Home sick

We were so lucky with illness last winter, hardly caught anything, and I don't think the kids missed a single day of preschool/daycare. So I figured we wouldn't be so lucky this year. I mean, after all, they're kids, and they need to catch things. That's one thing I dread about our first winter back in Boulder -- we'll probably be sick all the time, since more of the bugs will be new to the kids.

Anyway, this week we had our first major illness. Baby B actually had a mild case of it the week before Thanksgiving, and missed one day of preschool. Everyone seemed fine over the holiday, but Baby A woke up Monday morning feeling awful -- and ended up staying home all week. ALL WEEK. And Baby B had an intestinal upset that kept him home on Tuesday. Oh, I could never be a truly stay-at-home kind of mom, with my kids there all the time. I need my time. When I used to work in an office, somehow the office time was my time. Now that I'm home, my solitary afternoons are my time. I don't like giving up that time! But give it up I did.

Our theme this week in homeschool preschool was "Animals in Winter" and I'd thought of some nice activities, but it mostly all fell apart because of illness. Baby A was not up to doing anything for the first few days, and since I never had any time to myself, I couldn't buy little extra props or plan the lessons out more thoroughly. Monday and Tuesday were mostly a bust, although we did read some of the books shown above. My favorite was Moon Glowing, which is about hibernation.

Wednesday I wanted to do some activities from the book Going Home, but I couldn't get them interested. The only thing they were willing to do was watch me draw migration patterns on a map. I'd wanted to get a world map, but no time, so we drew with washable markers on our laminated National Parks map. That turned out OK.

Thursday's activity was supposed to be building a bird feeder, but on Wednesday it occurred to me that that was crazy. So Wednesday night I rushed out to Home Depot and bought some cheap bird feeders, and Thursday's activity consisted of filling and hanging up bird feeders, which was really quite enough. Oh, and we also made the "suet" for the suet feeder from scratch, using a recipe from an Audubon site. Here are our feeders:

I never had any luck with suet feeders in Boulder, and since I've never seen a woodpecker anywhere near our house in Ridgecrest, and we don't have squirrels here, I'm not optimistic about this one. Still, it was fun to make the suet.

I'm embarrassed about the red-colored liquid in the hummingbird feeder. Even though the package said it was perfectly safe for hummingbirds, I think it's still frowned upon by true birders. When it's time for a new batch of nectar, I'll make it from scratch with no red stuff. Of course, I'm not at all sure we have hummingbirds anymore, though we had them this summer. Haven't seen anything at the feeder yet.

And here's the regular feeder. The trouble with our yard is that we have so little "cover" that I'm just not sure we're going to get any birds. Baby A was looking out my bedroom window today and got all excited because there were birds on the wires "looking at the bird feeder," or so he claimed. I don't think mourning doves (which is what they were) could use this sort of feeder, though. We need some sparrows or finches. I told the boos it might be a while before they show up. Maybe next week?

The most successful activity of the week turned out to be a couple of songs I found on a preschool website. I tend not to like it when people make up new words to old songs, but somehow in this case it worked. The first one is to the tune of "Frere Jacques" and it goes something like this:

Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, big black bear, big black bear?
Time for hibernation, what is your location?
In my den, in my lair.

We sang verses for mouse, bat, rattlesnake, toad and frog, etc.

The second song was Baby A's favorite and it's set to the tune of "Skip to My Lou."

Bear is getting ready, what does he do?
Does he wear coats and hats like you?
That's not something a bear would do.
He goes to sleep in his den.

and there are verses for goose, snake, rabbit, and tortoise. (Goose flies someplace warm, snake hides in a hole, rabbit grows thick white fur, and tortoise sleeps in its burrow.) We also made up a verse for Pie Bear. Baby A loved this song, and whenever things got bad, all week, he would ask me to sing it. It cheered me up too.

So, I thought everyone was healthy now, and next week would be better, but tonight Baby B complained of a stomach ache and wouldn't eat his dinner. I'm hoping that isn't significant, but it probably is. Here comes winter.

Death Valley and the Amargosa Hotel

We took a short trip to Death Valley over Thanksgiving weekend, and for the first time spent the night. We had been planning to camp, but we were afraid it would be too cold, or all the campsites would be full. I thought the hotels would be full too, but when I did some checking, it turned out that there were vacancies. And then Rocket Boy said, "Would you want to stay at the Amargosa Hotel?"

The Amargosa Hotel is in Death Valley Junction, a tiny town -- well, a wide spot in the road, actually -- just outside of Death Valley National Park and very close to the Nevada state line. I won't go into all the details about its history, but it's a very interesting place, and supposedly haunted. Here's a shot looking down the hallway.

And here is our room, Room 22, where Red Skelton stayed a few times...

...according to the sign on the wall:

The room was pretty basic (aside from the wonderful wall paintings) and had no TV, so the twins entertained themselves by jumping on the two double beds (whose mattresses were already shot and REALLY did not need to be jumped on) and hiding in the closet and screaming. Finally, to let the other hotel guests enjoy their experience a little more, we went down to the lobby, where there was a TV. No TV service, of course (and no cell phone service), but there was a VCR and a few videotapes to choose from. We watched The 101 Dalmatians.

But we had a terrible night's sleep on a terrible mattress. Our room was heated by a little space heater -- worked very well, but so noisy. I woke up over and over and over again, and in between I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. We all got up for good around 6 am, as the room started to get light. The cafe didn't open until 8 am, so we went back out to the front lobby and watched The 101 Dalmatians again.

Another hallway photo. Just before coming here we had rented a David Lynch movie called Lost Highway, which has some scenes filmed inside and outside the Amargosa Hotel. The hotel room shown in the movie is Room 26. But as you can see in this picture, Room 26 doesn't actually have a number.

And here's the view out the back, from the window in our hotel room. You can see a closed-off wing of the hotel, complete with broken windows. I couldn't look at this the night before, too creepy. No, those are not ghostly eyes staring out of that window, that's condensation on our window. But still.

After breakfast in the cafe, we drove back into the park and saw some sights, including Dante's View, where we had never been before. It gives you a view of the whole valley.

We also saw Badwater again, and the Devil's Golf Course, where we hadn't been since the twins were two or so.

But the best place was the Mesquite Sand Dunes, where we had never stopped before. Now it's clear we'll have to go there every time we go back to the park. The twins adored them. We visited them both on our way into the park on Saturday...

and on our way out of the park on Sunday...

Greatest place in the world for four-year-olds to play. They had a ball.

Ayers Rock

We had to do something to recover from the horrors of yesterday's turkey and our general crabbiness, so this afternoon we decided to go see some more of the rock art described in my library book. Ayers Rock is so near us, so easy to get to, I don't understand why we'd not only never seen it before, we'd never even heard of it.

But now that I've seen it, I'm glad it's not better known, because it's both lovely and unprotected.

To get there, you take 395 north to the Coso Junction rest area and then drive about 8 miles on various roads, none of them bad (yes, I'm being vague on purpose). Fortunately, this time the book's directions were good, because there are no signs telling you what you're driving towards until you finally see this one:

although the "parking" it refers to is really sketchy -- there's no "lot" per se. We parked in a sort of open area near a trail sign and got out to look around. At first the boos said they didn't want to go (still nervous) but we convinced them that it was no big deal and we were mainly going to take a hike.

There was a sign about Ayers Rock lying on the ground nearby. I don't know why it's called Ayers Rock, by the way, but I assume it's a nod to the famous rock in Australia.

We read the sign carefully and then started down the trail, or so we thought.

The trail was REALLY sketchy, mostly just footprints in the sand. It wasn't until we got to Ayers Rock that we realized there is another, better trail. And when we got back to the parking lot and looked at the trail sign again, we realized that someone had tried to alter it to point to the real trail (see the crude arrow pointing left):

Anyway, it didn't really matter (except for the fact that the BLM sign specifically says to stay on the trail). Ayers Rock is so big that you can see it regardless of whether you're on the trail or not.

Ayers Rock has pictographs, not petroglyphs -- meaning that the rock art is painted, not etched into the rock. Pictographs are more fragile than petroglyphs, but the pictographs on Ayers Rock are supposedly not that old, painted maybe 100-150 years ago. They're still really cool.

 It's hard to know how to treat a "sacred site." We did our best to leave no trace of our visit, and we did not bring anything back with us. The sign near the trailhead warned us not to take "stone flakes," so we didn't. But honestly, it would take a LOT of visitors to remove all the bits of obsidian from the site.

They're everywhere.

The moon was up when we were there, though it was broad daylight. Its presence made the whole experience just slightly surreal. Nice place, Ayers Rock. I hope it can stay that way.

The turkey to end all turkeys

Nah, not this one. This is a nice turkey. It's on our front door. We made it this week in homeschool preschool -- OK, I made it, but the twins supervised and helped cut out the feathers.

THIS is the turkey to end all turkeys. The turkey that may cause me to give up eating -- or at least cooking -- turkeys altogether. The turkey that Would Not Cook.

It sounded like a good idea when I read it online. Supposedly it's actually not necessary to defrost a turkey -- you can just cook it from frozen. It takes longer, but that's OK, you just allow 50 percent more time. I bought a ten-pound turkey, which normally should have taken about three hours at 325 degrees. So I figured that if we cooked it straight out of the freezer it would take four and a half hours. We put the turkey in the preheated oven at 9:15 this morning. Here I am taking its temperature at 1:15, i.e., four hours after it went in. And what does the thermometer say? Probably about 130 degrees (we're aiming for 165).

OK, fine, it's not done yet. Back in the oven. At 2:00 we tested it again. No change. At this point we remembered about the giblets. The instructions online say to remove the giblets after the turkey has been in the oven about an hour. We tried that, but the turkey was still too frozen to pull anything out of its abdominal cavity. We were supposed to try again half an hour later, but we didn't. So now the turkey's been in for nearly five hours, and we remember to pull out the giblets. Except that we can't find them. Instead, what we pull out of the turkey is the NECK -- eeuww, don't like necks -- and it still has visible ice on it. NOT a good sign. We couldn't find the giblets bag, but we put the turkey back in for another hour.

Around 3:00 we tested it again. It got up to 140 degrees. I turned the temperature up to 350 degrees. At 3:30 (six hours and 15 minutes after it went in) I gave up and took the turkey out of the oven. "We're supposed to cover it with foil and let it sit for half an hour," I told Rocket Boy. "It will get hotter as it sits there."

"That doesn't make sense," he said.

"I know, but that's what all the websites say."

"I'm going to put it back in the oven," Rocket Boy said.

"Fine!" I said, storming off.

Meanwhile, the twins are starving, and we're trying to tide them along with little bits of things like cookies and juice. Here's Baby B sadly waiting for his Thanksgiving dinner:

At 4:00 (six hours and 45 minutes after we first put it in) we took the turkey out of the oven again and let it sit under a tent of foil for half an hour. Oh, I forgot to say that when we took the turkey out the first time, I noticed that the abdominal cavity had red blood in it (and of course it isn't done until "the juices run clear"). Rocket Boy went ahead and made gravy out of the drippings, but boiled them for about 15 minutes before adding flour, which hopefully was good enough. But when he started carving the supposedly "done" turkey, the meat was not completely white -- there were pinkish areas. Ick, ick, ick. Oh, and he finally found the giblets bag.

We put the food on the table.

What a spread for a family of four, two of whom ARE four. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potato casserole, spicy spinach dish, rolls, and cranberry relish. It was delicious -- even the turkey was pretty good. But as I ate, I started to feel uneasy. It did not help that the twins would not eat much of anything. Baby A had two rolls and Baby B had one. They refused the turkey and mashed potatoes (and of course everything else).

I wasn't expecting them to eat much, but I thought they'd eat more than that.

After I finished eating, I went back to the turkey carcase and started pulling off the rest of the meat. And then I started to get really grossed out. The turkey just didn't look right. Parts of it still looked bloody.

"I'm not going to eat any more of this," I said to Rocket Boy. "Not tomorrow. Not ever."

The Mayo Clinic website says it takes several hours for the signs of Salmonella to show up, but it can be as much as two days. So I won't know for a while whether I ate anything bad. At least the twins didn't have any.

On Wednesday, in homeschool preschool, the twins and I talked about being thankful. I brought out a bunch of their stuffed animals and had their stuffed animal turkey "ask" the animals what they were thankful for (he makes a "gobble gobble" sound when you press his tummy). The animals' answers were predictable: they were thankful for the twins, for having a nice place to live, and that sort of thing.

What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving? Many things, of course, including my family. I'm a very lucky person, even though I live in Ridgecrest. But not turkey. Not thankful for turkey. Maybe never again?

Vegetable Week

I thought Vegetable Week would be a good segue into Thanksgiving, so that's what we focused on last week. Each day we talked about a different form of vegetable. Monday was roots, Tuesday was tubers, Wednesday was stems, flowers, and leaves, Thursday was seeds, and Friday was vegetable fruits. Each day I brought out some real live examples of the vegetable type of the day, and each night we ate whatever we'd looked at that morning.  Also each day I added some vegetables to the "garden" in the photo above (this was my art project this week).

Above you can see Tuesday's exhibit (two potatoes and a sweet potato), plus a game I think I invented called "Am I a Potato?" (I can't remember whether I got the idea from another site or not.) The green cards have pictures of various things: other vegetables, dinosaurs, and potatoes in all their forms. I held the cards up one at a time and asked "Am I a Potato?" and whoever gave the right answer first got the card. Boos found this mildly amusing.

Wednesday's activity was by far the weirdest. I decided that we would pretend to be vegetables. So I put some Stravinsky on the record player, put some green tulle over my head, and began dancing around. Boos of course wanted to do it too. They kept asking me what we were doing and I wouldn't answer. Finally I told them we were being vegetables, and they thought that was weird and stopped dancing. Still, it was fun.

On Thursday, seed day, we sorted a bag of mixed bean soup that I'd bought at the grocery store. Supposedly it contained 17 different kinds of beans, but I think we only came up with 12. After sorting them, we dumped most of them all together into a pot and made bean soup (which we had for dinner and boos would not eat).

The next day I was going to do something with veggie fruits but I was tired of the theme by then and did not feel creative. So we munched on some cherry tomatoes, but we made art with the leftover dried beans and some glue and construction paper. Boos enjoyed it so much that they kept doing it for the next day or so.

On Sunday we drove to Murray Family Farms, outside Bakersfield. The idea was to do their U-Pick thing, but it was expensive, and it had been raining so the fields were probably muddy, and everyone was in a bad mood, and we got there kind of late... so we decided to skip it, and just bought some produce from the store. Boos were happy to play in the corn pit.

Sheep Springs

I think I mentioned that after I went on that petroglyph tour last weekend, I got some books out of the library on the subject in order to find out more about what I'd just seen. One of the books was Rock Art Along the Way by Janet Webb Farnsworth, which gives a lot of good information about rock art sites all over the southwest. She has a section on Little Petroglyph Canyon, but also talks about FOUR other sites in "the Ridgecrest area" that are not on base and can be reached by anyone with good tires and high clearance.

So on Saturday we decided to pay a visit to Sheep Springs. I've got to say, although this is a very nice book, its directions (to this place anyway) were terrible. First, it says to take China Lake Blvd to 395 and go across the intersection to "Randsberg-Inyokern Road," when in fact what they're talking about is BROWN ROAD. Then it talks about going past two gunnery ranges and THEN turning south, when in fact, the turn south is just past the first rifle range -- you pass the second one after you've been on the new road for a few miles. There are several other things about the directions that make no sense. But if you follow the signs for a dirt road called EP26 and stay on it for 6 or 7 miles, you'll get to Sheep Springs. It helped that we also had a local BLM map. The road is abysmal, though, not really a road at all. The book says, "The dirt road is narrow and rocky in spots." Uh huh. I think it may be the rockiest road I have ever been on! MAYBE the road to the Racetrack in Death Valley was worse. Really glad we took Rocket Boy's car, not mine (his has big strong tires).

When we got to the Springs (it's not marked, but in that desert landscape, a spring and its accompanying greenery really stand out), we got out and took a look around.  On the little hillside on the left side of our car in the photo above are lots of boulders -- with petroglyphs on them. It was fun to find them ourselves, randomly, rather than having them handed to us on a silver platter, as in Little Petroglyph Canyon.

Here's one we liked, though it's rather crude:

And this one has very visible sheep:

And we found a few of what we think are cupules:

The twins surprised us by not wanting to look for petroglyphs with us. In fact, although here's Baby A hopping around outside the car...

...he very soon went back in, and Baby B never came out at all. We eventually figured out that they were afraid of the petroglyphs. They'd seen my photographs from my trip the week before and were frightened of the rock art. (On our next trip, we won't tell them what we're looking for.)

So, since we were a million miles from anywhere or anyone, and it was too cold for snakes, we let them stay behind in the car while we climbed up the hillside (we were within shouting distance and we had the keys). We didn't look for long. It was chilly and getting late, and we still had to drive home on that very rocky road.

It was beautiful, though. I'm almost starting to understand the appeal of dirt bikes -- not enough to actually ever ride one, mind you, but I can see that it's a way to get out into the desert and see some amazing country in a way that's hard to do on foot or in a car.

I can't begin to capture the beauty in photographs. I take pictures like this to remind myself how very much more beautiful than this it was.

Petroglyphs

I finally did it! I finally saw the petroglyphs that Ridgecrest and China Lake are so famous for. Rocket Boy went on the tour (you have to go on a guided tour, because the petroglyphs are on base) in March 2009, about a MONTH after we moved here. A month! (I couldn't go with him because children under 10 are not allowed and we had no one to leave the twins with.) And now here it is three years and eight months later and I finally got to do it.

The fall tour dates were posted in August, and I decided I'd like to go in November, when it would be cooler. I sent in my check for $30 and all my info (the Navy does a background check on everyone) and soon received notification that I'd gotten my first choice of date, November 11th. I had to buy new hiking boots (no tennis shoes allowed) and dig up my passport (something to prove I was a citizen).

On the actual day, last Sunday, I set my alarm for 5:30 am, and was off to the Maturango Museum by 6:15 (we had to be there by 6:30). It was absolutely freezing. Well, I'd gotten my wish on that score. At 6:30, we were ushered into the museum to sign various forms and watch a short video about the petroglyphs. There were 16 people in our group (most from LA, San Diego, and elsewhere in California), and 3 guides. Then we split into carpools and drove to the entrance to the base, where they searched all the cars and lectured us on what we could and couldn't do.

One thing you can't do is take photographs on the hour-long drive to Little Petroglyph Canyon, so we stowed our cameras in the back of the cars. You're also not allowed to have your cell phone turned on. I was sorry I didn't have my camera available when we turned on to the last road leading to the canyon and were joined by a herd of beautiful wild horses -- the first I'd seen since moving here.

Here we are just setting off for the canyon, after parking the cars and getting organized again. The funky stuff on the ground is some kind of plastic that they put down so that they could push people in wheelchairs to the edge of the canyon. You have to be able to walk to go down into the actual canyon -- it's extremely rocky.

Here is the only photo I took looking down into the canyon. This is actually the upper part of the canyon -- we spent most of our time in the lower part -- but it gives a sense of what it's like. The whole time you're just walking through this very narrow canyon with walls of rocks on both sides -- covered with petroglyphs.

I had hoped that our guides would lecture us on rock art as we traversed the canyon. I knew almost nothing about the petroglyphs and I wanted to know more. But for the most part the guides just walked along with us, occasionally pointing out a special glyph. I don't know whether some tour guides are more talkative, or whether this is standard. Many people on the tour seemed to know a lot about what we were seeing -- some had even taken the tour before -- so maybe that's why the guides were quiet.

But since the tour I've done some reading, and I guess people don't truly know what the petroglyphs mean and why they're there. The general belief seems to be that the petroglyphs were carved into the rock by shamans, medicine men, after going on a "vision quest" or trance. The petroglyphs represent the visions that the shaman had. I wish someone had explained this to me on the trip, because it would have made everything less confusing. For example, I could not understand why there were so many pictures of bighorn sheep:

and not more common desert animals, such as tortoises and lizards. But apparently bighorn sheep were spirit helpers.

There are also many petroglyphs of atlatls

and I don't think anyone really knows why. But don't quote me. They have various ways of dating the petroglyphs, and while some in this area are believed to be as much as 16,000 years old, most are probably less than 2000 years old. Some were made as recently as the early part of the 20th century.

We walked a long way down the canyon, until we came to the "waterfalls," or what would be waterfalls if there were any water flowing. There's a little water collected in pools below each waterfall (on the day I went it was ice), and you don't want to fall in it, so you have to creep along a rock edge.

It doesn't look bad in the photo, and I didn't find it too difficult, but some people had a lot of trouble with it. Physically, the tour was an odd experience for me. I almost backed out of going because I thought I wasn't in good enough shape -- and it's true that I was probably the second-fattest person on the tour. Maybe third-fattest. But I was also probably the third-youngest person on the tour, and that made all the difference. I'm sure I would have enjoyed the tour more if I'd been 50 pounds thinner, but being 10 or 20 years younger than the other participants made a surprisingly significant difference. Note to self: Do things NOW, do not wait until some mythical time in the future when I'm thinner.

Here are a few more photos. I think the squiggly lines in this first one are supposed to be rain. The bighorn sheep were associated with rain in Native American religious beliefs.

 This photo shows how the petroglyphs are all over the rocks, some high up, some low down.

 Some people in the group were concerned that this bighorn sheep (being killed) had a baby behind it. But it also could have been a dog (helping with the kill). And in any case, it was all from visions and trances, not a real hunting picture.

 I think the shapes in this last one are supposed to be birds.

And here I am -- I asked a woman in the group to take my photo, just to prove I was really there. Maybe I'll put this on our Christmas card -- I've got that bright red turtleneck accompanying my developing sunburn. We were out there from maybe 8:30 am to 3:00 pm -- even in November, that's a lot of sunshine.

We got back to the museum in Ridgecrest around 4 pm. I was just blitzed, would have liked to go to bed as soon as I got home, but of course Rocket Boy was blitzed himself, having taken care of the little darlings all day alone. So I took over. Kids, kids, when will they get easier??? But it was a very cool experience and I'm so glad I got to go before we say farewell to Ridgecrest.