A Few Firsts

 

So Somehow or another the latter part of this year has been kind of a whirlwind.  In September I got to experience a few "Firsts"  -  The alligator, not quite in the wild, but in a natural habitat on the U of L campus.  The cicadas had recently come out of their exoskeletons so I got to see one still in the "husk" - it had apparently no strength to come forth.  I got to see the resurrection ferns come to life after a rain storm on the live oaks.   I went there to spend some time with this little family walking under the live oaks just after they welcomed a little baby into the world.

 

I got to make cookies with the oldest two grandchildren for the first time.  We made that perfect cookie for preschoolers.  The peanut butter cookie.  Sal was in charge of the smish, smash smoosh.  The recipe was Katie's and it was a good one even after all that smishing and smashing and smooshing.

TW was more into the rolling than the smish, smash smoosh.  He rolled and dipped them in sugar for a nice crunchy top of the cookie

 Grandma's job was to measure out the size of the dough balls to be rolled and to keep the smishing and the smashing from going to far.

 Sal and TW played with boxes and balls a lot.  My role was to throw the balls into the box.

 Daddy played too.  I wasn't the only one welcoming a new baby.  TW loves with up close enthusiasm and Sal with gentle motherliness.

 And this is what the little guy looks like after his first bath and all smooshed up as only a baby can smoosh
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This is my first meeting with the little guy.  He is a sweet natured baby named Charles.  He was expected to be a girl.  Ultrasounds are not always right.and this little family got a surprise package.  They were prepared for this surprise though - they had a boys name picked out and not a girls name.  Somehow, they must have known who he would be.

Detours

 

 

 About a year ago I noticed some women using the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator on my Temple Tuesday.  I wondered if I could make it to the top in my "not so great" physical condition.  My assignments there take me up and down several times of day and so I started taking the stairs.  The ceilings are high so by the end of a day I usually have done about fifteen flights of stairs.  I can do it top to bottom  now without feeling excessively out of breath.

that detour enabled this detour. 

Labor Day we decided to take the hike in spite of traffic on the mountain passes and the probability of crowded roads.  We went to Lake Dorothy on the edge of the Alpine Wilderness - one of the few hikes in that area that does not require permits.  Our guide book said "in a little over one mile after leaving the highway take forest road...."  As we left the highway we saw one of those orange signs - "DETOUR - one mile".  We kept going knowing that we might be disappointed by a closed road and an inaccessible trail.
We found the turn off just before the roadblock and drove up to the trail head to find the parking area almost empty!  Some forest service workers were cleaning up and mentioned that this trail head is normally full every weekend.

Off we started

Enjoying the plant life on the way up.  This is Canadian Dogwood - a personal favorite.




Half way up we say this lovely spot. The water is beautifully clear. Some other hikers there mentioned that they have been at this pool and seen it crowded with kids.  They also said the lake was usually crowded too.  We speculated that the trail was empty because of the warm dry weather and maybe people were hiking at higher elevations not normally open this time of year.  Then we realized the value of that detour sign.  I wonder how many people turned back because they didn't have the same information we had or because they made a false assumption.  The crowd had been deterred by the detour sign.

 













The second half of the trail is where my temple stair climbs paid off.  Most of the trail looked like this.  Nicely constructed stairs.

 A few fun fungi on the way to the top delighted us.
































 



The lovely large lake at the top of the climb didn't get very much of our attention, but we ate our lunch here.


 We needed to head back.  We did stop to play in the streams heading into that lovely pool half way down though.

 We cooled our feet off nicely.










 
I used DER's hiking poles and will probably never hike without them ever again.  With the poles I don't have to worry about balance and since my eyesight often causes me to misjudge distance, those poles made me feel like I didn't have to pick my way through the rocky areas of the trail and made the little stream crossings so easy.  Going down hill, we adjusted them to be taller and I felt steadied.

The traffic was slow once we got on the highway.  Fundraising groups were chasing the slow down with water bottles for sale on the side of the road.  We stopped at a roadside place that advertised fresh fruit milkshakes.  I ordered blackberry, DER ordered blueberry.  The blue was better than the black.

I finally made it into the Alpine Lakes area!  Check one off the bucket list.

The Fourth

 

We had planned on going on hike for the fourth of July.  We didn't.  I hurt my hip somehow and wasn't sure I was up to even four miles.  But the walking we did that evening seemed to clear up my problem.  Truth to tell, I wasn't sure that I wanted to travel the mountain pass roads on the Holiday.  They carry lots of slow traffic on holidays.

So we picked Seth up after work, parked the car a few blocks away and headed for the South Lake Union Park.  The Center for Wooden Boats was just closing up their festival. 



We ate out picnic, near some young men playing with a soccer ball.  Coincidentally, one of them turned out to be an old friend.  These flowers were growing near where we ate out picnic.  They are such a pretty color.  The stems and leaves and flowers are all that color of blue.


 

We checked out the yacht sales yard and noticed the crowd of boats on Lake Union.  The fireworks are set off from a barge on the Lake and a view of them from the water is probably a lot of fun. 

A local band, Hey Marseilles, was playing and we listened to them.  Partly because the guy on the keyboard/accordian was in a choir with a couple of our kids.  They have a nice mix of instrumentation.  They have guitars, a violin, a string bass, a bass guitar, an accordian and keyboard and various rhythm instruments.
It was fun to watch the crowd watching them. 

The hula-hoopers were amazing.  They could eat and hula-hoop and dance all at the same time.  I tried to hula-hoop when I was a girl.  I could never get it to stay up for long.  These people seemed to do it without effort or thought.  I don't know why I can't get this picture to turn the girls were not standing on the wall.

We got a bit bored waiting for dark when the fireworks would go off. so we decided to head over to the edge of the crowd.  That was a good move as we missed being in the heavy traffic after the fireworks.

As it began to get dark I checked to see what my camera would do in low light.  If you think about it you can tell which lights were flashing because this picture has so much squiggle in it.















When the fireworks when off it was fun to have the new lens to get "closer"
Enjoy the fireworks.   

 These were some of my favorites.  They reminded me of sheaves of grain.

This last picture is another picture with squiggle.  The fireworks don't look like that really. The camera sees differently than our minds.  It is fun to see the difference sometimes.

Kansas, she said...

.... is the name of the star

So March found us taking a trip to Kansas to see family.  It was the first time I have been in Kansas in the spring since 1975.  Ahhhh  The first few days I thought we had come just a wee bit to early, but by the time we went home the new leafy green was showing and the redbud tree blooms were swelling and opening.  That made our timing just perfect.








                                                            

We took a "blue highway" from Kansas City to Manhattan, watching the prairie sunset over and over again heading west, up and down the hills of the eastern part of the state.  We drove through small towns that I had never been in during all my growing up years in Kansas.



The next day, a drive around town and a stop at the University Art Gallery.

The next night we went out to the Konza Prairie and took a quick 3 mile walk just as the sun was setting.  Wild turkeys and deer were raiding the green winter wheat.


 
The seed pods of autumn were falling to the ground.














This rim of rock just under the soil is reason for the name of these hills, the Flint hills.  This layer of rock made
this land not very suitable for farming.except in the more fertile river valleys.  












The next night, another prairie sunset from the cemetery on the west side of town where my father is buried.


and a drive around town past former homes and schools.  Lots of memories.  Primary on the steps of that house.  The boy that was supposed to be staying at our house while his mom recovered from surgery but was homesick and ran away.  (All the kids in the neighborhood walked miles trying to find him).  Girl Scouts in the Methodist Church and in the armory.  High School marching band practice on the streets in the neighborhood between the high school and the zoo.  Yes, that is an amazing location for a high school between the cemetery and the zoo.  Babysitting for the people that lived in that house.  The bus driver speeding up to go over that hill and driving by his girl friends house so he could honk at her.  Letting our voices vibrate in the back seat of the car when driving over the old brick roads.  Track and Field day at Griffith park in the spring of Junior High years.  The VW bug that was decoration for a church dance (yes it was in the building), walking to the library and the orthodontist.  How wonderfully cold the Wareham Theatre felt if you got to go to a movie in the summer.  The watermelon seeds I planted when I was 5.  (Yes, the plants grew but we moved and they probably didn't mature so late in the season.)  raw rolled oats and sugar and cinnamon as a treat when we were playing outside on a hot summer day.  The divided highway that my friend thought was a street (yep, she went the wrong way for about 5 blocks before she could turn around)  Mrs. Loofburrow always buying a box of girl scout cookies from every girl that came by selling.  Playing hide and seek in the street with all the kids from the neighborhood on long summer nights
.
This is the place were DER and I had a wedding reception in the late seventies.  It has been added to so that it could serve a student ward.  The addition is very well done and preserves some of the historic features of this building.  Other things have changed some.  Downtown is old and new.  A Flint Hills center will be opening soon.  It has nice public outdoor space and a lovely viewpoint of the hills surrounding Manhattan.













 Much in Manhattan has remained the same.  This building was the central building in the Dairy barn where my father has some work affiliation. It is now used for other university functions and it's big lawn is surrounded by horticultural gardens.  The dairy barns are now moved further out of town.  I remember coming here for student club cook-outs and to follow Dad around.  Dad was more involved with the food side of the dairy industry, but we came here and saw the cows with windows in their sides for research purposes when I was a child.  I have stronger memories of the smell of the dairy plant and of the lab.  We stopped at the Dairy bar to buy some "squeeky" cheese (cheese curd) and to have some "Purple Pride" ice cream.      

The train station is has undergone a revival since I was young.

 It was here that I stood in the wee hours of the morning as the sun was coming up through a misty morning while Dwight David Eisenhower's funeral train came through on the way west to his burial place in Abilene. 

It was not something my 15 year old self wanted to do.  It was something my father wanted his family to do. He had been a teenager during WWII,  and in the Air Force when DDE was president.  I had never known anyone who had died at this point in my life (we lived far from extended family in a fairly young community of friends).  I was uncomfortable about paying respect to a dead person I had never known in a public way.    Dad was insistent and I went along without excessive complaint to keep him happy.  We were among a few others at the depot as the train slowed while going by.  But I felt other people's respect for someone and I felt respect for their feelings.  I felt a bit of what it meant to be an American, to value the leader who served with dedication and vigor.  I really didn't know if I valued DDE, but I knew that these people at the station did and that it mattered to them. I became a different kind of American that morning watching the feelings of others who stood in the morning dark and fog to show respect.     Sometimes in our current political climate, we forget that we may be unaware of what matters to others.  We sometimes forget to value the respect others feel. 


A Sunday morning at church found only three old timers.  Manhattan never had a very stable long term LDS population.  The kids grow up and move away like I did. The older people are getting too old to make it to church or have moved to be closer to their children.  The wards consist largely of people there for military reasons and people attached to the universitySunday afternoon was spent in Topeka with the family enjoying really good food.  Yummy, yummy.  I looked up the recipe for the coconut cake that Stephanie made - going to make it soon.

We also drove around and took pictures of the street signs we could find that represented the families of our children.  Sorry M, we couldn't find one with your family name on it.

 

Monday featured a good big thunderstorm as we drove to the airport.  Never fun for driving, but another memory relived.