Sunday, February 17, 2013

Oh no, it's Whiskey Flat Days!

Yesterday we decided that if we wanted to see any more snow this year, we'd better go now, since it seems to be getting warmer every day. Our plan was to drive to Kernville, have lunch at the diner there, and then continue on to the Shirley Meadows ski area. Shirley Meadows is closed due to lack of snow, but we thought there might be enough around for sledding.

As we were driving up around Lake Isabella, we were passed by a large group of old classic cars. "It must be a classic car club, out for a drive," I guessed. But then, as we drove through the outskirts of Kernville, we saw regular cars parked all up and down the side of the road, and people walking along the road too. Parade floats. Carnival rides. People dressed up in old-fashioned clothes. "What is going on?"
What was going on (I'll cut to the chase) was Whiskey Flat Days, an annual extravaganza that celebrates the Old West days of Kernville and its environs, before there was a Lake Isabella. I'd heard of it, but had forgotten it's held on Presidents Day weekend. Thank you Ridgecrest newspapers, for not mentioning it.
We crawled along in traffic (normally Kernville has almost no traffic). The roads were lined with people. The restaurant we had planned to go to is behind all the tents in the photo above. Oh well. No place to park anyway.

We finally got out of town and headed south to Wofford Heights. We'd never noticed a restaurant there, but maybe... yes! There was a restaurant. We almost missed it, but pulled over just in time. The Chatterbox Cafe. They were busy (perhaps full of Whiskey Flat escapees, like us), but eventually we got served. Quite good food! We would definitely go back if the occasion presented itself.

After lunch we turned right on Highway 155 and headed northwest to Shirley Meadows. At first there was no sign of snow, but as we got closer we finally saw some. Still, it was pretty bare for a ski resort. We parked and got out and walked around a bit.
The kids didn't want to wear warm coats or mittens, so they got cold quickly. Baby B slipped down a snowy hillside and had to scramble back up bare-handed.... he came back to the car crying and I had to read a Ms. Frizzle book (The Magic School Bus: In the Time of the Dinosaurs) to him to calm him down. Pretty soon we gave up on Shirley Meadows and drove down the hill to where Rocket Boy had seen a hill that looked sled-able. Oh yes! Very sled-able!

At first the kids did not want anything more to do with snow. So Rocket Boy climbed the hill and went down on the sled himself. This looked like so much fun that Baby A and then finally Baby B agreed to do it with him. They each went down a few times, but then they were too cold and climbed back in the car for more of Ms. Frizzle. Rocket Boy was disappointed in them.

"It's OK," I told him. "Next year we'll be back in Boulder and they'll learn to love snow and sledding. We'll just take it slow. It'll be OK."

We went back to the Chatterbox Cafe for pie, and then drove on home to Ridgecrest (avoiding Kernville this time).

Now they're saying we're going to have rain and possibly snow on Tuesday and Wednesday. Maybe that wasn't our last chance for the year?

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Resolutions

It occurred to me that I never wrote a post about my New Year's resolutions... and, you know, it's probably too late to do it now. But tonight I took a quick look at my list, just to see how I'm doing with them. Many of the resolutions refer to things that are going to happen (or not happen) later in the year, such as *Move back to Boulder, *Get a job, and *Get twins settled in kindergarten. Others, such as *Walk regularly, *Go to sleep earlier, and *Stick with WW, are coming along reasonably well, which is to say, sort of OK, sort of not OK, you know how it is.

I have noticed, through the years, that often one resolution will knock out another. They compete for my time, and I have only so much time (not to mention almost-five-year-old twins). I can't write AND sew AND keep up with photo albums AND play the piano AND read AND watch movies AND walk AND go to concerts AND blog AND do volunteer work AND do art projects with the kids AND have a garden AND AND AND. Some people can probably fit all these things into their lives, plus more, but I can't. And when I start working again I especially won't be able to.

The resolution that seems to be knocking out others this year is *Spend at least 1 hour (preferably 2) on writing, at least 5 times a week. Now that the twins are in daycare from 9 to 2, I have a lovely little writing niche in my days. I get home around 9:15, do some chores, and am sitting at my computer by 10. I write from 10 to 12, and then there's time for lunch and more chores and errands before the twins get home. It's completely fabulous.

On the subject of writing, I have some news. Again this year, I made the first cut in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. If you go to http://www.amazon.com/abna and click on mystery/thriller, you'll find my name and entry (which incidentally has the same title as this blog). I will probably not make the second cut, but I'm having fun.

Today the News Review (local Ridgecrest paper) published a book review I wrote of David McCullough's John Adams. Only in Ridgecrest can you write a review of a 12-year-old book and get it published. And last week the brochures for the Ridgecrest Desert Wildflower Festival came out, and they contain a poem of mine! It's nothing special, and they left out a word, and there's a word in there that should have been a different word... but I'm still kind of tickled. Never expected to have a poem published. Here is the corrected poem:

My little boy can recognize one flower,
and as we walk along he points it out:
"Dandelion!"
said always with such confidence, such pleasure.
"Yes," I agree, but add, pedantically,
"Desert dandelion."

We've had so little rain this year that I'm afraid there won't be many desert dandelions around in the spring, but you never know. Meanwhile, I'll keep writing.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Where NOT to go with twins

Oh dear. Just when I think we've got the whole travel thing worked out, we have another disaster.

Today we had planned to go up past Kernville to Shirley Meadows to look for snow. Although the East Coast is blizzarding, out here we're starting to think about spring. Not much time left for sledding. But we had a busy morning and it got too late for a long trip like that.

So we made a new plan. I've been trying to get Rocket Boy to buy some new pants, but he always says he doesn't need any. Then on Friday he had to make an emergency trip home from work because his pants split. So we decided to go to Kohl's for new ones. Unfortunately, Kohl's is in Palmdale, 90 miles away. To make the trip a little more twin-friendly, we decided to include a visit to the Cat House in Rosamond (otherwise known as the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound's Feline Conservation Center). We drove an hour to Mojave for lunch at Denny's, and then it was maybe 15 minutes more to the Cat House.

We arrived around 2:30 pm, parked in the dusty lot, and walked up to the entrance (that is, Rocket Boy and I walked, while the twins hopped, danced, and ran). You enter through the gift shop, well stocked with interesting cat items. After we paid our $24 ($7 adults, $5 kids), the woman at the counter told Baby A and Baby B the rules: (1) Don't run, (2) Don't yell, (3) Don't go on the grass, (4) Don't chase the peacocks. I thought about turning around and leaving right then, but it's hard to turn around and leave when you've just spent $24 and your children KNOW that they're about to enter a kind of zoo. We'd been talking and talking about the big cats we were going to see.

Anyway, you can probably write this next paragraph for me. We enter the zoo. Boos spot the grass, begin to run across it. We chase them: "Don't run! Don't go on the grass!" They spot a big, interesting rock on the grass and want to climb it. We say "No! Don't go on the grass! Come see the cats!" They start to yell and then to scream. A mountain lion that has been eating its dinner runs and hides. We say "No! Don't yell!" They run over the grass again. A park employee tries to help out by urging the kids to come and see some other cats. Reluctantly they go with her, but Baby B continues to yell at me about how he wants to go on the rock, and then starts kicking the fence around the cats' cage, hard. Everyone is staring at us and the cats are getting more and more agitated.

I give up, pick him up, and carry him out of the park, still screaming.
Above you can see the grass that we weren't allowed to walk on and just a corner of the rock they wanted to climb on. This is the only picture I took at the park. Things fell apart too quickly.

It took forever to calm them down enough to get in the car, and Baby B screamed pretty much all the rest of the way to Palmdale. He kept saying "I wanted to see more CATS!!!" It was horrible.

In Palmdale, Rocket Boy and Baby A shopped at Kohl's, while I stayed with Baby B, who was too freaked out to leave the car. A long long time later, RB and Baby A emerged from the store with one pair of pants that had cost $63. WTF??? I thought Kohl's was a discount store. "That's the last pair of pants I'm buying in California!" Rocket Boy declared. It had not been a good shopping experience.

We were back in Ridgecrest by 7 pm. Maybe by tomorrow I will have calmed down.

On the plus side, the experience reminded me why I am moving back to Boulder. There's a Kohl's six miles from our old house in Boulder. Six miles. Do you know how different today would have been if we had only needed to drive six miles to go shopping?

Saturday, February 9, 2013

Hello February, hello stress

So now it's February, which means I'm supposed to be happier. To some extent I am. Some of the things that are good about February are (1) it's short, (2) it has a cheerful candy holiday in it, and (3) it's followed by the month (March) in which spring begins. In addition, there's more light in February, which makes everything seem better.
But there's no question that I'm more on edge this year than usual. I finally got myself to take a Barbara Pym novel off the bookshelf and put it on my nightstand, but I haven't opened it yet. (Normally I like to spend all of February reading B. Pym.) Still spending most of my time doing puzzles, not reading. I'm pretty sure it's the coming move that's making me jittery. Our progress on said move seems stalled, though we have not changed our tentative dates (late April to early May).

Here's where we stand with the move:

1. Called two movers to come give us quotes.

     a. 1st mover came by, looked at our stuff, and quoted us $18,000. (To be fair, that quote includes packing our breakable stuff. We have since decided to pack everything ourselves.)

     b. 2nd mover didn't call us back. This past week I called them again. They claimed they were just going to call us back and might be able to come over either late in the day Thursday or late in the day Friday. Heard nothing on Thursday. On Friday I checked messages around 2 pm to discover that they had called at 9 am, offering to come by at 10 am. I quickly called them and the nice lady said they couldn't possibly come now, but she'd give us another call next week. I'm not feeling optimistic.

     c. Debating whether or not to call a Bakersfield mover too.

2. Rocket Boy's old SUV needs a smog check this year for us to be able to register it, and we're almost certain it won't pass. So our plan is that he will drive it to Boulder and register it there (as non-operational) with the idea that he will get it fixed later (there's a good Mitsubishi repair guy in Boulder), and then fly back here. Need to choose a date (SOON) for him to do this crazy thing.

3. Need to start freecycling stuff; haven't. Hate freecycle.

4. Every time I tell RB I want to leave something behind (Papasan chair, microwave, old kitchen table, changing table, washer & dryer) because we won't have room for it in the Boulder house and we need to lighten up the moving truck so as not to pay $18,000 for the move, he says, "We could put it in the cabin."

5. Didn't get the job I applied for at the University of Colorado. Remembering vividly what it was like to do temp work when I was 37. Wondering what it will be like to do temp work when I am 52/53.

If you were me, wouldn't you be stressed? Just a little? And there's all that Valentine's Day candy in the stores...

On the other hand, it's still at least two and a half months until our move date. Maybe I should just forget about the move and have a pleasant February.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

San Diego adventure

We're just back from a lovely long weekend in San Diego, visiting an old friend of mine and her husband. Betty and Mark actually let us stay in their new house with them, which was great -- but also a bit terrifying, knowing as we do how destructive the twins can be. They weren't TOO bad. I think the only breakage was one wineglass. Unless I'm forgetting something. It's easy to block these things out.
We drove down there on Thursday afternoon, arriving in time for dinner. It's about 222 miles from our house to theirs, and we made the drive in a little over 4 hours, including two short stops.

On Friday, we spent several hours at the fabulous San Diego Zoo. Here we are looking at the flamingos.

Next, we saw the orangutangs being fed.
And then we decided it was time for our own lunch. After lunch we asked everyone what they wanted to see. Baby B wanted to see gorillas, Baby A wanted to see lions, Rocket Boy wanted to see polar bears, and I wanted to see Galapagos tortoises. So we first took the Hippo Trail to the gorilla exhibit (didn't get a good shot of the gorillas, but here are the men sitting on a statue of a hippo),
saw lots of monkeys and birds and other animals, and finally reached the polar bear exhibit, at the far end of the park. The twins were more interested in the statue of the polar bear than the actual animal, but the adults had a good time looking at the bears, reindeer, and arctic foxes.
The "polar plunge" section was not too far from the lions and jaguars.
We got to watch the jaguars being fed "blood popsicles," which was quite interesting, if a bit gross.

After the big cats, we had to take a very long walk around the zoo to get back to the entrance/exit, and we were all very tired when we got there, so we let that be the end of the day. I was a little bummed that I didn't get to see the tortoises, but only a little. It was a really nice day.

Saturday we drove over the famous Coronado Bridge to Coronado Island, where we had lunch right near the water and then took the ferry back to the mainland. Here's the ferry we took:
And here we are getting off it, after a pleasant ride:
We walked along the pier to Seaport Village, where there are lots of shops and restaurants -- and a carousel, which of course we rode. Baby A, as usual, insisted on riding with me on what he calls a "couch" -- the animals are just way too scary for him.
But Baby B was unexpectedly brave and decided he wanted to ride by himself on a giraffe (a non-moving one). I was so proud of my little boy.
Afterward, as a special treat, we let the boys choose balloon creatures ($3 each from a vendor, and we got to watch them being made).
After a snack at the local independent bookstore (and several purchases, of course), we walked back to where we caught the ferry for the ride back to Coronado. Here we are getting off the boat.
Another really nice day all around.

Today we got up and packed, said our goodbyes, and went off to shop at Fry's and Trader Joe's before beginning the long drive home. About a half hour out of town we stopped in Escondido and spent an hour at a wonderful park there, Grape Day Park, where the kids played on the cool grape-themed equipment,
and got wet in the fountain.
The rest of the drive home involved the usual screaming and fighting over inconsequential things, but eventually it ended. And you know what? January is finally over! It's February! I'm so relieved.