cowboy up

we made it out to fort collins the other weekend to visit our friends owen & kim. since i was coming straight from work, kelley and the kids picked me up on the way out of town, and i brought a change of clothes. i neglected only to bring a spare set of shoes, which as it turns out, is the only article of uniform clothing you really don't want to be trudging around a horse ranch in.

not only did the kids get some more simulator time in a parked tractor, but kim (a horse trainer by profession) gave them a real life horse riding lesson. 

this was especially nice since a pair of city slickers like kelley and i had never considered exposing the kids to horse riding, but they seemed to really enjoy it. although when we congratulated penelope on having ridden a pony, she was staunchly insistent that she had not. in the course of trying to prevail on her, i realized that she was drawing her concept of ponies from a my little pony book which she has become fond of lately. i was able to understand some of the confusion considering her concept of a "pony ride" looked a little more like this...

in the loop

met up with dan & airks recently in chicago. dan was "attending" a medical conference which amounted to about ten minutes of face time at the conference center, and four nights in a downtown hotel on the government's dime. we did all the tourist stuff, including the downtown loop and a photo shoot at chicago's famous millennial bean. those familiar with the bean will be no less than dumbfounded at my photographic creativity- i am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person to come up with the idea of photographing one's self within the bean.

gino's east deep dish won out over chicago style hot dogs for dinner. with a couple of pounds of mozzarella a piece in us already, we went with cousin rob & sarah to a high end cupcake bakery in their lincoln park neighborhood. i had to wonder what a four dollar cupcake tasted like. dan pretty much summed it up- "for four dollars we could have gotten a couple dozen of these at von's". and that refers to quality and quantity. i've always felt that if it's not good, you should at least get a lot of it, but i suppose that means i was born into the socioeconomic class i truly belong in- at least we saw how the other half lives. now it's back to pez for me.

christmas carols

penelope shows off her aptitude for enunciation, verse blending, and lyrical improvisation...

the snow must go on

winter this year, it seems, has caught us with our snow pants down. we awoke the other day to the years first snowfall with our house and children un-winterized. we managed to round up a box of undersized snow clothes and stretch them across our all too eager to play kids before releasing them to the elements. we crammed as much snow play as we possibly could into the forty five minutes the snow actually stuck on the ground. after towing the sled around in front of the house, we scraped together a whole yard's full of snow and managed to get a watermelon sized snowman out of it.

ding, dong, the witch is dead!

our little murine basement dweller was first sighted by kelley some two months ago. according to her story, he looked right in her eyes with a defiant visage, and seemed to be laughing as he scurried away. soon after, we discovered he had gotten into some of our foodstuffs, which were promptly discarded, along with anything he might have walked past, looked at, or otherwise thought about in any way. as busy as i was with my new duties involving dozens of daily trips to the basement for anything kelley might need, i was frequently petitioned to quit my pilot job and assume full time extermination duties.

adding to my frustration was the fact that our tiny transient was particularly cunning, and artful in the ways of basement survival. i tried an array of fatal traps, all of which he was able to evade with baited reward. the panoply of humane traps he balked at altogether. i even constructed a crude booby trap similar to the one which successfully snared my missing turtle some twenty five years ago, but to no avail. kelley spent most of her free time stomping on the ground level flooring, as if to somehow badger the surreptitious cellar dweller into a change of residence.

as if conspiring to ruin my life, the rodent's relative waited until i was getting ready to leave for work to make an upstairs appearance. in our time crunch, we employed our neighbor shane to up our arsenal, while a consternated kelley even suggested the purchase of a starving cat to confine to the lower level. 

it was shane who serendipitously stumbled across the victor woodstream m-130 quick set snap trap- a device so hypersensitive, it snaps when it hears the word mouse. after the humiliating failure of an entire stockpile of lesser mouse traps, the rapacious m-130 did its job with unrelenting precision. after seeing the device tear through an entire rodent population, i can testify to the truthfulness of the old axiom- when an m-130 comes up empty, you know the mice are gone.

this is not the spot where i set the trap- the m-130 hunted the mouse down and rained down on him with fatal aggression before dragging his corpse out in a more public quarter as a final humiliation.

the m-130, marvel of modern mouse trapping technology displays its prey in the company of those that went before.

fair weather farewell

we bundled everyone up for a night walk last week to take advantage of the last of the year's outdoor weather. indeed, we woke up to a snow covered neighborhood just three days ago. for those keeping score, that makes five snowless months this year- we might as well move to northern manitoba.

tractor time

just a stone's throw off our path of travel in oklahoma provided us a visit with some family on kelley's side. the kids were delighted to get the full tour of uncle steve's distinguished tractor collection...

ozzie's

ozzie's is the diner at max westheimer air field where i learned to fly and put in my subsequent stint as an overworked flight instructor, and incidentally, the strip where eli logged his first fetal flight instruction with myself and his expectant mother in a cessna 152. the restaurant was well known among the insolvent students and undercompensated instructors for a very economical all you can eat breakfast, including bottomless bacon, eggs, oatmeal, pancakes, ham, biscuits & gravy, sausage, toast, cereal, and about anything else you might consider eating before noon. many were the weathered-in mornings i broke bacon until the higher functions of my brain shut down, only to regain concsiousness on the heavily soiled couch in the instructors' lounge where i presumed to have been deposited by my well intentioned, if slightly misdirected associates .


it was actually pretty tough to keep eli still long enough to eat anything, as the diner overlooks the preferred runway, as well as thetransient parking ramp. as he watched various aircraft ground and flight operations, he yelled out their respective types, loud enough for everyone in the resaurant to hear, which was charming, although his fascination was probably less so for whoever has to clean the windows.

eli is neither calling for world peace, nor paying tribute to the late richard m. nixon, but rather counting the number of engines on the diamond da-42 twin star parked on the ramp behind us.

posing in front of the beech king air that flew in for the oklahoma v. nebraska football game the next day. by saturday morning, the ramp was packed with about $500 million in equipment either owned or chartered by enthusiastic sooners.

our noble past

what trip to oklahoma would be complete without a visit to the sam noble museum of natural history to learn more about the sooner state's rich carboniferous past? as soon as the kids heard about the museum, (as i'm sure with anyone else) one word came to mind- pentaceratops. there was much speculation as to whether the museum would provide adequate homage to the magnificent cretaceous herbivore, and in this respect, the gallery did not disappoint.

among the museum's more prominent displays was none other than the largest dinosaur skull on record, belonging to a pentaceratops whose entire fossilized skeleton stood assembled at the entrance to the dinosaur exhibit. the massive dino-dome stood over ten feet tall, and served as an impressive reminder to all that dinosaurs were freakin' big. in addition to being the most educational activity of the trip, the museum outing was also the only three hour period in which we did not eat ribs.

eli poses with another cretaceous favorite, the cranially crested parasaurolophus.

penny holds a real piece of mesozoic history. once she picks up the fossil, there is about a 75% chance she will either break it, or injure someone with it.

all gussied up for the field trip.

digging for fossils. by eli's enthusiasm, i concluded that it must be a lot more fun to dig with a shovel, and throw the debris on the other kids in the sandbox.

spooklahoma!

well, old al gore had me pretty riled up by the end of his award winning enviro-mentary, but i gotta say, after a night of trick or treating in shorts and a t-shirt in oklahoma, i'm starting to lose a lot of steam on the climate change issue. the conditions that day were downright balmy, cooling off to a very agreeable 75 degrees come looting time. if global warming is turning the sooner state into the new san diego, that would certainly explain oklahoma motorists trying to accelerate the process with their petroleum avaricious 4x4s.

this year, we were accompanied by an astronaut, spider-man, a four year old fashionista, and a queen bee. lucia even dressed up as the power up mushroom from super mario brothers. 

let me just stop and say that the great thing about toddlers on halloween is that they have absolutely no concept of how much candy they have in their bag. you send them running frantically from house to house for hours on end, sweating inside their bulky costumes like jungle animals, driven by a galvanizing voracity for sugar, until their little bags are stuffed so full with a panoply of savory sweets that their puny arms are literally trembling under the weight of it all. after all their hard work, you give them one piece of candy, send them to bed, and they are no less than absolutely, unambiguously, and in all other respects categorically unassuming when they wake up the next morning to a couple of remaining tootsie rolls and a roll of smarties. i don't want to say this is an immoral holiday, but isn't that pretty much the same principle that gets us hand woven textiles from southeast asia for two bucks a piece?

the evening also marked an important milestone for myself, as well- the beginning of "weight gaining" season. it starts with half priced halloween clearance candy at the day after sales, carrying me into thanksgiving, christmas, and then continuing on through more or less continuously to the next halloween.

reviewing the day's transactions- if they could, they would bathe in the filthy stuff...

you have no idea...

...how close you were to not seeing any of this. as we were buckling the kids into the car in the airport parking lot at the cessation of our increasingly traditional halloween trip to oklahoma, all of our camera equipment was sitting underneath seat 17d on southwest flight 348 headed for  las vegas, burbank, and back through las vegas to providence, rhode island. being the expert travelers we are, the gear was in an unmarked bag with no tags or identification. upon realizing our negligence, we immediately did the most productive thing we could think of- argue about whose fault it was. with that matter properly addressed, i was then free to call every southwest station along the aircraft's proposed route. kelley proceeded to call all the stations again, and then make me call them a third time. after repeating the process hourly over the next two days, we finally recovered the cameras with all the photo and video documentation of our recent lives.

the trip to oklahoma consisted of way too much to chronicle in a single post, but most of it was centered around eating offensively exorbitant portions of succulent, deep fried, trans fat infused food. we stayed in norman with our good friends billy and becky, whose kids eva and jordi are both within about month in age of eli and pen- we are currently finalizing the details of the arranged marriages.

among our pre-halloween activities was a trip to a local overpriced pumpkin patch. for all i joke about my mothers excessively parsimonious parenting, i did exactly what she would have done- i balked at the admission price, bought the kids each a fifty cent mini-pumpkin, had some guy snap a photo of us all sitting on the hay bales out front, walked around the corner and dropped a quarter on vending machine chicken feed. i don't think the kids were any the wiser, but then, stunts like these will probably make me the butt of my kids' jokes for the next thirty years.

 

modeling with the pumpkins- five years ago, this would have been a much smaller picture with less fussing and nose-picking.

trying to pose with the chickens in the glaring sun- i think i was the only one with my eyes open, but there was a blazing white orb burned into my vision for the rest of the trip.

eli confidently hangs his arm around a much less enthusiastic eva. get used to it, son- that's pretty much how i remember years 4 through 25.

because i say "no" to daddy

penny and i had a lot of laughs over this game, but eventually we had to stop playing it because frankly, we found it was encouraging her to say "no" to daddy.

triceratops

triceratops has three long horns,

a beak like a parrot 

and a frill where his neck is.

triceratops has four big legs

and a tail in back.

the body parts and quantities get a little confused, but you get the idea.

celebration day

eli recently performed in his school's celebration day. the kids recited some nursery rhymes they had been practicing complete with interpretive actions. how do you follow an explosive opener like hey diddle diddle? how about penelope storming the stage in an impromptu display of sororal adoration? the actors were real pros, and played off the surprise cameo as though it were part of the act. the show must go on!