Travels with Tommy the Tent Trailer, Chapter One

I do understand that watching someone else's vacation slides is about as exciting as folding laundry, but  I hope someone out there finds this first chunk of our vacation slides enjoyable. Or at least think that my children singing Sons & Daughters is cute. If nothing else, please appreciate the 30 hours of my husband's life that went into them. I will post more with a bit more of narration in the future. 

You might be a nurse if.....

Okay, these lists are a little bit obnoxious, but the kids have nearly caused Ariel and I to run away from home today, and all of these things are soooo true about the nursing profession, and perhaps will give a little insight into my day job.

• You have the bladder capacity of five people


• You have your weekends off planned for a year in advance


• You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if the phrase, "wow, it is really quiet" is uttered
  
• You have ever restrained someone and it was not a sexual experience


• You get an almost irresistible urge to stand and wolf your food even in the nicest restaurants


• You are the only one at the dinner table NOT allowed to talk about your day at work.


• Your family members must have a fever of at least 105 or be missing a limb with active bleeding in order to receive your sympathy.


• You would like to meet the inventor of the call light in a dark alley one night.


• You find yourself checking out other customer's arm veins in grocery waiting lines. (Wow! I can get an 11g in that puppy!)


• You want to put your foot through the TV screen every time you see a nurse on a soap opera doing nothing but talking on the phone and flirting with doctors.


• You know the smells of different types of diarrhea


• You check the Caller I.D. on your days off to see if anyone from the hospital is trying to call and ask you to work.


• You notice that you are using more 4 letter words than you didbefore you started nursing.


• You avoid unhealthy looking shoppers in the mall for fear that theywill drop near you and you'll have to do CPR on your day off.

Procession of the Species

Saturday was Olympia's Annual Art walk and Procession of the Species. It is always a blast and makes me happy to live in Olympia. The parade is basically a bunch of people dressed up in homemade animal costumes who then dance around. Some people make better costumes than others. The kids all get chalk to draw on the streets, and Aimee paints their faces.

The weather was cooperative this year, and our friends came down from Seattle to join the festivities. 


Today we went on a five mile hike and and managed to survive 2.5 hours of the kid's whining about the hiking. Ariel finished the home movie of our trip and I hope to post it soon- I know my viewing public cannot wait to see our slide show!!!

A few reviews

Originally, I had wanted to do a blog post on things I liked that started with the letter L, but I had to expand my horizons.

I had read Lolita in high school and didn't enjoy it at all. I reread it on the California trip and was completely mesmorized. Nabakov is such an extraordinary, talented writer, and the rather infamous plot reveals a story on so many levels. When I first read it, I could not get past the obvious story; the abuse of a young girl by a pedophile. The novel is also the hidden story of Dolores (Lolita is Humbert's nickname for her); the horror of what hapens to her is only revealed in the tiniest details. Humbert (the narrator) believes that everything he does is justified by his deep and truly felt "Love" for the young girl. I read somewhere that the story is about the subjugation of one human being by another because of an ideal (which is one of the most dangerous talents that humans have). That is a pretty pitiful review, but I cannot recommend the book highly enough. I was especially suprised to read that N wrote at least some of the book while collecting butterflies in Ashland, OR. I was also quite pleased that I could identify a literary reference to an Edgar Allen Poe poem in the book.

Lars and the Real Girl was a much sweeter and good natured movie than I anticipated. Ryan Gosling is a very impressive actor for taking such an odd role and making it such a lovely story. kind of wanted to give him a hug through most of the movie

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I thought the movie was decent, but I LOVE the sound track to the Darjeeling Limited. It's weird mix of 70's Rock, French pop songs, and Indian music is great. I have been listening to it for days and the kids love to dance around to it.

Girl's Rock is the Documentary we took the kids to tonight. It is about the girl's rock n' roll camp run in Portland by the former bassist for Sleater-Kinney. Although taking four young kids to a movie always involves questionable logic, you can get away with a fair amount of rowdiness at the Olympia Film Society. It definitely made me feel quite hyped up about having strong and bold daughters. It was also very cute to see Elias spontaneously head banging during the performances.

Happy Earth Day/Anniversary

Happy Eighth Anniversary, Ariel. It has been a real pleasure to hang around with you for the last ten years. I think you are pretty great. I was going to write out a list of ten things I really like about you, but instead I will just tell you while I try and coerce you into watching an episode of Battlestar Gallactica (you get a free pass to make fun of it, too).

Bigg Big Trip Day 2: Mendocino

After leaving Ashland, we headed into California for the coast. Blindingly trusting Google Maps, I had a route where we drove through Northern California and over to Mendocino all set out. We knew it would be a bit longer of a day, probably about 8 hours. We quickly figured out that the first four hour portion through the Salmon River area was going to be way, way longer than that. There was no turning back and we enjoy the beautiful isolation - even after we got through a pass that said "Trailers not recommended". It was too late to turn back at that point, or the stopping point when we got out of the car only to hear Ruth comment that she thought the burning smell might be our breaks.  

After close to eight and a half hours driving on this route we got to drive through the Redwoods. They are very big and pretty, and we headed into the coast. Shkuri got car sick on the windy roads, and Elias had to pee ever 45 minutes. We have no idea what was going on in urinary tract, but we have 8 or 9 pictures of him peeing at various back drops to prove it. For some reason, I told Ar that I didn't think we would need gas as we were only 20 miles from the next town. If I ever say that to him again, he has strict instructions to punch me in the face and get gas anyway. By the time we hit the coast, we had been on empty for about 20 minutes, it was pitch black, and the quaint little town's only gas pump had been closed for hours. After begging a half gallon of gas from a very nice elderly German man who ran a B& B we managed to make it another 15 miles to a gas station. I am pretty sure that the words "Thank you Jesus" were repeated several times. 

 The next morning we woke up and spent the day hanging out at the beach until noon. Mackericher was worth the drive, and is a really lovely spot. It is a little bit wild like the coast in Washington and we spotted a few seals. 

  We made it to Mackericher at close to ten o'clock, fed the kids some fruit loops and called it a day.  ( I do not have a clue why the second half of this is underlined and am not good enough with html to figure it out) 

Home Again

After a 17 hour drive home, we pulled in this morning about 6 am. Mostly I can say I am extremely impressed with Ariel's ability to stay up all night and change blown out tires. I have an extremely capable husband. I am much less impressed with google maps time estimates.   

 Here are a few of the pictures from our trip. We spent about five nights camping along the coast in Mendicino, Santa Cruz, and Santa Barbara. We then headed inland to Disneyland for two nights/one day and visited family in Stockton. The trip was fantastic; everyone had a great time. The biggest suprise was Disneyland. Neither Ar or I had much enthusiasm for going, but thought the kids might really like it. Disneyland was fantastic - we all had a wonderful day and stayed from 9am to closing at 11pm. I will post some more pictures and stories in the next few days, but sleep is to strong a siren call right now to post more. 

Ashland

After a somewhat clausterphobic but uneventful 8 hour drive from Olympia to Ashland we arrived at our campground.  My first thought was "this place is really run down"...luckily, I have kids to see for me, and they went bonkers over the very wobbly merryground in the camp's "park".  E promptly fell off and scraped the entire right side of his face up. After a quick pasta dinner, we went into town for ice cream. The weather was a little cold but very sunny, and Ashland, OR is really wonderful medium sized town. It is best known for it's Shakespeare festival, but Southern Oregon University is here as well and Ashland is just the sort of crunchy, granola BoBo paradise that I love. There are a lot of coffee shops, trees, and tastefully restored older homes. After ice cream, we found a great park with a fantastic rope climbing tower that I will post pictures of soon. 

 Since there is WiFi at this campground, Ariel and I got to watch the Daily Show while everyone else was asleep. This morning when we woke up, there was still frost on the ground, and we were very slow to get out of bed. The kids celebrated by having a watergun fight in their shorts and sandals and then, shockingly, complaining that they were cold. 

 Today we have another 7-8 hour drive to Mackericher State Park near Mendocino. We will switch over from I-5 to 101 and go through the Redwoods. I finished Better by Atul Gawande and am going to start in on my Pediatric Text Book and Lolita until car sickness and curves force me to stop. Better was a wonderful book - it was a series of essays he had written on medicine focused around the ideas of how it (and humanity in general) can be better. The concepts include diligence and integrity. I had read some of the essays before in the New Yorker, but I still enjoyed reading them again. One of my favorite chapters was on the clash of medicine with birthing traditions. I hear a lot about the damage that obstetrics has done to women in the medicalization of birth through my midwife friends, but he did a wonderful job of making me understand that medical reasoning and the conflict of seeing labor and delivery as a craft vs. a science. 

The bags are packed

This is about all I am thinking about now...the Big Bigg Road Trip '08 is about 12 hours from being underway....the amount of prepatory work is rather overwhelming, but I think it will be worth it. I hope I can get the chance to post while we are on the road. Right now the only thing that really worries me is fratercide and car accidents!