Tongue Tied By Beauty

“This isn’t the way I thought retirement would go,” Dean said.  As I bent down to throw another humongous chunk of cement over the bank, making sure I threw it exactly between those two trees and far enough that it lands on the bank, but not so far it lands or rolls into the water, I was thinking I wasn’t going to tell him that those two trees now had areas of missing bark and that somehow chunks of cement had gotten into the creek. But when I wasn’t thinking that, I was thinking I agreed with him and that we needed a break from the yard projects that seemed to have taken over our lives.  So we did.  Take a break.  We ignored our aching joints, stiff backs, swollen fingers and throbbing feet and took Emerson to the Tongue River Canyon for a day of hiking. 

The grass was tender and lush and the boys took advantage of it to do some grazing, which I know 

from Googling they eat for one of three reasons:  1. they need some fiber, 2. they just enjoy the taste of tender grass, or 3. (and most likely) they think it’s fun to gag and run straight for my area rug where, just as I get my arms around them and start dragging them toward the wood floor, they barf up a pile of bile and long-slimy grass blades. 

When they weren’t foraging they were sniffing, snorting, drooling and enjoying any water we came across.

It was a pleasant surprise to discover that all the cement hurling, compost digging, dirt turning, stone lifting, stooping, bending and twisting we’d been doing over the last weeks had made my body stronger which made it easier to crouch down (and even back up!) to take photos of all the different wildflowers and unique displays of nature.  

I’d really hoped my photos would entice the nature/flower-loving friends we’ve known since high school to come out

and experience the wonders of Wyoming (and see us!) but my photographic talent (or lack of) was

 hampered by the fact that I had no idea how sharp, or even what, was in the viewfinder of my

camera.  I could have easily remedied that problem, but hiking with reading glasses just seemed so, oh, I don’t know, old. 

Photo credit to Emerson -- oh, to have young eyes again ....

After I got home and realized most of the photos I’d taken were blurry, I decided next time I’d just suck it up and wear them.

Squirrel banquet hall

If I’d been wearing them I would have been able to see what I zoomed in to instead of needing to get up close and lean back to get the “perfect” shot.  That way I wouldn’t have ended up like a turtle on its back when my water-bottle-filled backpack pulled me over, which was much more humiliating than wearing reading glasses on a hiking trail. 

 Dean, who I’ve apparently ruined by making him “wait while I just take a quick photo,” of course couldn’t help me up until he’d made me “wait while I just take a quick photo.”

The culprit

We’d hiked the Tongue River Canyon Trail a few times in the last couple of years but had never made it as far as the meadow area.  If you ever want to push yourself a bit farther and a bit harder than you initially planned on, take a 11 ½ -year old hiking with you.  “I’m pretty sure we can go 

farther,” Emerson would say.  And farther we’d go.  This time we made it to the meadow.   And next time ...  next time we’ll hike to the meadow and beyond!

The hike out took half as long as the hike in.  Partly because more of it was downhill, but mostly because Emerson spent her time talking on her rock phone and the more she talked the faster she walked.  She obviously got much better reception than my cell phone.  Mine said “searching” the whole way out but Emerson made multiple calls to friends and family. 

“Hi Mom.  Nana and Papa thought we should have ice cream after we get back.  What do you think?  Yeah.  I think it’s a good idea too cuz it’s free ice cream.  What’s Dad doing?  Is he playing the drums in his underwear again?  Okay, I gotta go.  I need to call Nolan.  Bye.”

“Hi Nolan’s Mom….Mrs. McCready.  Is Nolan there?  Okay, thanks.  Oh, hi Nolan.  I’m just hiking with my Nana and Papa.  Oh, wait, sorry.  Hold on.  ‘What Papa?  Okay.  I’m just talking to Nolan.’  Nolan?  Sorry.  My papa was just asking me a question.  Oh, we're just hiking and then we’re going to get ice cream when we get back.”

She talked ….

And talked …

And talked. 

Her phone lost its charge just as we reached the car.  Or imagine it did because it was very quiet in the backseat on the ride home.  The dogs were sacked out in the back dreaming of the next time they’d get to graze on grass, Emerson was reading the last chapter of a book and maybe trying to decide which sprinkles she’d be putting on her ice cream.  I don’t know for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dean was trying to figure out how he could talk me out of the next project I suggest.   And I was wondering if, once we got home, I’d have time to suck down a couple of Ibuprophen before I had to run for the dog barf cleaning solution.

◦

Tongue Tied By Beauty

Poopastrophe

It’s a given that most of us never get around to starting or finishing projects around the house until we find out we’re moving and need to sell our house.  And then once those projects are done we wonder why we hadn’t finished them a long time ago so WE could be the ones to enjoy them, not the people who buy our house.  Now that Leslie and Ryan have found themselves a part of that procrastinating group we all belong to, we have been spending a lot of our time the last couple of weeks helping them paint, tile, pack, clean and finish all those other little projects they knew they had years and years to complete because they were never going to move.

 

And, since we are also planning to move in a couple of years, when we haven’t been helping out at their house, we have been staining the woodwork we hadn’t managed to get around to for four and a half years ...

... because we were never going to move either. 

We’ve all been in pretty high gear for days but recently all of our engines have begun to misfire.  Our gears have been grinding and sometimes we can barely get from first gear to second.  It became obvious we needed to idle a bit.  So today Leslie and Ryan left to spend a night in Denver and enjoy a concert they’d gotten tickets for way before they knew their life would be crazy at this moment in time.  We are keeping the kids while they're gone because Ryan’s parents were busy and we couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a reason to get out of it.  Juuuuust kidding.  If it wasn’t for those kids I wouldn’t be entertaining you with this blog post.  I’d be sitting out on the deck … in my glider, drinking a gin and tonic … listening to the birds sing … waiting for Dean to feed me dinner.   Instead I’m at the computer, drinking a gin and tonic …waiting for three kids to fall asleep ... so I can too.

So……the kids arrived at 9:40 a.m. this morning all geared up in hiking boots, hats, jeans, long sleeves and carrying their special nature bags.  Off we went to the grocery store to buy our nutritious Lunchables and Crackerjacks.  As everyone was choosing between slimy fake turkey, oily cheese and crackers, or slimy fake beef, oily cheese and crackers or slimy fake ham, oily cheese and crackers, I realized  that I had forgotten to bring any washcloths so I went searching for some kind of hand wipes.  But since I never buy hand wipes, and we were in a store I don't normally shop in, I couldn’t find them.  I could have asked somebody but I just didn't feel like it so I decided we’d be fine just wiping our hands on our jeans.  We were going hiking and rock hunting after all.  We weren’t going to an afternoon tea at the Governor’s Mansion.  I had no idea what serious ramifications that seemingly innocent decision would wreak upon me a few short hours later.

Loaded with two small coolers filled with our nutritious lunches, two backpacks filled with extra jackets, water, sunscreen, camera, and water bottles, and three special nature bags, we headed out of town to our destination.  All went well.  We scrambled over rocks, 

discovered amazing fossils, 

helped speed up the natural process,


























 and had an awesome lunch of slimy meat, oily cheese and Crackerjacks. 

Near the end of our adventure Myra got a panicked look in her eyes and said she had “to poop.”  I hadn’t factored pooping into my equation when I chose not to pursue searching out the wipes.  All I had was half a kleenex in my pocket.  Once Myra made sure it wasn’t “full of boogers” she accepted it.  I found her a place near a bush which was nice and flat, had no cactus in sight and left her.  “Be sure to bring the Kleenex back,” I said.  “We can’t leave it out here.”

When I got back to where Pierce was waiting he had the same panicked look in his eyes and I caught a whiff in the air that had definitely not come from the few wildflowers we’d seen blooming.   I took Pierce’s hand and we headed to another “bathroom.”  Myra handed off the half a kleenex to me as she headed back the other way.   As Pierce and I walked I was trying to remember how I’d done this with my own girls years and years ago.  Did I just brace them as they squatted or did I make a triangle of my arms with their little butts pointing through the opening?   I found another nice flat spot, cactus free, and I pulled down Pierce’s jeans and underwear, still not quite sure of my role in this pooping matter.  Then I looked down and realized the whiff had been much more than just a spurt of gas.  Think underwear filled with gooey wallpaper paste.  Only brown. That tiny square of already-used kleenex was not going to cut it.

Squatting was definitely not an option now.  I quickly made a triangle of my arms and lifted him up hoping to contain the thick “paste” globbed onto his cheeks.  I knew immediately that I needed reinforcements.  As I held him up, jeans and overflowing underwear bunched up around his ankles, brown butt pointing through the opening in my triangle arms, I yelled “I need help!  I need help!  I need help!”  Emerson came running.  “I need a plastic bag or a coat or a shirt or, or, or, anything!”  She opened the two backpacks and I saw coats and shirts flying.  One backpack held plastic bags but they were filled with the remnants of our oily cheese and slimy meat lunches.  I wasn’t really desperate enough (yet) to use a bright yellow shirt as toilet paper so I said, “tell Papa I need help!”  She yelled.  “Papa!  Nada needs help!  She needs help!”  In the meantime I looked down at the ground and discovered Pierce had been hard at work and on the ground was, well, more “wallpaper paste.”  As he was calmly propped in my triangle arms, tiny brown butt hovering over the ground, his pants leg dangling dangerously close to everything he’d eaten in the last 12 hours, I continued to yell for help, Emerson continued to yell for help, and Dean hollered back, “Nada can take care of it.”  (Later he told me I “didn’t sound desperate”)

I couldn’t let Pierce stand up because the “paste” would plop down his legs onto his pants.  I needed to get those pants and the overloaded underwear off but I couldn't get them off without taking off his hiking boots first and I couldn’t take off his hiking boots while he was nestled in my triangle arms.   Pierce was completely at ease but my arms were becoming tired and Dean was 50 yards away nonchalantly gathering the coolers and water bottles we’d left when we went exploring after lunch.  Finally Emerson convinced him my situation was becoming desperate and he arrived with two nearly full water bottles.   Dean carefully got Pierce’s boots, socks, jeans and underwear off, and then I tipped Pierce’s butt up as Dean began pouring water and I wiped the brown sticky “paste” from his little butt with my hand.   Yes.  My hand.  Because a few short hours earlier I hadn’t thought we would need wipes. 

So there we were; Pierce was in my triangle arms, tipped up so his little skinny butt was nearly facing the sky, Dean was pouring water on him, I was smearing the “paste” around and hopefully off of him, while girls and Pierce are all laughing.  At least we were in the middle of nowhere.  Two quarts of water later he was clean (enough) and we decided it was time to call it a day.  Other than Myra running into some cactus (which required some miniscule needle extractions), a tree branch (which resulted in a few tears), and a rock, (a few more tears), the walk back to the car was uneventful.  We stopped for ice cream on our way home and nobody even wrinkled their noses when we walked in to the shop. 

It was a day of learning.  The kids learned about rocks and fossils

 and what “going commando” means.   

 I learned never to go anywhere without hand wipes.

◦

Poopastrophe

Grub On A Wire

It’s funny how things sometimes just drop in your lap.  I’d been trying to figure out how to write about our recent trip to see friends in Yuma, Arizona without being responsible for bruised foreheads or electrical shock due to heads and drool meeting keyboards and then yesterday I saw this. You may wonder how words on a watch list have anything at all to do with a mid-winter break from snow and cold.  What would a watch list have to do with drinking pina coladas, beer and wine on a patio with friends?  How would a watch list be remotely related to the freeing of our piggies from wool socks?  And how could baking out the rest of the virus I’d been sick with be connected in any way to a watch list?  Here’s the thing.  If you’re drinking pina coladas and wine and beer, soaking up the heat, watching that one cloud in the sky, you need to get some exercise so you can drink more pina coladas and wine and beer.

So we did a lot of hiking.













 

And every day as we drove out of town to go hiking we saw a white maggot-shaped object floating high in the sky.  It was as spooky as a word watch list.

We didn’t know what it was but it was always there.  Every day.  It sometimes faced a different direction but it never moved.  We couldn’t figure out why it didn’t float away until one day we noticed it was tethered to a long string.  Every day when we drove to a new place to explore we tried to figure out what it was doing up there. 


We joked that it was spying on us and even though I didn’t truly believe that, it made me uneasy to see it up there.  But not quite as uneasy as a word watch list.

It’s not like we didn’t have astounding intuitive abilities and superb deductive reasoning when it came to other mysteries.  We’d already determined exactly why there was a wide “street” out in the petroglyph area we’d gone to explore.

It was obviously a boulevard for a wedding processional.   

Back “in the day” the king and his nubile bride-to-be would march up the boulevard, crawl regally across the rocks until they reached the top of the sacred monument where the king would 

scoop a handful of “nectar” (made from mashed creosote bushes with a drop of snake urine) from the cups carved into the stone and offer it to his bride as the masses watched and cheered from below.  

Then they all gathered at the pavement for post-ceremony reception. Either that, or the monument was an altar and the cups were for collecting the blood of the sacrificial virgin who was offered to appease the gods.  Either way, it sounded plausible to all of u … me.

Besides the maggot there were a few other mysteries we couldn’t solve.  Like ―

How can a cactus grow out of a rock? 

Why would palm trees choose to grow here?!

If you were a killer bee, wouldn’t you choose  to make your hive somewhere closer to flowers?

What the heck are these?  Halloween alien bugs? 

Does Buford know this is not what Betty had in mind when he told her to pack up the kids because they were moving somewhere warm?

And finally ―

How many conglomerates will a conglomerate collector collect when a conglomerate collector collects conglomerates?

We did finally figure out what that maggot was through questions and Googling.  It IS spying.  And that’s spooky enough, but learning that tweets and facebook comments and all that social media stuff we all use so blithely is being monitored kind of sends a chill up my back.  Especially now that I look back and realize that I’ve used several of those words in this post. 

But I’m not going to worry about it.  Today it is too beautiful for worry.  As I write this I’m sitting by an open window, glancing up now and then to look at clear blue skies, bright sun, and … what's that … ?

◦

Grub On A Wire