Time flies...

We have gotten settled here in Canby, and really enjoy the town. There is a park down the street, and the library is a little further. There is even a grocery store within walking distance. Dustin enjoys the shorter commute. It only takes about 6 minutes for him to get to work.

Abby is now 20 months old and speaking in full sentences. Sometimes it almost seems as if you can carry on a real conversation with her. I can't believe our baby is now a toddler. The only quiet time around here is when she sleeps. We recently moved her into a toddler bed and she loves it; she has actually started napping again! She really enjoys playing outside in the dirt. Ladybugs and worms fascinate her, and one day I caught her stretching a worm like a rubber band. She asked about eating it, but luckily she didn't try. Abby also enjoys helping in the garden with the planting and weeding. However, she is going through a phase where she loves to sit on everything, so we have quite a few smashed flowers.

Our garden area is much larger this year. We also have some berries, grapes, and fruit trees. At the rate we're going, we may finish the first round of weeding by the end of summer!

We went to the tulip festival in Woodburn a few weeks ago. If you've never gone, I recommend it. Especially if you have kids. There is a huge area for kids to play, with slides and inflatable bouncing things. There is also a cow train you can ride on to see the tulips. It was an incredibly bumpy ride, but lots of fun. Abby had a great time. She went down the big slide several times, climbing up the ladder by herself. By the time we left, she was so exhausted that she dozed on Dustin's shoulders on the way to the car.

We are starting to think about camping. Abby is big enough that we won't be able to sleep in the bus like we did last year, so we'll have to try a tent. It should be an interesting experience. If we get enough practice, we should have it down by the time our church camp-out happens in August!

Up Before Light for Tofu and Bananas

This morning at 5:30 AM our alarm went off. This is quite unusual, even on a weekday. It is even more unusual that I will roll over and let it go until Sarah turns it off. She hit snooze... twice. The advantage to living in a house over an apartment is that I can turn a CD all the way to top volume to help get us rolling, and the neighbors don't complain, even if the sun isn't up yet.

By 6:20 we were out the door. After a few bites of breakfast, a lot of mad scrambling, and cramming three layers of clothing onto Abigail, we pinned racing numbers on Sarah and Abigail and headed downtown to participate in the "Race for the Cure" fundraiser against breast cancer. After a bumpy ride on a schoolbus shuttle, we found ourselves in Waterfront park, next to the river; the first wave of what would be 46,000 runners and probably another 20,000 supporters. Booths were set up along the length of the park which housed corporate sponsors including radio stations, Yoplait yogurt, a jeweler, and an Irish dairy! The sponsors were bent on being sure no one went hungry or without a hat or keychain! As the pink-clad crowds thickened, we battled our way through to stand in lines for handbags, yogurt, bananas, pink underwear (from Macy's), energy bars, hats, bottles of water, cubes of tofu, boxes of soy milk, and cubes of (delicious!) cheese! We were handed stickers, keychains, and coupons for innumerable items. Had we wanted, we could have even had a free massage or manicure!

I should mention the pink. Probably one in every two-hundred people there was male. The place was literally swimming in estrogen! Pink is the official color of support for the fight against breast cancer, and almost everyone was wearing some pink, not leaving out the grandmas with hot-pink dyed hair. If you didn't come wearing pink, you could get pink stickers with which to decorate your face or pink foam bunny-ears from the Energizer bunny.

At 7:30 the first wave of runners, the 5k race, departed. The news helicopter hovering overhead filmed the sea of pink surging through the barricaded streets of downtown Portland. At 8:00 we rushed to the starting area, quickly loaded Abigail into her "backpack," and Sarah and Abigail started on their 1-mile walk. I had the heavier burden of cameras and the amazing pile of pink objects and food we had acquired.

It didn't take long for them to finish, although with the crowds, it was more of a "stroll for the Cure" than a race. Fortunately we had agreed where to meet afterwards, although since I was waiting there, I wasn't able to be at the finish line. After another half-hour waiting in line for a hat, during which another group of (running) runners departed, we elbowed our way through the still-thickening crowd back to our schoolbus. Sarah and Abigail accomplished something neither of them had ever done before, and we still made it to church (a little late).

The Flat Mailbox Morning

Sun 8/26/07

I got up only slightly later than my normal time and came downstrairs to take a shower, let the cat out, and start breakfast. It was just after eight and I was sitting down to check my e-mail when I heard a sound which can only be made in one way, a crunching bang, from the direction of our driveway. I've never heard an accident before, but I knew immediately what it was, and jumped from my chair to look out the window. A cloud of dust was beginning to settle, and I could see the front of a green Ford Explorer where formerly the corner of our driveway, a chainlink fence, and a wall of twenty-foot tall arborvitae had stood.

I leapt up the stairs two at a time and jumped from my bathrobe into clothing, telling Sarah to dial the police and call our landlord as well. By the time I had run out to the wreck another car had stopped. The cabin of the vehicle was only slightly damaged, although the driver's window was completely gone. The driver, a middle aged man, was conscious, and appeared unhurt but for a few scratches from glass. He was shaking, though, and gripping the steering wheel and shifter spasmodically while repeating that he was, "just going to work." I asked him if he was hurt, or had hit his head, and finally discovered that he had diabetes. In shocking circumstances it can take several minutes to sort things out, but he got out a candy bar to eat, raising his blood sugar level, just about when the police arrived, and was feeling back to normal soon. In the meantime a tow-truck company pickup had stopped, and soon a firetruck and ambulance arrived.

His name was Owen, and he'd been westbound on his way to work when he must have temporarily blacked out, waking up to see an oncoming car. He swerved and somehow overcorrected into the opposite ditch, where he sideswiped a power pole, which totalled the front left end of his truck, and started it spinning counterclockwise until it completed a quarter turn and came to rest, nose in, about where our mailbox used to be. The Sunday newspaper was spread for twenty feet in either direction. Fortunately, nothing was damaged which money can not fix. Only a few scratches on Owen, and our power was out for half and hour until the power company sent a truck to reset the cutout and repair the minor damage to the pole. I am thankful that he woke up in time to avoid a head-on collision, that he slid passenger-side first, and that I hadn't decided to go out and pick up the paper just then. I'm also just a little thankful he wasn't fifty feet further down the street, where our garden is... The corn is just getting ripe...

As of today: our flattened mailbox has now been replaced with a new one, and the chainlink fence is up again, but we can now see when our mailman comes through a gap in the arborvitae...

Abby's First Camping Trip

For weeks, through the hot and into the comfortable weather, I was really looking forward to our camping trip. It was to be the first one since before Abby arrived. We spent all week getting ready. I spent a lot of time on details on our 1977 Volkswagen bus like hanging the funky green curtains as Sarah finished them, installing another seat belt, and lubricating the squeaky windshield wiper mechanism.

Friday night we wore ourselves out packing the bus and cleaning up the house... and we still had a few things to do Saturday morning before we rolled out of our driveway around nine. The drive to the coast went very well. We headed north on I-5 to Longview, Washington, watching the cars whiz by at seventy while we cruised at a leisurely fifty-five. Although the bus would probably go seventy, it certainly isn't designed for it, and since we were on a leisure trip, I wallowed in the idea of being able to drive slowly, enjoy the scenery, and avoid the stress and heart-attack that the caffeine-slurping cell-phone junkie driving 85 raced past us to reach. At Longview we re-crossed the Columbia river and then floored the throttle to maintain that 55mph over the sometimes steep road to Astoria. The bridge from Astoria into Washington is narrow and looks easily tall enough for an aircraft carrier to drive under (especially when you're driving a wobbly VW over the top). After the tall arch it cruises along for half a mile just over the water... probably only a few feet deep. It was at this point that I first noticed that the weather was not what I had hoped. The occasional light showers were becoming less occasional and more regular. We drove straight through to our campground about twenty miles up the peninsula in Long Beach. Fortunately Abby was able to fall asleep when we pulled the curtains closed in the back of the bus, and got in a nap just before we arrived.

After checking in and looking around, we took the proprietor's advice and headed several miles back to Ilwaco to check out the trinkets for sale at the modest Saturday Market and get a bite to eat at Ole' Bob's Seafood. We have a backpack carrier that we put Abby in so she can ride up high and we can get around. As we walked, we overheard nearly everyone we passed comment on it, and got quite a number of compliments! This continued throughout the day, much to our surprise, since we thought they were quite common. After a fresh crab melt and some clam chowder we headed back to Long Beach. We parked some distance from the beach, due to traffic, and walked down the main street. If ever there was a "tourist trap" Long Beach is it! There are amusement arcades, theme restaurants, and knickknack shops packed solidly on both sides of the street; and you can buy a shirt that says "I Love Long Beach, WA" without walking more than ten steps from any spot on the whole street.

We walked down to the beach where the annual "Sandsations" sand-sculpture contest was just ending and grabbed free hot-dogs before inspecting the sculptures. Unfortunately the tide was coming in quickly, and since we hadn't brought our wading-shoes we only got to see the backs of some of them. We wouldn't have gotten a whole lot wetter in the surf, however, as the rain was quite steady by then, and the wind was gusting strongly. We saw several castles, penguins, a mermaid, and the Deathstar, but the highlight was King Kong, who's shoulders and head jutted up six or seven feet above the beach.

It was nice to get away from the soggy crowds and head up the peninsula to the "Jumpin' Good Goat Dairy." On the way Abby grabbed a nap, and we were all ready to go again in time for the daily tour. Abby is intrigued with all animals, and grinned hugely when the little "kid" goats nibbled her fingers. I tried my hand at milking the goats, since Sarah was too shy, and found it quite easy... most of the work consists of installing and removing the vacuum tubes that do the actual milking! After that we visited the billy-goats and sampled the dairy specialty cheeses... quite good really! Several were a bit too "goaty" for us, but some had very little unusual flavor, and we bought one to bring home.

By the time we headed back to the campground it was very windy and pouring rain. The inside of the bus was fogging up, so I used several strands of wire and a multi-tool to temporarily wire the heater fan... something I wasn't expecting to need when we planned this camping trip in the ninety-five degree weather! Unfortunately something else in the system is bad, and I had to settle for wiping off the windshield with a rag. The windshield wipers on the bus then began to squeak. As we neared our campground I saw three bear cubs run across the road and remembered that they had mentioned giving left-over goat milk to a bear that hung around the goat farm! I wondered if Abby smelled anything like left-over goat milk.

It was time for Abby to go to bed soon after we arrived, so we "reconfigured" the bus by folding down the back seat into a bed, and set up Abigail's portable tent-bed (inside). In the midst of the pouring rain and trying to get the cooler and stove and everything else we needed where we could reach it for dinner without waking Abby, I tried to slam the sliding bus door (which never does close quite right), and it fell off it's front rollers! I grabbed it and tried to maneuver them back into place, at which point the back roller fell off it's track, the back lower corner of the door bent against the ground, and I had the whole thing in my hands! The rain continued to pour down, although I couldn't get much wetter than I already was, as I dug into the far corners of the bus for screwdriver and flashlight (never go ANYWHERE in a VW without tools!). I finally determined that the back roller would go on with a bit of finesse, but for the installation of the front rollers nothing would suffice but a swift kick. After that it was "as good as new," but we were a bit more cautious with the door the rest of the trip!

I was glad for a short lull in the rain (if not the wind) during which I cooked dinner. At least I have a lot of experience using that type of camp stove... every once in a while living on a boat and in a (previous) VW bus comes in handy. I dumped the large box of firewood which we had brought all into the fire pit at once, box and all, and lit such a conflagration that the whole campground (or at least our neighbor's tent) would have become a raging inferno had it not been for the soaking weather. We didn't last too long before crawling into the back of the bus and into our already-damp sleeping bags. By this time everything was moist. The humidity inside the bus was only slightly less than that under a running shower-head. I whispered a chapter of "Through the Looking Glass" and turned the flashlight off. It was far from the end of the night, however. The rain drummed down on the roof of the bus wildly like a hailstorm on a kettle-drum, and the wind rocked us in a way which called to mind boats and oceans. I don't know how many times I awoke. Several times I heard the small jingling sound made by a toy we had left with Abigail. She must have been awake a lot too, but not once did she cry or make any other noise but that little jingle. Some time around 2 AM the storm let up and we got a little sleep.

Everyone was ready to go in the morning. Sarah wanted to go straight home, but I knew we needed to have breakfast first, and so cooked up bacon and pancakes with tea while at the same time packing up the bus for the road once again. It was once again raining steadily. After wiping the condensation from the inside of the front windows with paper towels (so we could at least see a little) we headed for home. Halfway there the squeaking from the windshield wipers became so intense that Sarah was afraid it would wake up Abby from her nap. I had considered bringing WD-40 along... but had to settle for a squirt of cooking-spray, which fixed the problem immediately (at which point it quit raining). We got home around two in the afternoon to find sweltering heat and sunny skies.

Although this camping trip had probably some of the worst conditions I have ever encountered, we got home in relatively good spirits. Tired? Yes! Abby went straight to sleep. Glad to be home? Yes! It was so nice to be out of the soggy bus. Successful? YES! Abigail's first camping trip... and we didn't pack up and drive home before breakfast... ;-)