Mita: The Angry Squirrel

I like it when lots of things are going on, but nothing's happening. For example: we went horseback-riding Friday, but we're not being audited, or some other such tomfoolery. The human condition is such that people always have some stupid thing on their minds... but I don't really. It's neat. I feel like I'm defying convention.

I'm glad Tim's got nerve. Riding my family's horses can be a practice in monk-like, Zen self-centering techniques because they like to do things like scraping you off on bushes, kicking fenceposts and stopping, mid-canter, to pee (the horses, that is, not my family). Tim did amazingly well for someone who's never ridden a horse past a walking pace, which is to say he didn't freak out and he didn't fall off. And even though my cousin Amanda got stung on the forehead by a wasp, and my saddle nearly slipped off sideways... it was a great ride that ended without any major catastrophies. I also got a free spaghetti dinner, and my cousins and I picked gooseberries for the first time since Amber and I were wee.

Yesterday went much the same way... a whole of doin' stuff but nothing really happening. The Hotchkiss pool (where Trina was a lifeguard for a million and a half years) was as exciting as ever. My cousin Sam, who is the only little kid I ever babysat (because he's the only little kid I never wanted to throttle) is eleven years old. That means I'm like 80 and need to retire. I'm glad that my cousins are finally old enough to swim because I can do cool things like throwing them across the pool and swimming along the bottom while they sit on my back. I like not having to worry about accidently killing people I love.

Gooseberry Pie

3 Cups Black Gooseberries (Grandma's rolling over right now, she always used green ones)
1 Cup Sour Cream
1 Heaping Cup Sugar
3 Tbsp Flour
pinch salt

Combine, place in nine-inch pie crust and cover with second crust. Cut slits to ventilate and place in 350 degree oven for about one hour. Voila.

We Don't Need No Water

This has been a week of heat. Thursday night the mesa caught on fire. Tim had never seen a forest fire before (oh, you city folk)... and so, along with the rest of the sleepy hamlet known as Crawford, we went down to the lake to see whose house was burning down. Fortunately, no one's house was burning down (despite rumors) but Jed was still out there "whacking" the fire with a shovel until well after nightfall. Crawford isn't large enough to have a proper fire station so they depend on Volunteer Firefighters to put out the fires in the Valley. Everything from field-burns gone awry, kids starting fires out of boredom, lightening strikes, concentrated heat from the sun on broken glass/in car mirrors, to exploding meth-labs (or meth-lab cover-ups). Not that Jed is even a volunteer firefighter; like a number of people, he wasn't there in a fancy helmet-- just average people in shorts and sandals, trying to fight the fire and not get arrested by the cops for doing so.

All of this explains Crawford pretty well. Talk about an interesting mixture of regular ranchers, a youth population challenged only by the sheer lack of anything to do, and a serious case of nature having its own way with a place.
The best reason to live in a small town (besides the sudden appearance of a couple thousand more visible stars) is that everyone makes there own rules, firefighting protocol be-damned.

Saturday was our annual Crawdad party (yes, Louisianians, crawdads. Deal with it). Every year we go to the lake and sit under the full moon, with a string in the muddy water, like idiots, just to catch a cooler full of Crawdads. They're disgusting, they make wierd noises, and do this thing we call "the moon dance:" coming almost to the edge of the water and waving their claws in the air... Still, every year we catch them at the dam and the next day we party. This year was not only our first year in a new house, but Tim's first year of the explain-your-life-plans ritual while the little kids "organized" (read: destroyed) a bunch of stuff in the barn. I made my margaritas, which everyone underestimated (as usual) and my Grandpa told me that all I need to know in life is this:

The world will end when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

I'm not sure who said it first, but I can tell you who said it last.

My senior year of highschool we raised funds all year for our senior trip and then spent the last month of school convincing people it wouldn't be that cool. Our logic was that if fewer people came, the people who did go would have more money to spend per person. I'm convinced we could have wittled the list down to myself and my two best friends and gone to Vegas, but we were too young to get into the casinos at the time anyway. Instead we went to Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, where I fell in love with the Mormon State. I haven't been back since then, until yesterday.
The park is full of places with names like "the Devil's Garden" and "the Fiery Furnace" because, in all honesty, if it wasn't so strangely beautiful, you could imagine that this is what the nicer parts of hell might look like. Even though Edward Abbey might roll in his grave every time someone opts for the "scenic drive," the park is still marvelously lax on safety measures (one trail goes along a six-foot wide rock fin with a thirty-foot drop on one side), and that should make a mountainier proud.

The rock formations are absolutely beyond words (unless you've ever seen that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk gets stranded on a desert planet).

That brings us to today, wherein I sat around and did nothing. If anyone can tell me where Trina is, I'd be much obliged. I hear tell she gets married in two weeks and I haven't seen hide nor hair of her yet. Maybe that has something to do with the whole "making of one's own rules" thing.

Tanya and her damn insects.

Look. Look at this. This is what happens when my auntie gets a new camera and plays with it around the yard.




Am I jealous of her photographic abilities? Yes.

Listen, for those of you who plan to be born into a family of geniuses, prepair yourself for a lifetime of never getting to sit down and relax or else your own genius (and I am a genius, I must confess) will be outdone by your aunts/cousins/parents.

How am I supposed to be a prodigy when this is what I have to deal with?

Conversation Starters

Going home after such a ridiculously long time is an exercise in re-adjustment, like readjusting to free public toilets.

for Instance, I had forgotten that my mom's boyfriend (who shall henceforth be refered to as "Jed," because that is his name) greatly disapproves of small talk, instead opting for such conversation starters as:

"What was that one about the diaper?" (To my mom, instead of "hello.")
"All you gotta do is give that sucker a shove and we can roll it across the road!" (Trying to recruit Tim and me into acts of hay-bale vandalism)
"Just eat some horny-goat-weed, Bob, and get it over with." (Commenting on a TV commercial)

and my favorite recent conversation:

Jed (out of nowhere): "I just wanted to look at the freakin' toys but the clowns kept harrasing me?"
Mom: "What?"
Jed: "Oh, I was going into the toystore and they wouldn't let me get past unless I put on this freakin' balloon hat."
Mom: "Well did you?"
Jed: "Well, yeah."
Mom: "So where's the balloon hat?"
Jed: "It popped. So now I'm a dollar short and all these freakin' kids are looking at me like I'm the crazy man. (Makes a crazy face) 'Check me out, man!'"
Mom: "You paid the clowns a dollar for a balloon hat?"
Jed: "Well, yeah... everyone can tell I'm a pushover"

This, this, is why I love coming home.

Another example of Jed's brilliance is the natural progression of our pet names. For instance, our dog, Dixie, AKA "Silly Smells," watch:

Dixie
Dixie Loo
(or Stiffy Loo, or Whackin' Loo)
Loo Loo Belle
Looley Belle
Wooley Belle
(or Whackin' Belle)
Silly Smells

I know it's a bit of a leap from "Wooley Belle" to "Silly Smells," but it fits. Our dog is a melange of silly smells.

In short, anything I learned about French in France is dwarfed by what I learn about the English Language in my own household.

"You buy 'em books and buy 'em books,

you buy 'em a mule to ride to school

and what do they do?

Stand on the books and eat the teacher."

-Jed Hart

You must be this tall to ride this blog

Former and current movie-theater-employees will agree that "upsizing,"has never gotten them anywhere. "Upsizing" is the constant repetition of the words: "Well Sir, if you buy a large drink instead of a medium, you can add a large popcorn for only $4.75, blah blah blah candy blah blah nachos, etc etc," until the customer either gets annoyed and snaps at you or buys enough junkfood to stock a bunker. I always thought that mystery shoppers, those mythical people who patronize businesses in the guise of normal customers, but who are really monitoring your every move as an employee, where a fiction made up by bosses (ie: adults) to scare their adolescent employees into giving correct change.

As it turns out, unlike other fictitious beings such as King Arthur and Elvis, Mystery Shoppers do exist. I know because while working at Colorado Cinemas Arapahoe Village 4 (Feb 2002-Aug 2002) I upsized two shady characters and won two free passes to Six Flags Elitch Gardens as a reward for my excellent salesmanship (read: fear of being fired).

I used them to take my friend Mike to the amusement park for his 20th birthday; that was the last time I went to Six Flags.

Since then both Six Flags and I have grown a little older, a little wiser. For instance, I now know that the "six flags" are the six flags that have flown over Texas (where the franchise originated) they are: Texas, The U.S, Mexico, France, Spain, and the Confederacy. Though of course, in Denver, the confederate flag has been replaced by the Colorado flag. I'm not sure why we have to have a Six Flags Over Texas in Colorado, since, by nature, Colorado is not Texas. I prefered the days when it was just Elitch Gardens, and the park was, honestly, mosly just gardens with a few stomach-turning, rickety old rides like the octopus and the tilt-o-whirl. (Oh yeah, and the trees by the Wild Cat that were covered with 100 years worth of chewing gum.)

Anyway, those days are gone but that doesn't mean the rides aren't just as likely to make you lose your funnel cakes on the log ride. I love a place where people pay to endanger their lives, get drenched with filth-infested pond water and vomit every ounce of their overly-priced, deep fried lunch. And parking only costs $9 (US) these days.

Yesterday was a day of discoveries:
Alsn especially likes to watch the ugly people.
Tim gets motion sickness, but wants to go on every ride, hands-up, anyway. (This is remedied by going, "ughhhhhh, ughhhhhh" over every bump instead of screaming your head off, like me)
"My Sharona" is not a song about a car.
You're just as likely to scrape your face on the bottom of a wavepool as you are in the ocean (sand not included).
Tim's cell phone falls out of his pocket no matter how tame the ride is.
People will pay any amount of money to play any unwinable game if the stuffed monkey is big enough.
Alsn is still the uncontested winner of any and all Diet Coke-drinking constests.

And most importantly: I'm still 12 years old and not above running from one ride to the next. The rides only get better when the sun goes down.

Train Dreams Everlasting

This is us pre-sunburn in Park Guell, Barcelona; home of RCB 2006

There are nights when you work a full day: answering phones, making copies, selling turkey legs (or whatever you happen to do) , until the alarm goes off and you wake up exhausted. You then realize that you're entire day was just a dream, and that you now face a genuinely full day of work. I've been dreaming about time tables.

Every night I go to sleep and chase trains for hours and hours, I look for museums, backtrack across bridges and try to remember which steeple belongs to which cathedral until I wake up exhausted (Instead of ready to label and identify our several hundred photographs, which is an effort in near futility).

Tim and I have been home (in Plano) for five days now, trying to fit in a million hellos and drink a million free-refills. I've been trying to come up with a reasonable way to talk about our trip without boring the holy living daylights out of everyone. There are too many photos to show at once and too many stories to fit in one bite. I've decided to keep it to anecdotes and to publish links to my pictures one city at a time, in the column on the right hand side of this page. That way, if you care: excellent. If you don't care: go eat a sandwich or catch a movie instead, I don't mind.

For now, I'm just glad to be home, though I hate that not every path ends with a priceless work of art or a thousand-plus year-old monument. Tim and I leave for Colorado on Thursday (because we just can't stay in one place), so I'm sure there will be little to tell, unless you find hammocks and iced-tea absolutely riveting.