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June 28, 2005

Skirting the Ephel Duath

Like some fell, winged beast, Oklahoma swooped into our lives a couple weeks ago. It was a good trip, really. Except for the Egyptine swarms of insects. It's interesting when you have dozens of bite marks to dab with ointment, at least 1 out of 50 turns out to have a bullseye around it. Makes you wonder what whiskery parasite injected those tantalizing histamine shockwaves into your kids. Keep an eye out for the symptoms of Lyme disease, I guess.

The kids were great though. The 11 hour drive takes 15, which isn't bad, really.

Really.

Amanda's Mom lives on a large parcel of land known to some in her family as 'The Patch'. Here we can see Harrison making his way along a path in the fertile, cow-trimmed, lower plains region of The Patch.

Higher up in the arid plateau region, Harrison hooked up with his cousins, Mike and Luke, and a nice collection of sticks. Out of the frame to the left lies the dark and swampy canopy of Fangorn. Giselle and Harrison weren't allowed in there. (Lack of immunity to snakebite being part of the concern.)

The second day we were there, we took the kids to the Route 66 Museum, where we ran into an interesting tricycle from the olden days

I wanted to have Harrison sit on that thing, put a cowboy hat in his hand and have him swing it around while hollering yeeeeha. But I think the curator lady would have pulled a Derringer out of her desk and aired me out.

Toward the end of our little tour, Harrison had a snit and turned into an entertaining photo subject

Amanda's neice, Alana, drove us down to Quartz Mountain with her kids one day. We spent a few hours sloshing down a curvy old, dilapidated, cement water slide that was built into a hillside. It was arranged nicely so that the occasional child or adult that lofts over one of the curves would only drop a few feet onto the grassy moguls before rolling and flailing into to a fire-ant-seasoned heap at the bottom of the grade. We had an excellent time. No pictures. It's nice to not worry about a camera, so you can concentrate on pulling your five year old son up from the tumbling froth of bubbles, inner tubes and bodies when things go wrong at splashdown. My little trooper. We just squeezed the excess water out his nose like a mustard bottle and kept hoofing back up the hill for more.

It was great to see everyone, but we're glad to be back.

Here's why we keep the lawn in our front yard:

(Giselle and Harrison with the next door neighbor kid)

In other news, there's a triple planetary conjunction swirling around in the West after sundown the next week or two.

Left to Right: Saturn, Venus and Mercury. The star toward center is Pollux, from the constellation Gemini.

And in other, further unrelated news, my cough seems to be gone!

Yeeehaa--urgh gasp hack hork croop

Posted by Jeremy at June 28, 2005 7:12 PM