We came back from our vacation and the garden was, shockingly, not destroyed. Definitely quite a few weeds in there that we need to take care of, but I bet it’d be worse if I hadn’t been putting grass clippings in open areas.
As you can see above (shaded, so perhaps not that easy to see…), the corn is tasseling and we’ve got a few other small rows of corn popping up. The stalks aren’t all that all, but we’ve got some ears showing up. Also, the green beans have some pickable veggies ready to go. We’ll probably pick those and eat some in the coming nights, though Brooke wants to wait on some until they get bigger before she cans some.
We picked some of the broccoli before we left and had some. Not bad! Kinda “gamey,” perhaps? Difficult to describe, but not quite what I would expect if I were picking up a head from the store. You can see another head in the picture above, but it’s flowering, so probably won’t taste all that good.
Also, you’ll notice the pumpkins proliferating and vining. We don’t see any buds on them yet, but they’re looking pretty good!
Mom was wondering about the soup beans, so here’s a picture… I don’t see many buds yet, but like the pumpkins, the vines are really taking off, so it shouldn’t be much longer!
Now that the sun has finally returned to Missouri and the rain clouds have slowed down a bit, the tomatoes are starting to take off. There are three plants in the foreground (that we thought were peppers…), and all the plants on the trellises. The three remaining pepper plants are still pretty tiny, so I’m not getting my hopes up for them, unfortunately.
The tomatoes, however, have quite a few flowers on them…
…and we even have some actual, legit, tomatoes on there! Totally green still, but they’re getting to a good size. Not very many yet, but we’re hopeful that the July heat (that, literally, started last weekend…as in, we hadn’t seen 90+ F temps until last week…which is crazy for July…) will start to move the tomatoes further.
So, after the not-so-awesome first night’s sleep in the back of the car, we continued toward the nearby Fort Kearny State Park. Fort Kearny was one of the early well-known stops along the trails, a trading and restocking depot along the California, Mormon and Oregon Trail systems. It went through a few face-lifts during its years of existence, but importantly, it was established by the US government as a service to pioneers heading west along the Platte River.
Fort Kearny…an early stop along the trail for supplies.
The Platte River, we would find, was an essential lifeline to the early pioneers as they crossed Nebraska and into Wyoming (where things would get a lot worse). It’s an odd river in that it’s somewhat shallow at many points, but it also gets muddy and changes its shape/location readily. It was also important to the Native Americans of the area, which means the pioneers and Indians were in close proximity, sometimes leading to conflict (hence the need for a Fort at this location).
The state park grounds were interesting, including quite a few replica buildings and the outlines of where previous buildings were. This site wasn’t well-maintained from its time as a fort, as most of the materials were dismantled around the time the transcontinental railroad was completed (another theme throughout the trip, as nearly every museum would bring up that the trail effectively ended once the train system was completed). After that point, there wasn’t much need to protect travelers, so the fort was abandoned and eventually turned over to the Nebraska state government.
Courthouse and Jail Rocks
After leaving Fort Kearny, we passed multiple rock formations that were frequently mentioned in the diaries of those traveling the trail. Courthouse and Jail Rocks were the first…
Chimney Rock
…followed by Chimney Rock. Courthouse and Jail Rocks had a pull-out off the highway near Scott’s Bluff, but no visitor center. Chimney Rock, however, had a decent visitor center with some displays of artifacts and another video. By this point, we were noticing that most of these videos told the same story for 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes that discussed the exact feature you were seeing. Still, it was interesting to listen to the evolution of how the trail was discussed, where early sites appeared to focus on the railroad system coming in, while later sites seemed to shift that focus more toward how Native Americans were more of a help than a hindrance to the pioneers.
Fort Laramie
The next stop, just over the border into Wyoming, was Fort Laramie. Here, in one day, we had a stark reminder of the difference between a state park and a national park. Where Fort Kearny had replica houses and somewhat chintzy displays, Fort Laramie still had original buildings and displays within those buildings to show how things were set up, including period-specific furniture, clothing, dishes, etc. If you’re going to pick one, you definitely want to visit this one (mostly because it’s free…your tax dollars at work!).
Much like Fort Kearny, Fort Laramie was there as a service to the emigrants as they crossed toward Oregon, however it ended up having a larger role in the Civil War and in multiple wars with the Native Americans of the region, so it ended up being a larger and longer-lasting establishment. It wasn’t officially abandoned until 1890, almost 20 years after Fort Kearny was opened up to homesteaders.
Stuck in jail at Fort Laramie…
The buildings here were pretty cool, so I think we both agree it’s worth the visit if you get the chance. It has quite a few descriptive signs, lots of artifacts, and is big enough that you could spend a morning or afternoon exploring all of it. We only spent an hour but felt like we could have stayed quite a bit longer.
It also sits on the Platte River, so it was also important to the same emigrants who traveled multiple trails. It would be days between these two forts for a wagon train, a distance we traveled in a few hours. Thus, this establishment had much needed supplies and defenses to allow for oxen to rest before the arduous journey that was to come across the deserts of Idaho and western Wyoming.
Stuck in a rut in Wyoming!
The last place we stopped was a set of permanent wagon ruts dug into sandstone near Guernsey, WY. Apparently, the pioneers couldn’t find an easier way around this terrain, so they drove their wagons over it, digging up to 5 ft into the rock face. Kinda crazy enough wagons passed through that one spot to dig a hole in rock that deep!
After that, we stopped at a hotel in Alcova, WY. It was called the Riverview Inn. It’s attached to the Sunset Grill. Never stay at this hotel. I’ll leave it at that…
We started our trip at the National Frontier Trails Museum in Independence, MO, where we got our first introduction to the Oregon Trail and the other trails that started from this area. The museum itself actually set the tone for the rest of what we’d see, in that much of what we saw there was similar to what we’d see most other places: artifacts, a video, some diary entries, regionally specific displays, etc. It’s a decent place to go if you aren’t planning on driving the whole thing (like crazy people…), but it didn’t really add much to the overall trip, aside from serving as a primer on what was to come.
From here, we hopped on the trail! Wanna see what it looked like?
Here’s the trail…in suburbia…
Cool, eh? Yeah, this was our view for the first few hours of the trip as we rounded Kansas City through the southern side of town. We probably could have skipped this section, but especially early on, we were pretty committed to following the exact route of the trail as far as we could. Unfortunately, this meant driving through Suburban Hell for longer than anyone should.
Once we were out of the KC area, though, we traveled on state and federal highways as best as possible. We were on I-70 only briefly after Independence, and then started heading north.
Cholera Cemetery!
One of our first stops was a Cholera Cemetery near Belvue, KS. It was somewhat off the beaten path, but as disease was commonplace on the Oregon Trail (and in the game), we thought it would be interesting. There were only a few stones there, and they were kept behind a chain-link fence, but the informational display nearby was interesting. It wasn’t the most exciting thing we saw on the trail, but it was a good reminder that a lot of people ended up dying of cholera before they even made it a few hundred miles past Independence…
From here, we kept heading north into Nebraska toward a Rock Creek Station State Historical Park. It was a relatively early stop on the way to Fort Kearny for trail travelers, but wasn’t necessarily an important stop. On our first day of traveling, however, we thought it’d be nice to go somewhere else before we reached our destination for the day.
At this point, I should take this time to point out that Nebraska, apparently, doesn’t believe in gravel roads. Instead of gravel, they use dirt. And in the event of rain, that dirt turns to mud. When did it last rain? I don’t know. But it must have been a lot, because the dirt road Waze took us down to get to this particular park (which, granted, was a road you don’t have to use – it’s just the one that let us cut over from the highway we were actually on to get to where we wanted to go) was filled with mud.
There’s the road…that our beautiful Subaru destroyed…
Luckily, Brooke was driving, otherwise we probably would have been worse off. This is probably the most harrowing experience I’ve had in a car, mostly because we were in the middle of nowhere, and if our Subaru Forester got stuck down one of those hills, it was likely a tow truck wouldn’t be able to get down there to get us out.
Thankfully, our car is awesome, and Brooke did a great job of driving it. She dropped into low gear and took it slow down and up the hills. As you can see in the picture above, the “ruts” we dug into the road were rather squiggly, as the car was sliding back and forth constantly up and down the hills.
Victory is ours!
Ultimately, though there was mud caked in our wheel wells, we survived and made it back up to the top. Brooke and I were shaking for awhile after that…enough adventure for our first day on the trail…
Rock Creek Station
Rock Creek Station doesn’t appear to get many visitors…certainly not down the crappy mud road we took to get there… Still, it was a good reprieve from the last 30 min, so we took our time to walk around and see the re-created period-specific buildings they’d erected. There were wagon ruts visible, though somewhat obscured by the tall grass. The rain was starting to come in, so we didn’t hang around too long, yet long enough to watch a video about the site and learn a bit about that era. It sounds like Rock Creek Station’s main claim to fame involves a story about “Wild Bill” Hickok and his first gunfight, which took place at the station. It looks like they do re-enactments somewhat frequently, though I hope the participants are better actors than those in the video they showed us. Still, they’ve got quite a few buildings on display that make for an interesting visit. I wish we’d had more time, but with the rain coming in, we didn’t want to get stuck in a wood building a mile from the car.
Thus, we continued onward toward Windmill State Park, where we stayed for the night. The pricing was reasonable and we’d already paid our daily fee for use of Nebraska state parks, so it seemed like a good option. That, and Windmill was relatively close to Fort Kearny, where we’d start the next day.
Car camping….not the most comfortable?
This was also our first attempt at car camping in the back of the Forester. We’d practiced this before leaving, though didn’t actually try sleeping in the car until then. Still, we put in some eggshell foam pads and a bunch of blankets in the back of the car, folded the seats down, and did our best to get comfortable. Unfortunately, the way the seats fold down causes a substantial “dip” between the back of the rear seats and the cargo bay, so if you’re my height, it means your hips land exactly at that dip, making it kinda uncomfortable. By the second night, I figured out a reasonable sleeping position and it got better, but that first night wasn’t great.
We also ate dinner in town at Sportsman Bar and Grill. After a day like ours, that burger was pretty spectacular! Definitely an old establishment that has seen better days, but hey, the food was good and the beer was cheap: we weren’t arguing.
A few months ago, we started thinking about what trip we’d like to take for our tenth anniversary (which was June 25th). With the kids, we hadn’t been able to take an extended vacation for the past few years, so we had accumulated a few ideas. We knew we wanted to drive somewhere (and would, thus, leave the kids with the grandparents) and discussed a few routes, including a trip to Maine or down to the Florida Keys.
Ultimately, the Oregon Trail won out. I can’t remember how exactly that idea came up or who first suggested it, but Brooke looked into it and the National Park Service has a series of maps available to give you a driving route that’s relatively close to the course the pioneers took.
Thus, we will embark soon on an excursion that takes us from Independence, MO out toward Oregon City, OR (near Portland). We’ll spend a few days heading out, stopping at some of the key locations (Chimney Rock, Fort Kearny, etc…mostly the locations from the classic game…) on our way. Then, we’ll spend some time in and around Portland, followed by heading south along the coast toward San Francisco, CA. After a few days there, we’ll head back toward home.
Aside from the ultimate destination(s), we aren’t really planning the trip that carefully. Like the pioneers of old, we’ll take our time, sometimes staying in hotels, sometimes sleeping in the back of the car at state parks. We haven’t made any reservations, so we’ll take what we can find as we find it!
Just a brief update about the garden, as it’s been a few weeks. We’re making more progress getting the concrete bricks lined around the plot(s) and hope to have most of them surrounded in the coming days. Brooke picked the peas and dug up the carrots a few weeks ago and planted more corn in its place. However, the rain over the past few weeks has been ridiculous. Literally, 4 in of rain fell in 2 hrs one night last week, leaving a lake where the new corn was just about to come up in the garden. Thankfully, it looks like at least some of the sprouts survived and we’ve got plants coming up…
Also, the green beans and soup beans are coming up well, with buds on the green beans already.
From left-to-right: green beans, pumpkins, broccoli. Soup beans in back.
In the middle of the shot above, Brooke’s got some pumpkins growing. After the massive rainfall, they actually took off surprisingly well. She’s got 6 pumpkin plants in right now, and obviously they won’t be making much for awhile.
Broccoli!
This is probably the most success we’ve had with broccoli. We tried it in Iowa and got a little out of it, but the heads we’ve got right now are already looking larger than we remember from before. It’s a bit late for broccoli, we think, so we aren’t sure we’ll actually end up with anything, but it looks good, at least…
Tomatoes!
The tomatoes are coming in pretty well, too. Really, the one side is taking off, while the other (in the back) is moving a bit more slowly. The ones in the forefront were in the ground sooner and were also larger when they went in, so it isn’t surprising.
More impressively, this is the first time we’ve successfully grown tomato plants from seeds. Brooke got them started on our back porch months ago and they’re doing pretty well! We’ve also got flowers on at least one plant. I suspect we’ll have them showing up on more soon.
Raspberries and blackberries
The berry bushes are moving slowly. We don’t expect to get much out of them this year, though at least one bush has already produced some berries. We put some mulch around them to make mowing a bit easier, as they’re taking their sweet time in betting big enough for me to see, but they’re moving along. Next year, perhaps…
Sweet potatoes
The sweet potatoes are also going a bit slowly. We don’t really remember how quickly they went last year, but by the time we moved from St. Louis, it was like they’d taken over our garden. It feels like they should be further along than they are, but oh well…they’re doing something…
Probably enough for now. Hopefully by the time we get back from our vacation, we’ll have something to harvest! …more likely, we’ll have tons of weeds…
I took Meg to her second theater-based movie this past weekend, and her first in 3D. She’s a fan of most Pixar movies and, while we weren’t originally keeping an eye on this movie (unlike Finding Dory), Brooke read a few blog posts suggesting that Inside Out may be helpful for young kids (girls, especially) to visualize their feelings, especially as young people tend to get rushes of emotion and don’t necessarily know how to deal with them, or how to express the complexity of what they’re experiencing.
Inside Out centers on an 11-year-old girl, Riley, whom we meet at birth. At that time, we also meet Joy, her one and only emotion. Over time, other emotions appear as Riley gets older: Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust. Ultimately, these five emotions work together to help Riley navigate her life, frequently conflicting on how exactly Riley should be “controlled” in a given situation. Sometimes Disgust needs to take over (when broccoli is presented to Riley), while other times, Fear is the one in control. All of this action appears in a “Control Center,” of sorts, where each emotion works at a control board to control Riley, and new memories are formed and sent off for storage.
The action balances between Riley and her interactions with her peers and parents, and the emotions inside Riley’s head. Without spoiling the finer points of the plot, the writers provide an interesting take on Riley’s entry into adolescence, giving the viewer an intriguing take on how a kid can go from jubilant and goofy, to morose and reserved.
As an adult, I can recognize this shift pretty clearly, as someone that went through it at some point in my life. It’s intriguing to think back on how my emotions changed during the first decade-and-a-half of my life, where memories come from, how you forget things over time, how things just “pop in there” randomly.
Meg, however, didn’t get any of that. At the age of 5, she simply isn’t aware of it yet. Oh, she has emotional outbursts, but the experience of a 5-year-old is different from what was presented in the film. She hasn’t gone to school yet. She hasn’t had similar situations quite yet as what Riley goes through. I suspect that she’ll appreciate it much more in the next few years, but right now, to her, it was “just a movie.”
Overall, I think it was really good. It blew over Meg’s head, but I certainly appreciated it. The voice actors they chose for each emotion were spot-on, between Amy Poehler (Joy), Phyllis Smith (Sadness), Bill Hader (Fear), Mindy Kaling (Disgust), and Lewis Black (Anger). I don’t think they did much motion capture of the actors while reading these lines, but I saw them in each of the oddly-shaped cartoons as they spoke.
Hopefully, in a few years, Meg will appreciate it on different levels upon subsequent viewings. I guess that’s as good a mark of a successful film as any.
The first movie I remember seeing multiple times in theaters was Jurassic Park. Pretty sure it was three times. And I was 11. I loved this movie and still think it holds up to a ridiculous degree, considering it’s over 20 years old and ushered in an era of CGI-based summer blockbusters. Seriously, I picked up the Bluray last week and we watched it this weekend. Those dinosaurs still look good, better than many other heavy CGI movies that come out today.
The sequels were “decent,” at best. I don’t remember if I saw Lost World in theaters or not, but I know I didn’t watch Jurassic Park III until it was out for rental. Neither movie had as good a story, and both of them started to try doing too much with their effects. If I recall, many of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park III looked about as good as what you see on any given Saturday night on SyFy Channel.
Thus, the franchise died. Until it was revived, over a decade after the third iteration, in the form of Jurassic World. This movie all but retcons the middle two movies, returning 20 years later to Isla Nublar, which is now fully operational as Hammond’s dream theme park. They have their own Disney World main street equivalent, roller coasters, hamster wheels that let you drive among stegosaurus, triceratops, and diplodocus – truly a spectacle.
As we’re quickly told by the park’s administrator, Bryce Dallas Howard, they have to constantly introduce new, scarier beasts to attract new guests to the park. Thus, they have taken to genetic engineering (carried out by BD Wong, the only returning cast member from the original), combining multiple species of dinosaur into a single animal, named Indominus Rex. Chris Pratt is brought in to consult on the enclosure for this fierce new dinosaur, followed shortly after by the escape of said dinosaur from said enclosure, leading the characters (and audience) on an epic chase through the island. Indominus Rex is clearly intelligent and uses its genetically-endowed defenses to escape from its captors at nearly every turn. InGen’s private military force, led by Vincent D’Onofrio, is brought in to try and contain the situation, though he has ulterior motives of proving that Velociraptors would make great soldiers in war zones to fight on behalf of the military.
Yeah, you read that right. This is about the point where I couldn’t suspend my belief much more.
Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed the movie (Brooke saw a movie with me!!!). I caught myself smiling like an 11-year-old multiple times, any time I saw my “old friends” from the 1993 original, or they made some reference to the characters of that film. It really was quite good fan service. But I don’t think it was as good as the first one. I suspect it’s because I’m biased toward the property I grew up with, and this new one is for a generation 20 years younger than me. The two things that hold me back from loving this movie are the aforementioned Soldier Velociraptors, and the excess of CG effects.
First, the raptors. Chris Pratt is on the island because he’s training 4 raptors to follow commands. That part’s actually pretty cool. He isn’t doing anything all that complicated with them, but he demonstrates that he can get in the cage with them and can get them to follow simple orders, but only to the extent a trainer could do so with a lion: they’re still very, very dangerous. But D’Onofrio is there to get these raptors to follow orders, like “go chase that terrorist in Afghanistan,” and at this, I say “okay, that’s kinda nuts…why would you try to train a velociraptor, who were clearly smarter than the humans 20 years ago in the first movie, to act as soldiers?” It just wasn’t believable for me. I feel like the plot would have been stronger if Pratt was there training raptors for his own scientific ends, and D’Onofrio came in from InGen to solve the Indominus Rex problem, but they had no prior connection. The same plot points could have been there without certain key scenes, while keeping all the awesome action scenes.
Secondly, the effects. Overall, they were good. We saw it in 3D here in Marshall, where the screen isn’t exactly IMAX, so perhaps I’m clouded by the less-than-stellar visual fidelity. In short, many of these dinosaurs were obviously computer generated, whereas I’m still fooled by some of them in the original movie from 20 years ago. Most of that comes from the fact that Spielberg used a mix of animatronics and computer animation to make a seamless experience, where each dinosaur felt huge and weighed down, adding to the realism. CG has a problem when you integrate it with the “real world,” where the creatures seem to “float” unnaturally and gravity doesn’t actually affect them because they aren’t a real thing. Animatronic animals from the original were actually quite heavy, and that showed when you watched the film – and the CG dinosaurs they used in certain shots were designed to match those animatronics in their slow, lumbering movements. That wasn’t a problem in this movie, as nearly all of the dinosaurs were CG animated. So while many of them shots looked really good in Jurassic World, there were others that pulled me out of the experience because I knew I was watching dinosaurs that weren’t really there, unlike the way I feel when I watch Jurassic Park.
Hopefully that just made sense…
Regardless, it was a great movie. Brooke enjoyed Jurassic World quite a bit, but for my money, I prefer Jurassic Park so far as this franchise is concerned. If anything, Jurassic World was spectacular fan service in the callbacks it made to the original, and certain aspects of the original they brought back to this movie to remind you of the magic you felt in 1993. At least on that level, it completely succeeds.
It’s about time I updated everyone on how the garden’s going. Again, we bought this place with the intention of taking advantage of the extra lot next door to the house with growing some fruits and vegetables, so we’ve been busy trying to get that going.
I say “trying” because rain has been something of an issue. It seems like Marshall has been getting the brunt of the weather these past few weeks, with at least 10 inches falling since the last few weeks of May. It has slowed down this week, though, giving us a chance to get some work done and let the sun come out to do its thing.
In the picture above, you can see the green beans pretty plainly in the middle of the garden. Soup beans are planted in the bottom-left, and broccoli is slowly making headway in the upper-left. The far-right has peas that are ready for picking, so we’ve been working on those a bit recently. Our neighbors have been picking theirs for at least a week now, but they planted a bit earlier than we did. The carrots have been in the ground about as long as the peas, though they still seem a bit on the small side.
Brooke also planted a row of corn where the radishes used to be. I say “used to” because I pulled them up a few weeks ago. Of all the things we planted, they were the only ones to really adhere to their prescribed schedule. They grew pretty well, incidentally, as we got quite a few big ones!
Yes, that’s a radish.
That row of radishes turned out pretty well, so I suspect we’ll move forward with them again next year, even though I’m about the only one in the house that likes them (Brooke will eat them on salads…Calvin just spits them out…).
In the background of the picture far above, you’ll also see an A-frame of sorts, where Brooke planted some sweet potatoes. We haven’t grown any since we were up in Iowa, when Meg would eat them constantly. We’ll see if we’re as successful this time around – at least we can make fries out of them…
Tomatoes and berry bushes…
The other garden plot still needs some work, obviously. Lots of weeds growing in the front portion (where we still plan on putting some green pepper plants), but we finally got the tomatoes in a few weeks ago. Brooke started most of them as seeds on our back porch using a heating pad she picked up from Menard’s, but I supplemented with some plants I stole from students at school (they left for summer…oh well…). A few of those plants disappeared, likely due to rabbits or squirrels, so we’re having to keep them protected with milk jugs until they get big enough.
You’ll also notice the trellises we set up between rows of tomatoes. We’ve tried a few different methods in the past and have never been all that happy with any of them. Before we moved last year, we tried making A-frames using PVC pipes. That generally worked, but a). the middle of the A-frame got zero sun, so no tomatoes grew, and b). we moved before we actually got to harvest anything…grrrr… This time, we spaced things out a bit more and made two trellises, so we’ll see how they hold up.
In the background, you’ll also see a white frame where blackberries and raspberries have been planted. I suspect we’ve got critters munching on them as well, but we weren’t expecting to get much out of those plants this year, anyway. At least their root systems will get established this summer.
Lastly, in the top picture, you’ll notice we’re slowly surrounding the garden(s) with concrete blocks. We’ve been making them using disposable aluminum cooking trays with leftover Quickrete from our other long-term project:
The concrete path we’re making to the side of the house.
We debated how to handle this, exactly, and went back and forth between stone pavers, a mulch path, and everything in between. The problem with that spot is that grass doesn’t really grow there, tree roots are all over the place, and it gets really muddy after it rains at all. So, we needed some kind of pathway to get from our backyard down to the side area where the garden is.
Brooke eventually found a concrete form that lets you make individual stones from Quickrete, so we’ve been slowly grabbing (heavy) bags and making stones when we get a chance (or when the sun comes out…which, again, has been an issue…). It’s coming along alright, though the pathway isn’t exactly “uniform” in how each stone looks. Once we’re done, we’ll spread some sand around it and try to fill in some of the gaps to make it look like they’ve been there awhile, or so they’re more integrated into the dirt.
I think that’s plenty for now! I’m just hoping those tomatoes get going soon…getting hungry…
We’ve done our best to ensure that Meg and Calvin don’t get pigeon-holed into gender-specific stereotypes. That is to say, “princesses” were largely avoided for the first few years of Meg’s life (can’t avoid them now). We avoided pink clothes and toys for Meg early on (again…hard to avoid…). There were some toys that Meg fell into, like “Julia” (her doll that she was inseparable from for a few years), that weren’t exactly “gender neutral,” but we also made sure Calvin had a doll to play with (which he largely hasn’t). The idea was to allow them to choose the toys they want to play with without filling their rooms with princesses and superheroes, respectively.
Weirdly, though, Calvin likes cars. Always has.
Our house is near a relatively busy road, so shortly after he started walking, he made his way near that street. One of his first words was “cars,” followed shortly thereafter by “trucks.” Many afternoons, waiting for Mama to get home, Calvin and I sat on the corner waiting for her to drive up, listening for cars about to come up over the hill.
Since then, he’s liked playing with toy cars (including two small ones he fell asleep with tonight), he likes watching rally car racing on YouTube, and he’ll even watch me play Gran Turismo 6 with a PS3 controller in his hand.
It’s just one of those things we think about. With Meg, she’s started gravitating in the direction of princesses slowly over time as she’s met new friends, so now she has an interest (recently because of Sofia the First). But Calvin’s one year old, so he doesn’t exactly have meaningful conversation about whether an STI is better than an Evo.
So is it inherent that boys must like cars? Maybe. I guess there are just some things “gender neutral” won’t work for.
I used to do a decent amount of biking, in another life. Growing up, we’d make relatively frequent treks to the Katy Trail in Rocheport, MO. I also had a paper route, and for the most part, made my deliveries on my bike. Once I went to college, after I moved off-campus my Junior year, I picked up a Trek 800 Sport to get around easier, and occasionally went mountain biking at Thousand Hills State Park near Kirksville, MO.
Since college, though, my biking has been pretty infrequent. Brooke and I went a few times after we got married, as we were close to a decent biking trail in Affton, MO. We also told ourselves that we’d bike the entire length of the Katy Trail back in 2006 (240 miles…and no, it totally didn’t happen…). But after moving to Soulard, we got out of the habit. Brooke actually rode her bike up in Iowa a few times with Meg, as there was a decent lake-side trail in Cedar Rapids to visit, but we still didn’t go biking as much as we’d used to.
Well, now that I’ve got more time in the summers, I figured it was time to get back in the habit. Meg got a bike for her birthday, so in an effort to get her a bit more interested so she’ll actually learn to ride said bicycle, I figured I should get mine back up to snuff. My poor Trek had been left outside for its first few years with me, so it wasn’t as well maintained as it probably should have been. I took it by a local bike shop and had them do some updating to it: new brakes, new brake lines, new road/trail tires, and a new grip shift system. It rides better than it has in a long time!
We live hear Sedalia, where the Katy Trail passes through, so I wanted to be able to take the kids down with me. As Meg can’t ride her bike with training wheels nearly fast enough, and Calvin is a toddler, I looked into trailers to attach to my bike. These things usually retail for around $500+ if you want a quality two-seat trailer, so I took to Craigslist to see what I could fine. After a few tries, I snagged one in south Kansas City for about $175, which I thought was pretty reasonable. It fits in the back of the Subaru, though I have to fold it down each time.
Once folded, it’s actually quite compact. In the image all the way at the top of the post, you can see how wide the thing actually gets. The seat belts are pretty secure and it has various windows and shades that can be optionally installed depending on what the weather looks like that day. Lastly, it also contains a rear compartment for picnic lunches, diapers, etc. It should hold about 100 lbs, so Meg and Calvin can both ride it this summer, and potentially next summer depending on how much they grow. Once Meg is actually riding her bike properly, then I can still keep Calvin in it until he’s ready to get on a two-wheeler himself.
I should note that I took the kids out for a spin in it when I brought it home this week. They made me go out in it again after dinner, so I think they’re pretty pleased with it. I think Calvin would have slept in it that night if I’d let him…
Speaking of the Subaru, the last piece of this puzzle involved getting the bikes from our house in Marshall to Sedalia. We’ve tried various bike racks over the years and have never been happy with them on our hatchbacks: they simply never feel secure enough when you’re driving 70 mph down the highway, and one of us always had to keep an eye out the back window to make sure we weren’t going to cause an accident.
Thus, we made sure that the Forester had a roof rack when we bought it so that we could put bike racks up top eventually. Actually, we want to put in a trailer hitch and then get a rear hitch bike rack, but that’s a $1000 (total) upgrade, so we opted against it for this summer. Instead, I picked up a few Rockymounts roof racks on sale at Amazon. They were pretty easy to install and, thankfully, are relatively easy to get a bike attached to. Brooke isn’t quite tall enough to get a bike onto the roof of the Forester, so it’s one of those things I’ll always have to do (at least, until we get a trailer system).
I’ll still be teaching in June four days a week, so I’ll probably take Calvin down with me on Fridays. If Brooke is available, perhaps I’ll take her bike along and steal her away from work for an hour or so to get some fresh air. Either way, I’m looking forward to getting back into biking, and hopefully getting the kids outside and away from the TV for a few hours each week. 🙂
We came back from our vacation and the garden was, shockingly, not destroyed. Definitely quite a few weeds in there that we need to take care of, but I bet it’d be worse if I hadn’t been putting grass clippings in open areas.
We picked some of the broccoli before we left and had some. Not bad! Kinda “gamey,” perhaps? Difficult to describe, but not quite what I would expect if I were picking up a head from the store. You can see another head in the picture above, but it’s flowering, so probably won’t taste all that good.
Now that the sun has finally returned to Missouri and the rain clouds have slowed down a bit, the tomatoes are starting to take off. There are three plants in the foreground (that we thought were peppers…), and all the plants on the trellises. The three remaining pepper plants are still pretty tiny, so I’m not getting my hopes up for them, unfortunately.
…and we even have some actual, legit, tomatoes on there! Totally green still, but they’re getting to a good size. Not very many yet, but we’re hopeful that the July heat (that, literally, started last weekend…as in, we hadn’t seen 90+ F temps until last week…which is crazy for July…) will start to move the tomatoes further.
