war on our hands.  A terrible, terrible thing.

Here's the plan:  the two remaining good gingerbread boys are to lure the bad Army men into Mr. Gloppy's fudge swamp where they will get all sticky and stuck while two good Army men sneak over to Lord Licorice's hideout and disable the power source for the electrical fences imprisoning Mr. Mint and Lolly.  With the aide of Princess Frostine, we froze some of the bad Army men too.

Wait for it!  You must double jump over the electric fences to avoid getting shocked.  (Just one jump means you will get shocked, by the way).  Remember, double jump.

After a horrendous battle (don't forget to double jump) with many casualties on both sides, Lord Licorice is finally defeated, which causes Candy Land to implode and collapse.

Mama, can we do it again?

Well, sure.

If you live in a house full of girls, I bet you never played a game of Candy Land quite like this.