All I'm Saying there's a joke in here somewhere

I'm a lot pissed but not at all surprised that Lt. Dan Choi's fight to stay in the military while openly gay lost its first round. Lt. Choi is a West Point graduate, a combat veteran, and a speaker of Arabic who is clearly a great asset to our military, and who will likely be discharged due to the discriminatory "Don't Ask/Don't Tell" policy. I'm furious this policy exists, but knowing the government fairly well, I also know that review board such as this one must only judge based on existing policy, whether the policy is right or wrong. Choi was bound to lose this, but hopefully the recommendation of discharge will not be acted upon immediately. There is still hope that the military could deliberately dither around a bit (for up to a year, evidently), and hope that the policy will change in the interim.

In other news, Matt had his first encounter since his gluten allergy diagnosis with a significant amount of wheat today. Suffice it to say that the poor boy was ridiculously uncomfortable. Must be pretty similar to what happens when I encounter even trace amounts of green pepper: childbirth isn't so painful. But as he points out, there's a valuable lesson he's learning from it. (The secondary lesson is that most fish tacos do have breading on them, dear.)

And finally, Facebook has thoroughly sucked me in with another game. If you're playing Farm Town, send me a neighbor request, won't you?

I came home to a hot one in Boise. (But it's a dry heat. Ha.) I believe it got up to 97 or so today. Fortunately, we'd made a trip to Target this morning and we were prepared.

We had this bad boy:

It's a whole 4 feet across and six inches deep, but it provided plenty of fun for the whole family. Even Grover got in on the action, because we splashed him every time he came close. We're all sporting faint sunburns, but we spent probably two hours out playing today and we stayed cool.

What did you all do this weekend?

I didn't check my horoscope today, but if I had, I think it would have said something like, "Girl, you are flying under a moderately bad travel star today. Pay close attention, or you will regret the consequences."

Looking at my watch, I was supposed to be getting back to Boise from Dallas here in about 25 minutes. However, I sit here in the Salt Lake City airport, blogging. What happened?

It all starts with a wonderful morning spent in Fort Worth with my friend Tea. First, we went to the Kimbell Art Museum, which was amazing. As I told Tea and her husband, the Boise Art Museum's biggest thrill is looking at the drawings made out of paper pulp, spit and charcoal from a moderately-disabled man from my home town. Caravaggios don't come to Boise. So now I've actually stood in front of paintings from Monet and Titian. It was great. Then we went down to the Fort Worth Stockyards and saw the longhorn herd get moved (a whole three blocks) by cowboys all dressed up in old west accoutrement.

Finally, (and this is where the clouds of trouble started forming) we went to lunch at the Lonesome Dove Bistro and had AMAZING food. I had trout dredged in blue corn meal with a sort of guacamole and some kind of lemony sauce over it, Tea had a steak that was so good we referred to it as a sort of dessert made out of meat. But the thing is, it was a little la-di-da, and so places like that tend to move at a slower pace. When I looked at my watch, it was 1:00 and my plane was leaving DFW at 2:25. And we hadn't got our dessert yet.

We flew out of Fort Worth with churro sugar all over our faces, hugged at the airport, and away I went. Until I got to check-in. That's when they told me I was 5 minutes too late to check bags and they'd be happy to put me on a later flight. I said no way, and could I throw out the liquids in my bag and just carry it on. They agreed, and I tossed out probably $50 worth of beauty products (goodbye, Origins conditioner, goodbye, Paul Mitchell styling products), and then I got hung up at security because I forgot about the liquids in my dopp kit. (Goodbye, mineral moisturizer and beta-hydroxy acid.)

I ran to the gate and made it in with moments to spare. I was thrilled to be on the plane; I was heading home to my much-missed family. I arrived at Salt Lake, checked the departures board and found the flight leaving for Boise at 4:55, and went to the gate. I sat there, and forty minutes later queued up to board. And then the gate agent looked at my boarding pass and said, "Hon, this is the Southwest 4:55 flight. Your pass is for the Delta 4:55 flight." I turned, and I ran again. The gate I needed was literally on the opposite side of the airport. I arrived, and saw no plane.

Long story shorter, I got on the phone to Delta and they have me on a flight leaving here in another 2 hours. After I got off the phone with them, I locked myself in the special needs bathroom nearby and I had myself a good, hard, long cry. I'm not sure why I melted down so badly, except that I probably had enough adrenaline zipping through me to power a Prius and it was all for nothing.

Sigh... I hate it when I fuck up. I have drawn several good lessons from this experience. One, get to the airport in time to check bags. Two, look very carefully at my boarding pass and the corresponding gate information. Three, check my horoscope before traveling.

I had this poster hanging over my bed in 1983. I was a nine year old Jehovah's Witness girl. Michael Jackson was a 25 year-old Jehovah's Witness man. As far as I was concerned, that was all the proof I needed that he and I were meant to be together forever, literally. I practiced kissing on this poster, and I wore the lips right off him. (I hope my mother never figured that out.)

He left the JWs before I did, and while I was still a Witness I felt a real sense of sadness about him. And then when I left, I continued feeling a sadness for him because there was so much ugliness in the media about him. I'm not saying he didn't do the things he was accused of, and I wouldn't defend him, but it's always sad to see a former hero laid low. I can't imagine that he wasn't purely messed up in the head; how can a little bitty kid who is raised in such a restrictive religion, but then is exposed to all these things he's told to repudiate possibly turn out normal? Add in the fame and fortune and the inability to have privacy or normal relationships, and you've practically made a recipe for a screwed-up human being.

So now the King of Pop has died. My mind is just having a hard time believing that he's cold and dead on a slab somewhere. I feel terribly for the children he left behind, and hope so much that they can somehow gain normalcy now.

Go with grace, Michael. Thank you for what you gave me.

That date is seared into my brain tonight. I just got back from The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which is in the Texas Book Depository, the building from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy.

It's hard for me to put into words what I felt as I took the audio tour through the museum. (But you know I'm going to try.) I was eleven years from being born when JFK was killed. I have no personal context for the happening. Truly though, I felt like I had been right there.

You pick up an audio tour headset and start it as you get off the elevator on the sixth floor. You are guided through photographs and artifacts of JFK and Jackie's marriage, the family, and the issues that he dealt with in the thousand days (approximately) of his presidency--the Cuban missile crisis and the Bay of Pigs, man's first steps on the moon, his conservation efforts, and the civil rights struggle. And then you turn a corner and you start to see photos of he and the First Lady arriving in Texas. That's when my mind started saying, "Turn around. Don't let this happen to you."

You continue to walk and listen to the tour as they get in the open limousine and start to drive through Dallas. You see news reels of happy people waving to him with pride in their eyes. You see this beautiful couple who represent the hope of a nation. Then the corridor narrows, and you walk past photos taken from video footage. Frame by frame, you see him smiling and waving, you see his body move forward, you see Jackie moving toward him, and you see his head touch his chest as her face changes from confusion to terror and agony as she realizes something horrible has just happened to her husband. A large photo shows a Secret Service man running to the limousine with his arms stretched out to pull her from the car and to shield her.

And then you walk around that photo, and there is the window. Boxes are piled up around it to create the stand that Oswald balanced his rifle on. And you think, "I'm so close. If I'd just been in this spot, I could have run at him and tackled him before he could shoot." I literally stood there thinking that I could have stopped the assasination of a President. But for forty-six odd years or so.

The rest of the museum shows you the grief of the nation and the world. I purely broke down as I watched the video that showed John Jr. saluting his father's casket. He's just a tiny little guy, and his father has been taken from him. No child should ever have to face that.

One quote from a speech I heard in the museum really resonated with me. JFK said, "Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."

I wish peace for us all. Please, go forth and wage it. We must.

The Book Depository. The second window down from the top on the far right is the one at which Oswald stood to shoot.

The Grassy Knoll, from which some believe another shooter fired. I can't for the life of me see how this could bear out forensically, but an hour at a museum doesn't exactly make me an expert.

Guys, I'm in a big ol' city. I shit you not. This hotel area? It's got an ice skating rink in it. No pool, but an ice skating rink. Tell me how anachronistic that is: I'm in Dallas, which is like 100 degrees out for literally months on end, and there's an ice skating rink here. You'd think Boise, which is 40 degrees or less for months out of the year would have an ice skating rink at every hotel. But no, we have swimming pools. Guess what my hotel doesn't have? Tell me that makes sense.

One of the guys in my training class (he works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington, DC) was asking me about Idaho and where I grew up. I told him I grew up on a 1200-acre cattle ranch and his eyes bugged out. He asked if the area there was like Boise. I said, "Oh, no. It's right on the edge of the Boise National Forest, so the ranch was both forested and full of meadows for grazing and alfalfa crops, and then there is a big river running through." He couldn't believe it; it sounded like something out of a book to him.

But to me, this area is what I can't really believe. Any time I travel to a populated area like this, I drive past or fly over miles and miles of houses and office buildings and I think, "There are people in all of these?!" I truly have a hard time wrapping my head around that, and around the fact that each one of those people has a story just as strange, weird, interesting, mundane as my own.

It's not just me on this planet. It's not just my close circle. There are billions of us, and we're every one equal. My taxi driver tonight (I went to the biggest mall in Texas, heh) was from Ethopia. ETHI-fucking-OPIA! He's been here for 12 years and he likes it, but misses his mom and dad. I almost said, "Screw the mall. Let's go get some burgers and you can tell me what it was like growing up there." I kind of wish I had...

Traveling really gets me out of my own head.

A crappy cell phone picture from my hotel room window.

Well, here I am in Dallas. Dudes, this is a major metropolitan area. I'm such a country mouse. Thank God my friend Theresa picked me up at the airport and got me to the hotel; I had to ask her if the men were going to bring my luggage up to the room or should I just go shoulder my bags and haul them up. I mean, I've never had to deal with the protocol for that. WTF?

Beyond that little crisis, it was a very smooth trip. I was kind of surprised to notice how pretty it was to fly over--there are ponds and little woods everywhere. Theresa told me that there is only one natural lake in the whole state of Texas. Can you believe it? It's Caddo Lake in east Texas. Learned something, didn't ya?

Tea cracked me up immediately at the airport by meeting me with a placard that said, "Freya's Mom." I knew I was in the right place. We came straight downtown, Tea humming the theme from "Dallas" for me as the skyline came into view, and found my hotel. As I told her, you could fit all of Boise's big buildings into one of the biggies here. And I know Dallas isn't exactly Metropolis, compared to the world's huge cities.

But that's me--the hick from the sticks. I hope to get more exploring done tomorrow!

I'm heading to Dallas tomorrow (which isn't Fort Worth, but hey, George Strait guys) for a work trip.

I'm going to facilitator training, wherein I will learn to be the master and commander of meetings. One of the main reasons I want to take the training is that a meeting that runs off-course drives me batshit crazy. If the agenda says it is going to be over at 4:30, I'm sorry, but that's when my brain turns off. And don't even get me started on what happens when lunch is late. That is just not okay; you're messing with my necessary biological functions.

Another reason I want to take it is because I have observed it is a highly marketable skill in the government. Pretty much any place you go would be happy to have a trained facilitator on hand. It should beef out my resume nicely.

And the final reason I want to go is that I'll get to see my friend Theresa and her family, including her sweet baby boy, Matthew. Cuddling him will help me not be quite so homesick for my own peanut.

If any of you are old hands with the Dallas area, post a comment and let me know what to check out. I'll be downtown, so make sure it's within evening striking distance. I'll continue blogging from the road and will let you all know what I encounter!

On the way to do errands this morning, we stopped at the Dutch Bros. coffee place by our house and I got Freya a hot cocoa and myself an almond steamer. I noticed on their sign that it says, "Free Stickers for Kids," so I asked if Freya could have some stickers. They gave her two big sheets full and she was overjoyed.

As we were pulling out, she said, "Don't worry, Mom. Some day when you get a little bit cuter, they'll give you stickers too."

It's our third week of picking up our subscription of produce from Spyglass Gardens. If any of you are interested, I found out tonight that they have a "Fruit and Corn Only" share still available, where you get treats like peaches, apricots, cherries, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, apples and more, plus tons of sweet corn for 10 weeks. The share is $300. Drop me a note if you're interested and I can hook you up.

In the meantime, here's this week's bounty!

Here we have carrots, green onions, salad greens, chard and peas.

And here are the farm fresh eggs and two pounds of cherries!

What I didn't take a picture of this week are the two parsley plants I got that are sitting in the garden: one is a flat-leaf and one is a curly-leaf. Garnishy!

Tuesday has become Giant Salad Dinner Night. We pick up our CSA haul on Wednesday, so we have to clear out fridge space to make room for the new stuff. That tends to mean that we have a ton of greens, so we do the salad.

I think I might have eaten a pound of leaves tonight. My colon will never know what hit it. On the other hand, you know that's got to be doing us a lot of good. Stay tuned for photos tomorrow! (Of the new CSA stuff. Not...the other.)

One of the fun things about being a parent has been rediscovering books that I loved as a child and sharing them with Freya. There will hopefully be much more of that in the next few years as she learns to read independently, but we've been able to enjoy a few of Matt's and my old books with her already.

Last week, I remembered a book of Walt Disney stories, but I had no idea what the title was. All I knew was that it had a red cover, and Mickey Mouse and a few of the other characters were on the front. I Googled and searched Amazon, but couldn't find anything solid. So I forgot about it.

Tonight we went out for frozen yogurt and then stopped at my favorite local book store, appropriately named Rediscovered. I was browsing the kids section, and looked down at my feet to see Freya paging through a large book. Guess what it was?

Walt Disney's Story Land

My jaw dropped. I mean, was that kismet, or what? And since Rediscovered sells both new and used books, I was able to buy it right there at a bargain price.

Things like this make me wonder at the workings of the universe. I mean, it's such a small thing, but some pretty random things all had to come together for Freya to grab that book off the shelf tonight.

Cool, huh?

So I've mentioned I have a touch of the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I never really realized I had it--I just thought everyone knew exactly how many stairs were in any given staircase they regularly walked on. Or that everyone said "safe landing" every time they saw an airplane.

I try to recognize the behaviors and stop them, but some of them seem so damned productive. Take weeding, for example. I can happily sit out in the backyard with a trowel and pull up weeds for hours. If people wouldn't think I was purely crazy, I would be ecstatic to start at one end of our street and just weed peoples' yards all day long.

Just recently I discovered the joy of weeding patches of clover. Do you realize the BIOMASS a patch of clover has? Holy crap, it's amazing. Clover appears to actually be a vine, and there are just branches of it that run all over the surface of the ground. You can start at one of the blooms and gently pull on it until you get to the root six or ten inches away. It's unreal.

I sat in the front yard contentedly yanking and giggling to myself for a long while this afternoon. At one point, my LDS neighbor returned from church and asked what I was up to. I explained it and he gave me a funny look. Then I explained that it was actually really fun to weed, and he gave me an even funnier look, said, "Well, as long as it makes you happy," and then went inside.

Maybe it's time to take my weeding underground. If you drive down my street at three in the morning and see me out there in my nightgown with a flashlight, would you please ring the doorbell and make Matt come and sedate me?

We took Freya out "exploring" tonight. It's a nice, mild evening and we're lucky to have some huge fields behind our house with little two-track roads between them. So we walked out our back gate and onto the farmer's service road and followed it past the cornfield.

We discovered that the irrigation ditch a little ways from the house was still running; we thought it had been shut down last summer when they built a new high school in the area. This is great news because we can take our dog back there to splash around later this summer when it gets hot (and when the seed heads fall off all the cheat grass back there). Freya had a marvelous time chunking rocks into the ditch and watching the splooshes that resulted.

Matt and I were talking about how much bigger the world seems when you're little. So we figure tonight's adventure of a half-mile in an hour probably seemed like a long journey full of surprises for our three-year old.

Don't you wish you could go back sometimes? I can't tell you how many nights I lay in bed and walk the hills, fields and forest that I grew up in. I think about every bend in the irrigation ditches, trees that were my particular friends, the snowbrush bushes that had a little tunnel through them to an open spot where I had a fort...I wish that kind of growing up for every child.

We picked up our second delivery of locally-grown produce from Spyglass Gardens tonight. Last week's bounty made for two big dinner-sized salads (with shrimp one night and chicken another), plus two big lunch-sized salads. I cooked the beets in the crock pot with a chicken this past weekend, and we blended some kohlrabi in with the salads, as well as the onions and radishes. So let's see what we get to chow on this week!

Here we have white and red Swiss chard, and turnips with the greens attached.

This is green onions, a head of broccoli, another kohlrabi peeking out from under its greens, and more lettuce. There are plenty of big salads in our future!

And finally:

Honey drawn from the farm's own hives (their earliest draw of the year ever!), and two pounds of cherries. Seriously, local food is the coolest, isn't it?

Matt is working late-ish tonight, so Freya and I went on a girl date together. I picked her up after school and whisked her off to her favorite fine restaraunt, Rockies Diner. It has roller-skating waitresses, so she thinks it's the bomb. (I think it's a little hard on my weight control efforts, but I don't have all that much self control anyway.)

I'll tell you right now, the way to get Freya to eat her dinner is to promise her an ice cream treat afterward: she ate four large chicken nuggets and a bunch of fries in order to get The World's Smallest Brownie Sundae. Then I decided to take a very full toddler to the park to ride on the swings for a while.

Believe it or not, there was not a throw-up incident. She must have a stomach of iron.

There's just something about taking her out for her favorite food and then a fun outing. I have to admit that knowing I put that huge smile on her face just gives me a thrill like no other. Even if we stayed home and did nothing much besides snuggle on the couch and chase each other around the backyard, she'd still have the huge grin. But I also know that I'm making memories for her, where later in life she'll think of those times Mom picked her up and took her for an unexpected treat, and how great it was.

What a kid...

I think you're all way overdue for one of my stupid jokes. Here you go--click on the extended entry for the punchline answer!

What did the Eskimo get when he sat on the ice?

Continue reading "Time for a Stupid Joke!"

Freya and I worked on a project together this weekend. We made an osmia bee house. Ours doesn't look quite like the one in this article--it's made from a 2' section of 4 x 4 post--but will do the same thing.

Osmias are "solitary bees," in that they don't hive like honeybees do. They are also much more placid than honeybees (which aren't that aggressive unless you get after their hive or surprise them). They're also very effective pollinators, which is why we're trying to make a good habitat for them in our backyard. We're growing vegetables and native plants, plus some sunflowers and marigolds, and the bees will find many tasty things to work on. Not to mention that they'll help increase our yields.

You've also probably heard of colony collapse disorder, wherein colonies of honeybees in North America are suffering enormous population loss for reasons yet unknown. (Some suspect fungal infections or pesticides & herbicides.) Part of the terror behind that is that honeybees pollinate all of our domestic food crops that need to be pollinized in order to grown. Take the apple tree as an example: you can have all the blooms in the world, but unless pollinization occurs, the apple crop will be miniscule. As a cumulative effect, colony collapse disorder could cause terrible food shortages.

Fortunately, osmia bees do not seem to be as affected by the disorder as honeybees are. Given suitable habitat, they are even MORE effective pollinizers than honeybees.

So. Help save the world--drill a bunch of holes in a 4 x 4 post, hang it in your backyard, and let the friendly bees move in!

I have practically the whole day off tomorrow! Freya's Montessori is closed for the day, and so I decided I'd just take the day off. I do, however, have to do the home office thing and check in every now and again, but by and large, I'll be a free woman.

I get to sleep in as late as Freya will allow. And then she and Matt and I are going to load up, go get a picnic at the Co-Op, and take her out fishing again.

It should be great!

We joined a CSA subscription this year from Spyglass Gardens in Meridian. This is the same farm Freya and I have been going to every Saturday for the past two summers in a row. The county shut them down for selling retail at their farm site because of unclear zoning problems, so they rebounded (as farmers do) and started selling at local farmers' markets and doing this subscription.

I know summer is finally here, because tonight we picked up our first bag of produce. I think I'll try and do a little feature for you all and share my weekly bounty of local, naturally grown produce and goodies. Try not to drool!

This is our bag waiting to be opened. It's like Christmas! You don't know what's inside. You can see the weekly newsletter peeking out there, and we also get to keep our bags. Good stuff already!

Left to right: Beets with tender greens attached, kohlrabi, and green onions

BIG bag of salad greens

Left to right: Spinach, radishes, and ohmygod CHERRIES! Hello, delectable morsels.

A dozen beautiful brown speckled eggs from the farm's chickens. We know the birds who laid these eggs, and they're some happy girls. They have a cozy coop, an enormous, moving outdoor run where they can eat grass and chase bugs and take dirt baths, and all the excess produce they can eat. These eggs are about as nutritious as you can get.

Recipes, just in case you don't know what in the world to do with kohlrabi. (Anyone? Anyone?)

And finally, a live lemon thyme plant to add to my own herb garden. They're going to throw in a bonus goody each week--next week is a bottle of their own honey! This is so exciting!

These are the kinds of things I am thinking about on the first day of wearing my new haircut in public:

A lady at work doesn't say anything about my hair. I think, "Why isn't she saying anything? Does she proscribe to 'If you can't say anything nice...'?"

My boss says, "Hey, your hair looks great!" I think, "But you preferred it long, didn't you?"

We see a neighbor at CostCo and she says, "Aren't you sporty?" I think, "Does it make me look butch?"

My other boss says, "I am totally digging your haircut!" I think, "You I believe, since you're an entirely honest Boy Scout type."

Freya says, "Mom, your hair is longer today!" I think, "Well, microscopically, I suppose."

I'm nuts, aren't I?

One: Today was Freya's first fishing trip. Matt took her to the ponds by the Fish & Game regional office in Nampa, and she caught a fish on her second cast. Unfortunately, the fish slipped the hook right at the dock, but it appears she's a natural. She used her Disney Princesses fishing pole--what a pro.

Two: I cut off between six and eight inches of hair today. (My own.) I was ready to ditch the long locks for a while. I vacillate between really liking it and thinking, "Oh my god, I just cut off so much hair! What was I thinking?!"

Three, my friend Shelly posted a pretty darned funny YouTube video to her Facebook page and I figured I'd share it with those of you who care to watch. It's a literal interpretation of Bonnie Tyler's video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Enjoy!