Last summer, we did a 16 day roadtrip that resulted in the discovery that left to it’s own devices in hot temperatures, the a/c unit that this camper came with will FREEZE. THE. F$CK. UP.

Currently, we’re on a 24 day long camping trip that includes stops in the desert. Just before this trip, we spent more than we intended getting a second a/c unit installed into the “prepped for a second a/c unit” slot in this camper. It turns out that if you have a camper that is “prepped for a second a/c unit,” a second a/c unit may be necessary. So anyway, before we left on this trip, we thought maybe we’d spent a bit much on the second a/c unit, but seriously, this a/c unit is the Little A/C Unit That Could. When the main a/c unit freezes up (WHICH IT DOES), we turn the main a/c off and let it thaw/drip dry and turn the little bedroom unit on, and man does it work. The main a/c is hooked in to a thermostat and central air distribution, but it doesn’t have the enthusiasm of the a/c with something to prove.

High five, Little A/C That Could.

In the time Before Kids, I used to garden. I found pulling the weeds sort of Zen. When I was a kid, my favorite book was The Secret Garden, and when I was burrowing through the weeds to find and learn the plants I wanted to keep in my first grown up yard, I felt like I was channeling Mary Lennox. I got on a kick where I decided that my yard should be edible, so I hacked out the Mugo Pines and the camellias that were trying to take over my front walk, and I replaced them with oregano and sage and rosemary and parsley and chives and lettuce and tea camellias and lavender and lemongrass.

Then I had kids and largely ignored it all for 10 years. I’m sort of delving back into it, but it’s not nearly as zen, because now gardening is punctuated by demands for more screen time, and for snacks, and to find lost toys… I’ve just weathered the latest wave of demands for my attention, and I’m just sitting here on the front walk of my house, looking at the bushy, overgrown mounds of herbs and trying to figure out if it’s a Situation that needs Dealimg with or if it’s in fact what I always hoped it would be when I see this little shape moving through. It’s a tiny little hummingbird flitting amongst the sage flowers (the sage mounds are a particularly vexing problem), and I feel like it’s exactly what it should be, messy, but good.

So we were driving down the 101 towards Los Angeles, and I noticed that it ran through Paso Robles.  I looked up from the phone I was using to plan our entire 7000 mile trip on the fly. “Why don’t we book an extra night at the Kampground there and check out the wineries?”  To say a plan was hatched is perhaps a bit ambitious.  The only things we knew about Paso Robles wines were that frequently the words “it’s a red from Paso Robles” were associated with good experiences and that Justin Winery was located there.  We looked up Justin on the GPS and headed there with a plan to wing it from there.  When we got there, what we found were not just excellent Justin wines, but warm and welcoming people who, when we asked them what else we should taste in the area, gave us some really excellent recommendations for wineries that we wouldn’t have heard of in Seattle.  And if you ever find yourself in Paso Robles, I solidly recommend the strategy of starting at Justin and working your way back in from there.  We were utterly charmed by the experience.  That was two years ago.

Last month required another trip to Los Angeles, this time for a memorial.  One of my cousins suggested that we make a trip of it by starting in Napa and going south from there.  She described her experience in Napa in the 70s, and it sounded like a lot of what we’d found charming about Paso Robles.  A plan was hatched, and we made our way to Napa.  Napa is perfect and beautiful in the same way Disneyland is.  The wineries are all textbook illustrations of beautiful wineries, and the vineyards roll right up to the roadways, providing a continuous display of beautiful scenery wherever you go.  Driving around is a feast for the eyes.  Thus charmed, we rolled up to our first winery, Stag’s Leap.  Oh the wines were incredible, and the tasting experience involved our personal wine educator plus a lovely view.  We asked where else we should taste, anticipating some hidden gems.  They came back with Caymus and Duckhorn.  Solid choices, but hardly a local find.  We made our own path, which led to Hall, which was a bit of a disappointment, and Cliff Lede, which had served its last tasting about 10 minutes before we got there (you’ll want to be there before 3:30, for what it’s worth).  The next morning, we decided to check out of our hotel early and head for Paso Robles.

I’ve since been told by a friend who went to Berkeley that if you want to have that casual Paso Robles sort of insider experience in that area, you really want to go to Sonoma.  We definitely want to go back to Napa, but we’ll have different expectations next time.  For one thing, we won’t have the kids with us.  For another, we won’t depend on the wineries there to tell us where we should go, we’ll have our own plan.  And that plan will probably be in the form of a day trip to Napa from Sonoma.

This year I went to Fred Meyer completely intending to just get some egg dye and call it good for an evening of ovoid dunking.  When I got there, however, I was presented with a startling array of options.  The one that piqued my interest was the tie dye kit, and so the purchase was made.  I got it home and settled in for an afternoon of egg coloring with the iBoo.  It went okay.  The gist of it is that you take each of your egg dye tablets and combine them with 3 tablespoons of white vinegar instead of some combination of vinegar and water, and then you drool this concentrated dye stuff onto your eggs.

If you follow the instructions on the box, it goes like this:

1. Get out their little egg press thingy
2. Poke holes in said egg press
3. Line the egg press with damp cloth
4. Place the egg gently upon the dampened cloth and close the egg press
5. Mutter curses under your breath as you try to get the stupid thing to stay closed.
6. Use a tiny pipette to suck up concentrated dye and inject it through the little holes you poked in the egg press.
7. Let the egg sit for 5 minutes and then free your newly decorated egg from the contraption.

The results were pretty nice, but I had 18 eggs to get through, and even assuming that the pursing and pipetting steps took zero time, we were looking at about an hour and a half of egg dyeing.

Clearly a different approach was in order.  I went up and raided my husband’s drawers for an unloved t-shirt and devised a different approach.  It went something like this:

1. Cut the T-shirt into approximately 7″ squares
2. Wrap each egg into its own little t-shirt square, securing the ends with a rubber band.
3. Drop the little egg comets into a pot of cool water.
4. Line the egg crate with plastic wrap.  I found that two strips of plastic wrap, each covering a swath of 6 eggs worked better than one long strip of plastic wrap. (this step is not necessary for Styrofoam egg crates)
5. Place the eggs comet tails down into the plastic lined egg crate.  I found that it worked best if you put an egg into the center of the plastic wrap and then work your way out from there
6. Drool concentrated egg dye onto your egg comets.  I mostly abandoned the pipette at this point and used a syringe I had for infant Tylenol. There was a little more potential for uncontrolled dye spurting, but it was much easier to suck up the dye in the first place, discard any unused dye, and clean the syringe before moving on to the next color.
7. Once we had all of the eggs hosed down with dye, we put the eggs into the fridge to wait for the Easter Bunny to unwrap them and reveal the artistic results

When the Easter Bunny unwrapped the eggs, she found the results to be not too shabby .  the one I’m pointing to is the one that I did in The Contraption.  It’s marginally better, but not enough better to warrant the extra time.  I think this is worth doing again.  I think that next time, though, I’ll try to get some muslin to cut into squares.  I think hat if I’d used fabric that absorbed less of the dye, the colors might have turned out a little more vibrant.  On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with this year’s results, though.  I think you could do this with any package of egg dye tablets, just use 3T of white vinegar rather than whatever the instructions actually call for.

Happy Easter, y’all!

Last weekend, I took my best girl to see the new Cinderella flick.  She had wanted to go to the Chihuly thing last weekend, but I put my foot down when it started dumping rain.  Cinderella was my counteroffer.  I actually enjoyed it quite a bit.  There’s a bit where Cinderella and the Prince bump into each other before the ball and have a bit of a philosophical discussion, which is what interests them in each other.  I’m sure the attractive footwear doesn’t hurt anything, but it’s the philosophy that triggers the initial spark.

Cinderella has bugged me for quite some time now.  The iBoo is enchanted with the tale, but whenever I tell it to her, I say things like, “And they lived happily ever after in an improbable relationship based entirely on footwear.”  We’ve also spent quite a bit of time discussing the difference between shallow relationships and meaningful ones, and how if she wanted to be friends with a kid just because he had a trampoline, that would be shallow, but if they were friends because he made her laugh and she had fun spending time with him, that would be more meaningful.  I’m generally not sure how much of any of this soaks in, but then there’s this part in the movie where the stepmother and stepsisters mess up her dress and she goes to cry in the garden, and the iBoo looks at me with this incredulous look on her face and she whispers, “It doesn’t look that bad, she could still just sew it.”  Possibly she was listening at least a little bit.

The iBoo’s class had a field trip to the Chihuly Garden and Glass last week.  She’d been looking forward to it, sucking up every bit of information she could on Dale Chihuly and the art they were going to see there.  *I’d* been looking forward to it, and I’d signed up as a chaperone for the field trip as soon as the option was available.  The day before the field trip, though, I got The Call:  the iBoo was barfing at school.  I told her that if she was too sick for the field trip, I’d take her at another time.  That time was yesterday.

I picked her up from school, secured advance tickets, and we made our way over there.  Slowly.  As we sat there on I-90, the DJ on the radio said something about banging someone, with apologies to anyone who had kids in the car.  “Eww, disgusting,” I heard from the backseat.  I mentally braced myself to finally finish the discussion that started with the kindergarten iBoo saying, “I remember you telling me that babies are made by a mommy and a daddy, and that they start out very small, and that they grow in a mommy’s tummy, but I don’t remember you telling me how the baby *gets* into the mommy’s tummy.”  I know she REMEMBERS things like that.

With all this running through my head, what came out (very smoothly) was, “Oh, what?”

“I just saw a man with his shirt off!”

This discussion had just gone in a direction I had not expected.  I rallied with, “Oh, really?”

“Yeah!  Girls can’t do that, right?”

Okay, this had just become an opportunity for a more feminist type discussion.  “That’s right.  It’s not really fair, is it?”

“No!” she agreed, “because men are so much more disgusting than women, right?  They’re all sweaty and hairy, and they have those floppy bellies.  A lady would never do that, right?”

“No, a lady wouldn’t,” I allowed, prepared to talk about etiquette or something.

“Because ladies put their floppy parts in that thing that you strap behind your back each morning, right?”

At this point, I gave up.  “You’re right,” I said, “and it’s called a bra.”

The iBoo, my battered feminine mystique, and I continued on to the museum in relative quietude.  The museum was, incidentally, amazing.  It seems that in our absence, one of the cats had taken it upon himself to bathe the IchiRow, a move that was soundly condemned by said toddler, who declared a new house rule, “No cat eating Rowan’s arm!”  I think the cat’s intentions were significantly less nefarious than that, but I can’t say I don’t think it’s a good rule.

Sometimes the kids make me crazy, but there’s so much good crazy I’d miss out on if they weren’t around.

We’re wine drinkers.  Some would argue we drink more wine than is strictly necessary, but I like to think of us as having a Continental perspective on the whole thing rather than an American one.  It may be delusion, but it’s a happy one, and one that put me in a unique position to help a friend of mine out when she said, “Everyone please save your wine corks for this massive project I want to do.”  I delivered unto her a substantial array of corks and then never got out of the habit of saving them.  Forever.  As it turns out, corks really build up after a while.

I decided it was time to bust out the accumulated corks of my life and “do something with them.”  I found all of the little caches of cork I had around the house and weighed the result.  “Five pounds of cork!” I declared to my friends.  “That,” said one friend in particular, “would be an awesome name for a blog about juggling a high tech career, kids, family, house, just everything.”  Because, I mean, once you finish coping with all of that, what are you left with?  Of course!

I don’t know where this is going.  At the very least, I hope it’ll be a place for me to write where I have a little more ownership of my words than I feel on Facebook.  With a little bit of luck, people will find something that they need, even if that’s just a bit of a laugh.

And incidentally, if you have any ideas on wine cork related crafts, I’m all ears.  I have about 4.5 pounds of it at my disposal.