Tag Archives: plants

neon

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Quinn could, as a younger boy, become sentimental about dryer lint, sticks he had collected on the floor mat of the car, candy wrappers. Perhaps he resisted farewells as a response to living in two separate households, and within each household, moving homes several times in his younger years. I would not know, as I was lucky to have one household—a farm!—and it is still the household I return to visit my 48-years-married parents in. So when I’d remove his stick collection from the floorboards to vacuum the car, I’d reverently pile them in a section of the garden where he could visit them if he liked (until we moved again). He has grown marginally more pragmatic about such things as a teen, but I wasn’t sure how he was going to take it when the actual car was the thing we would be saying goodbye to.

The Neon became unreliable in 2023, and I have been opting not to take it on highway 20. This winter I realized the trunk had leaked so much that the seats were now moldy. For a while I cherished the idea of passing this car onto a teen who needed a first car, maybe even Quinn, but the project of its rehabilitation was getting beyond me. Cue several months of avoidance and driveway sitting.

Last Saturday, a young man knocked on the door and asked if I’d like him to remove the Neon from the driveway. He works on cars, knows how to drain the fluids, and would take the car to Dahl’s for the $200 they will give him for it. He offered to split the money with me. I accepted his offer.

Quinn happened to be home, or this would have been a harder decision. I knew he’d want at least a chance to say goodbye.

I thanked the universe for solving my adulting problem with no effort on my part, and told the young man to come back in a couple hours with his trailer. I pulled the last remaining items out of the car, an archaeological dig that tugged its own heartstrings. I located the title. I had the car empty by the time Quinn came outside and I filled him in on its impending departure.

 

He made me peel the Lisa Frank stickers off the dashboard that B pancake had stuck there years ago, and hang onto the rainbow tie-dye steering wheel cover Rich’s mom had given me and save it, despite the elastic being shot. He reminded me to check the CD player. The battery had enough juice to power the eject button and lo and behold, Brandi Carlile’s Firewatcher’s Daughter had still been in the slot. The Eye is a song Quinn and I love to sing along to together. I would have been very sad to lose it.

Then he asked if I would transplant the tiny fern that has grown for years out of the Neon’s left front fender.

At this point the lump in my throat grew painful. I used two jack-o-lantern carving knives with their skinny blades to carefully extract the roots of the plant from the grungy fender crevice. We found a spot in the corner of the front garden bed to situate the fern in a bare patch of soil.

Satisfied, Quinn and I watched from the driveway as the guy got the Neon started and a black cloud of exhaust emitted from the tailpipe. He stepped out of the car one more time to discuss payment, and I told him to keep the money, he was doing me a favor. Was I sure? Yes, I was sure. He thanked me. He said it sounded like a cracked head gasket. I was glad to know I wasn’t wrong, the car was at the end of its life. 195,120 miles and many memories have accumulated in our fourteen years with the Neon.

After he drove it up onto the pavement to load it on his trailer, earthworms emerged from the ruts where the tires had been sitting.

We went inside and Quinn turned around and blew a kiss through the window at our good little car.

When I was with Quinn’s father and pregnant, we bought a used jeep that was intended to be the “family vehicle” as soon as Quinn was born. But, while I was still pregnant, his father’s truck died and the “family vehicle” became his work vehicle, while I walked and took the bus to my two jobs. Even with a newborn I commuted by public transit, which thankfully was doable in Portland, but let’s just say, less than ideal.

We split up on the eve of moving to Newport. I took the jeep so I could get to my new job and support Quinn. The $800 blue book value of the jeep was a contentious line item in mediation. I could not wait to never drive it again.

I found the Neon on Craigslist. A friend’s mother’s car someone was selling cheap, with low mileage and a stick shift. It was under $2000 and even so, I needed to convince my credit union to give me a loan. Andrew, a lab friend, drove me to Florence to pick it up, and I paid it off a year later.

 

The Neon is the only car I’ve ever independently bought, you see. Independently buying a car hits differently if your movements and finances have been constrained and controlled by another person for years. The Neon meant more to me than a 2002 car with hand crank windows ought to have meant. With my next tax return, I bought Quinn, who was three, a nice car seat that would keep him safe up to eighty pounds. As my string bean lengthened but did not gain much weight, he held onto that seat until I convinced him he no longer needed it, around second grade. All the beach bird feathers he had tucked into its side pouch were added to the stick collection in the garden.

I don’t have many photos of the Neon, but hunting through photos shows me all the places the little car took us; in a sense, it’s just outside the frame of every picture. It took us to beaches, to hikes, to campouts, to the end of Beaver Creek Road for several years and multiple flat tires. To school and activities and all over town. Loaded to the gills with a canopy and market gear, we drove it to farmer’s market every Saturday.

It was the site of all the Pickups and Drop-offs of Quinn’s two-household/one-driving-parent early life. It was where Quinn learned to blow kisses, as a fundamental building block of the routine to make transitions marginally more okay for him, to help him cope with always being left by the other person he loved. It was always the site of our coming back together again after we had been apart. A car can mean a lot more than you ever meant to let it mean.

~rainbow mondays~ equanimity

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Baby dahlias are sprouting!

 

Equanimity (n.) – calmness, composure.

Composed of equal parts light and darkness, I perch and hover on this equinox, my compass needle steadying but this orienting is an active state, an attentive tending. The direction I steer toward depends upon the territory I’ve already crossed as much as it does the destination to which I’m headed. And while both inform my bearing, it is neither of them, but the balancing here in the present, that is the point.

         

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ favorite college professor

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~June 23 to July 23, 2020~

Dinosaur Discoveries virtual camp

Since camp was during the day, we moved our noon video call to 6 pm for camp week. He was animated! I wasn’t sure if it was the time of day or due to camp, but he was ON FIRE in his nerdy mind. I got on the call on the first night to him frantically spinning his cube into an alternating colors pattern and he held up the blue-and-green side to the camera and said, “this is like a nerve check for me because I have to do the opposite of what I’ve trained myself to do,” and then babbled for the whole hour about phylogenies and homologies.

That day they made a tik tok, a google slideshow, did an interactive (video game) learning module, read and discussed a scientific publication. They talked about how paleontology, biology and geology relate to each other. They used starburst candy to illustrate the rock cycle (melted by microwave onto cardboard: igneous.) Two of his buddies from camp last year were in attendance, and he added seven new teens and two new instructors to his paleontology community.

The theme for day two was “geologic context of the Mesozoic,” because isn’t that what we all think of in our summer camp memories? They did a Pangaea puzzle, read about and discussed some contemporary dino fossil discoveries, met with a real paleontologist, sifted a bag of sand to find a whole bunch of fossils (24 sea snails, 17 amber pieces, no trilobites, 3 squids, gastropods, ray teeth, shark teeth – some of them not yet counted).

Day 3: biologic context of the Mesozoic. Mass extinctions, why birds are the only living dinosaurs, why Triassic animals were just the weirdest, a handy paleontology database. This was a dress-up day and Quinn chose to wear his “brambleproof” long-sleeved shirt, his Indiana Jones hat, and a rock pick. He worked on his dino diorama, which they made in the box that the camp supplies were shipped in.

Day 4: Reading the fossil record! Quinn finished up counting his sifted fossils and had 32 pieces of amber, 25 Sahara gastropods and 3 fragments (so at least 28 individuals), and he mentioned both Devonian squid and a Devonian fish called Dunkleosteus, but I’m not sure if they were included among his fossils. His knowledge on this subject has far exceeded mine and I can no longer keep up! He discovered he did have half of a Trilobite. On this day he was set the task of writing a scientific report of one of his fossil finds, and he came up with this:

“A new genus named a Trilobita was discovered to have lived about 520 million years ago and though not all measurements are available the specimen is certainly unique. The front half of this almost crab-like creature has been preserved in its 3-D structure representing a very small creature living in the Upper Cambrian Lodore formation.”

“I made up the part about the formation that it was found in, and I approximated on the million of years ago. Also I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing Trilobita correctly. Trilobita?” (Think: kilometer/kilometer.)

Quinn has a theory on Trilobites; that they were the first sentient organisms, and that they traveled in groups. I let him talk that night and recorded some audio after he introduced his Trilobite theory. These are just some segments I gleaned from a twenty minute treatise:

“To me it looked like in our fossil record, all of the things in that time period look practically the same almost, like really really similar, so it makes me think there was one kind of first species that evolved and then that evolved into a whole myriad of other things that evolved into a multitude of different things. Each species branching as it goes. To me the length of a species is determined by when it branched off the thing behind it to when it branched into multiple different things itself. That’s how I think of how long a species lived… when did it come into being from the thing that branched to BE it? That’s the start of it. and then the end is when it branched into multiple things itself. And everything kind of looks really similar that we have from back then. So it kind of looks like everything is one thing. And then that thing splits into several similar things. I mean a bird doesn’t look anything like a whale. But if you trace the two back far enough, then like a chickadee and a humpback whale, were once the same species. It might be somewhere back in the Mesozoic or before the Mesozoic, it might have been different things already when the dinosaurs were alive but if you trace them back far enough, everything has a common ancestor with everything else. So my thing is I’m thinking of like the ultimate common ancestor. I think of a trilobite.”

“Like someone looks at a rock on Beverly beach and is like, “there’s a clam shell imprint here,” but you can only see this little imprint for a bacteria if you’re looking at it micro microscopic. Attach several microscopes to your eye and walk around Beverly beach.”

“Soft parts still fossilize is my thing. If you think about it, it’s not the meteor strike that wiped everything out. It incinerates everything in one small area. Back then we happen to know that there was pretty much one continent with several large islands around it, maybe? And even when that was the case, that all the water that had life in it, was all one thing. You can swim from any point in it to any other point that has life in it. and so the biodiversity wouldn’t have been the greatest…”

“A meteor hits. let’s just say at the time trilobites are alive a meteor hits and we don’t know about it- it doesn’t deposit what it usually does or whatever. Let’s say that’s what wiped out the species then except for what evolved into what we have today… If there were bacteria I think they would have fossilized, because in the water, their soft forms would slip between molecules… If you’re willing to actually be really careful and chip them out of the rock, I think that you would have ended up with (and this is all under a microscope that’s under a microscope that under possibly another microscope.)”

“Even so I think that then that would have been like I don’t know like thinking… I think that that would have been like … I think that that would have fossilized” (I’m including this verbatim to illustrate his words trying to keep up with his brain.)

“If a meteor had struck, pretty much the whole earth is covered in possibly a mile thick cloud of ash just hovering above the earth or like encasing the earth. If you think about the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, the story goes: meteor hits earth. Ash cloud for several million years, meaning all the plants couldn’t get sun because of the ash cloud so all the plants died meaning all the herbivores died meaning all the carnivores died. Mammals survived because back then we were scavengers right? We were able to eat survive in pretty much any climate. So we were able to just eat dead stuff which there would be plenty of, so we survived.”

“The producers are subsisting off of sun, like just subsisting off of some non-living thing, like eating rocks, or filtering sand through itself, photosynthesis, like it’s always there. And if you use it, it’s not like you use it and some of it goes away. You’re done using it, and you get the energy from it, but it still has just as much energy on itself to give as when you picked it up and used it to give yourself energy. So what the meteors do when they hit is they take away that thing in some way or another. So meteors take away the producers source of energy.”

Day 5: Dinosaurs in pop culture and media! They met with another real life paleontologist, this time one who works on prehistoric penguins, and specifically the plumage – the colors of fossil feathers! Fossils can tell us about the evolution of the shape and color of penguin feathers! And other dinosaur plumage – they learned about a Jurassic bird that had iridescent feathers. The camp kit included (modern) feathers that they had looked at in preparation for this segment. Maybe not all the mamas have gathered piles of feathers for their kids.

This day’s topic on pop culture and media and dinosaurs (and misconceptions about them) was fascinating for Quinn. There were lots of links and resources provided, which were fun things like Jurassic Park and Disney’s Dinosaur.

Here is our conversation about the 1914 animation of Gertie the dinosaur:

“A sauropod eats a boulder and the top of the tree, sees a sea serpent in the lake next to them, starts dancing, eats the other half of the tree, tosses a mammoth into said lake, the mammoth swims back over and blasts the sauropod with water, and then swims away, a mammoth can swim, then the sauropod picks up a boulder and hits the mammoth, and then the sauropod takes a drink and drains the whole lake…”

“When were mammoths and when were sauropods?” His scientist/writer mom replied, modeling her grasp of both science and grammar.

“Sauropods were in the Jurassic period. Mammoths weren’t around until after the Cretaceous.”

“Are you saying it would be anachronistic for a sauropod to toss a mammoth in a lake then? And throw boulders at it?”

“I’m saying that a sauropod wouldn’t have lived at the same time as a mammoth. I’m saying that sauropods can’t toss mammoths by the tail…”

“Even if they didn’t have to time travel in order to do it?”

“If they didn’t have to time travel in order to do it, and they were capable of doing that time travel, and they could actually get a mammoth, they still physically could not pick up a mammoth by the tail and throw it five miles into a lake, and then accurately hit it at that range with a boulder.

“Are you sure? Aren’t you being kind of a party pooper?”

~

The two camp instructors and both guest visitors were women. I love that this camp group makes a strong effort towards inclusion and is working hard for fair representation for all in a science that has historically been exclusive to white men. I like that my white man-to-be is surrounded by all other types of people in these camps.

Q and I watched an episode of PBS prehistoric road trip together that night.

Day 6 was the final day of Dino camp, and they presented their Dioramas and played games.

On his diorama presentation, Quinn was complimented that he must have done a lot of research because of how his time period aligned with the species of dinosaurs and plant life represented. Here is his spiel:

“This is my museum diorama of the K-Pg extinction which is extremely late cretaceous. So the meteor is still in the sky yet it has already struck, so all of the grass has been burned off, and the rocks are bleached because of the immense heat. there is a river running through here, and there is a velociraptor pack here attacking this herd of triceratops, and all that’s left of these trees are small shrubs, which the triceratops herd is taking cover in trying to save themselves, however the raptor pack has expertly sent in an ambusher from behind. there are also a pair of tyrannosaurs attacking these two ankylosaurs, because big predators like tyrannosaurs assuming they were predators and not scavengers, would probably hunt in pairs or trios rather than full packs. there’s a quetzalcoatlus up in the sky looking for food, and there’s a volcano that’s erupting.”

He told me that night:

“For our final meeting they gave us like traditional class clown, most likely to become a rock star awards. Except they were specific to us regardless of the traditional ones. Frizzie got most likely to lead a paleontology expedition while wearing fancy clothing. Lead got most likely to draw the most scientifically accurate drawing of a T. rex. I got most likely to become everybody’s favorite college professor which I think is extremely accurate.”

Extremely!

~

(slightly modified by mama)

 

 

In which I realize why this post incubated a while…

I revisited my educational priorities for Quinn during this month. This was motivated by looking ahead to the 2020-2021 school year and grappling with which path to choose: hybrid online/in person public school, fully online Edmentum public school, or fully homeschool. Because I am writing this as we approach the end of 8th grade, I know what was chosen and how the story turned out to not be about what I would choose at all. It’s weird to have been thinking about things like scaffolding removal and then realize – oh we’re done with scaffolding. Now he’s taking charge of his own path. He chose Edmentum, and has handled his schooling. It turns out the scaffolding was even more temporary than I realized, and I was slow to take out the final pieces despite my awareness that removal was the goal.

Since I’m writing this later, I have control over leaving out the awkward and tense discussions of pros and cons, of offers on my part to advocate, which he kept gently but firmly turning down. I can see now that he was telling me he’s got this. If we had homeschooled, it would have been something he was doing to please me. (I cannot ensure that he did not choose his path out of wanting to please his father but that is out of my control. )Yes, I know it would have been odd to homeschool remotely – him at his dad’s but with me facilitating learning. But that would have worked, in fact I’m confident we would have slam dunked it, if it had been what he wanted and needed. It’s just that it wasn’t. It’s just that it was hard for me to hear that at first.

When I wrote the priorities, consent took up more of the bandwidth than it had in the past, though I could see it was there all along when I wrote the original mamafesto when he was six. It just wasn’t named quite as directly – it was emergent curriculum, choice, opting in. Looking through a 2020 teen parenting lens, consent rose to the surface. As I rewrote, I was thinking about how he needed to have autonomy in body and mind in the learning context. Keep those outside influences at bay and let him decide for himself, follow his own compass. But I was still a little bit holding onto some need for control over his learning in that way we have as parents of operating from a blind spot. The cliché about practicing what we preach. The cliché about 2020 and hindsight. Again.

So I’m leaving the awkward, tense conversations in my private journal, with this mile marker placed here from my somewhat expanded perspective of months. A reminder, an honest reckoning with yet another thing that was tough about the past year.

~

Quotable Quotes of Q:

“Flight was not why things evolved feathers… feathers were why things evolved flight.”

“When overwhelmed thinking about covid, I distract myself. Like, I think about how to write pi in binary.”

“An Illithids mindflayer is like a dementor possessing Davy Jones, but purple.”

Literature

We spent time in Rohan this month, and by the time we ended the month were reading the Appendices.

Q read the Monkey Wrench Gang this month.

We discussed the pronunciation of pronunciation.

One evening I just sat for a while, listening to the sound of popcorn popping upstairs, and the pages of Calvin and Hobbes turning on the other end of the video call.

Math

“Volume of a warbler” and “how many warblers on earth?” Oh, the things you google. These were inquiries during Quinn’s quest to remix Vi Hart’s binary tree of birds – her turducken-en-ducken-en…. but with 13 birds nested inside each other bird, in a long list of types of birds.

Which brought him to the question, “How many birds in the world?” So he could compare to how many in this thirteen-to the eighteen factorial power bird stuffing scheme. The 200 billion birds in the world seems like a big number, however, >121 quintillion is way bigger!

He took this ridiculously high numbers of birds even higher and google calculator eventually returned the result, “Infinity,” and he was laughing so hard at breaking google again.

Honorable mention to, “how many square feet is New York City?” and an ensuing discussion of area codes.

Nature

He was visited by a grouse in the pile of firewood he has been using a splitting maul to help create. He also used the hatchet to strip small branches off limbs, and off one cedar sapling they used to make a railing. He helped replace deck boards and build a deck addition. The seeds from Sam’s garden box were beginning to sprout – he described the sunflowers “busting out” of their seeds, and the pea “vines” that were starting to lengthen and reach out curling tendrils. He saw the comet on a few different nights, explaining to me the best time to see it at sunset and how the remaining light on one side of the sky made it shine brighter against its darker corner of the sky.

 

 

More dinos

This is Q’s giddy anticipation the night he unveiled his plans for what we would do after we finished reading the appendices.

He recreated the dinosaur game he made up on graph paper where I had to build my own Jurassic park role-play style, in a google sheets version for us to play together remotely!

Another memorable quote for the month came a few days later, “oh my god, oh my god, I’m so excited about this dinosaur game.” And we did start in before the end of this month, by the end of which I had collected three different ceratopsians and some stegosauruses.

Oh, the dinos you’ll know!

 

~rainbow mondays~ suddenness

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Mushrooms

by Mary Oliver

Rain, and then
the cool pursed
lips of the wind
draw them
out of the ground –
red and yellow skulls
pummeling upward
through leaves,
through grasses,
through sand; astonishing
in their suddenness,
their quietude,
their wetness, they appear
on fall mornings, some
balancing in the earth
on one hoof
packed with poison,
others billowing
chunkily, and delicious –
those who know
walk out to gather, choosing
the benign from flocks
of glitterers, sorcerers,
russulas,
panther caps,
shark-white death angels
in their town veils
looking innocent as sugar
but full of paralysis:
to eat
is to stagger down
fast as mushrooms themselves
when they are done being perfect
and overnight
slide back under the shining
fields of rain.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ nourish

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~summer shorts~ butterfly shadows

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I have been gathering the dried seed heads of the various columbine flowers that grow in my garden, and was headed to the final patch, the one that grows under the butterfly bush with the dark purple flowers, which are in brilliant bloom in late July.

I was so focused on the seed collection task, hunched over and looking down, that I was startled to see a shadow among the bush’s own shadow that was moving, a flutter that betrayed its being cast by something more than leaf. Abruptly, I stood up and almost hit my head on a butterfly.

This swallowtail had such tattered wings that I could see the purple of the flowers through the hole in its left forewing. It was also missing the frilly lobe that should be along the trailing edge of the left hindwing, and had other torn and frayed edges, signs of a long, hard journey, perhaps beating to windward.

It spent a long time sipping from the bright orange throats of the dark purple flowers and let me take close photos on that bright sunny day. I was grateful for this little reminder of the butterfly effect of gratitude, grateful also for the visual reminder that we may be tattered and beat up, but we should keep going, that there is still beauty in our surviving, that there is still sweetness to drink in.

I find it interesting that I saw its shadow first, even while looking down. I am peering into shadows even in summer, because if 2020 was a butterfly, it would be the most shredded looking one still flying the friendly skies. Even though July is full of bright sunshine and winged beings for the sun to shine upon, this is a different sort of summer in a different sort of year.

Normally July is a time of flying around the country visiting family, this time of wings and flight. Instead, this July is a month of being still and figuring out how to be okay with that, grieving the loss of that time with beloved kin.

As I peer into the shadows, I must remember that at least these shadows are being cast by butterflies, and take note that it is also the time of year to stop, spread my wings out on a leaf, and just absorb some sunlight.

~rainbow mondays~ raining roses

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I gotta get out of bed and get a hammer and a nail
Learn how to use my hands, not just my head
I think myself into jail
Now I know a refuge never grows
From a chin in a hand in a thoughtful pose
Gotta tend the earth if you want a rose

~Emily Saliers (Indigo Girls)

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow monday~ sunlight plus rain

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After the clouds, the sunshine; after the winter, the spring; after the shower, the rainbow; for life is a changeable thing. After the night, the morning, bidding all darkness cease, after life’s cares and sorrows, the comfort and sweetness of peace.

~Helen Steiner Rice

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ quercus quetzalcoatlus

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paleontology camp!

there was quite a bit of sand spilling out of the lint trap in the dryer as i restarted the bulging load of size 14 clothing for another cycle. Every pair of underwear but the two extras were worn; all socks; all shirts and pants; when the second batch of instagram photos of paleontology camp came across my feed, my very first thought, “look at his big smile!” was immediately followed by: “he’s wearing a different shirt!”

i got to hear a lot about the people he spent his week with on the ride back from camp, in between him tuning me out to participate in the group text chat the six campers had set up with each other. Conveniently for the purposes of this blog post, they had given each other nicknames. Quinn had become quetzalcoatlus, then morphed into pretzel. The others were bob (previously known as D from L.A.), remus (also CA), frizzie (WI), lead (WA), and k.k. (WA). The leaders, birt and kamel, had also taken on camp nicknames. Frizzie plans to specialize in birds and pterosaurs (such as the aforementioned quetzalcoatlus), bob is headed into paleobiology, but the common theme was that all six of them plan on getting PhDs, quinn’s in dinosaur paleontology. He recalled remus’s question about how many PhDs one could accumulate before getting kicked out of school. Kids on fire to learn!

Their days structured themselves around hikes and museum forays, with a clear division of labor in camp. The leaders prepared dinners, while the campers made their own breakfasts and lunches. bagels and cream cheese for breakfast; for lunch, sandwiches or wraps, goldfish crackers and granola bars. The van became known as the fishbowl, and the six campers themselves as the goldfish, for the sheer number of packages of goldfish crackers they consumed. While leaders prepared dinner, the campers set up all the tents, including those of the leaders. Quinn shared a tent with bob. Among the fossils he brought home was a plain old rock, “my stake-pounding rock!” The campers were also responsible for washing the dishes after meals. Quinn talked about this without any hint of resentment over “chores.”

“Did you know that only one single dinosaur fossil has ever been unearthed in Oregon? And it was a toe from a madrasaur? And it was found by Thomas Condon? He is who the Paleontology Research Station in John Day is named after.” I asked quinn how he was feeling about how the study of paleontology is not limited to the study of dinosaur fossils, the topic of a heated moment we shared a few months ago. At the time, he had felt devastated that his understanding of his dream job was all a lie, and his future was now ruined. It passed. Now he has seen fossils from turtles, plants, mouse deer, “and a very old pig!”

Day 1 Sunday

They drove east that first day into the mountains and hiked somewhere near Sisters, then camped. Before leaving the museum, they had to find one scientific name in the collection sharing the first letter of their name; quinn found Quercus, an oak leaf.

He said the hike that day contained more wildlife than paleontology, and they learned some of the plants currently flowering in the region: beargrass, lupine, and another pink flower whose identity they weren’t sure of.

Their cooking device was missing the correct hose, so they needed to cook dinner over a fire that first night. The kids decided pinecones might work well as kindling, and they lit right up!

Day 2 Monday

They would spend the next two days in the John Day fossil beds/painted hills area of eastern oregon. They finished the drive there, set up camp, and hiked and visited the Thomas Condon Research Center that day.

Day 3 Tuesday

John Day all day!

Day 4 wednesday

They finished up in John Day and packed up, spending a long driving day to Newport, set up camp in Beverly Beach and explored for fossils.

“By the way, mama, we are going to need to get a trash bag or something capable of holding large fossils and take it back to beverly beach to collect my fossil deposit.”

Day 5 Thursday

This was the day they had been planning on going to Florence to see Kamel’s research on fossil pinnipeds (floppy-swimmies) but it was raining and they decided to stay at Beverly Beach. Birt’s tent flooded so they needed to re-do her tent set up.

“Birt slept well that night.”

They went to the aquarium that day instead, communed with modern floppy-swimmies, and took showers back at the state park.

Day 6 Friday

This was the last day of camp, and they woke up, broke camp, and drove back to Eugene. They went on one hike on the way which culminated in some sand dunes where they played on a rope swing (this could have been somewhere around florence, but quinn didn’t know for sure.)

the folder quinn returned home with contained a bundle of good reading material about fossil formations, geologic processes, and animal phylogenies. i know it will be a resource he will look at later! the pile of rocks that came home provides another tangible reminder of camp!

the other kind of tracks

The goldfish made up several songs during their time together. A reimagining of from now on from the greatest showman turned into “And we will go back home, and we will eat these fish. Gold….fish….”

They rewrote hakuna matata using “the Birt will Durn,” the phrase uttered by Birt which earned her the nickname, because of the sausage that fell in the dirt on the first night, and her justification for going ahead and eating it anyway after re-exposing it to the flames.

A whole new world was in the process of becoming a song about basalt. “Unbelievable rocks, indescribable basalt…. A Very Old Rock…”

Finally, there was a song being written by Remus about bagels and cream cheese.

~~~

While paying half attention to a tilt podcast, i was directed to this thought-provoking ready for adulthood checklist from the author of the book happy campers.

in that regard, i see how camp encouraged his growth towards independence and self-responsibility. It gave him a taste of being truly responsible for himself in a way he hasn’t experienced before. i also appreciated how the group took care of each other (tent set up, dish cleaning). He may not have packed each day’s outfit in its own gallon ziplock bag the way i did when i went to camp, but he went ahead and wore the clothes anyway! It may seem like i’m making a big deal about his clothing changes, but i witnessed him wear the same shirt 3 days in a row for outdoor school just last month; and that was with a mama chaperone in the live studio audience, letting him know i saw that he was still wearing the same shirt again and reminding him to think about changing it at his earliest convenience.

Summertime learning

Quinn’s adventures in learning tag program day camp ran for two weeks, and we managed a carpooling arrangement that got him to the OSU campus each day. His chosen class schedule included united we solve, mathcraft, lego robotics, and create your own country! I think he enjoyed them all; at first create your own country was his favorite, but when the novelty wore off and the countries he and his classmates created had all cornered the market in the various limiting resources, he began saying more things about lego robotics in the evenings. I know the puzzles class was right up his alley as well!

Swim lessons – 4 of the 5 summer swim lessons took place this month. We will pick up again when school starts with one every other week so he can keep building skills!

I took quinn with me this year to oregon country fair – it has been a while since he was there! He experienced it through a much different set of more grown up eyes. At the same time, the magic of fair elicits from each of us the wonder of a much younger child no matter what age we are. We stopped in our wanderings to watch a parade go by and attended a concert by the march 4th marching band. We became absorbed for quite some time at an interactive musical art installation consisting of the innards of several pianos bolted to a structure; an assortment of the hammers were available for use around the panels of strings, waiting for passers by to experiment with sound by tapping on them. Food was a big focus, and quinn enjoyed a strawberry lemonade and a kabob (he thinks meat lollipops are yum) for lunch while rich and i shared souvlaki. Quinn mostly absorbed quietly and did not express many desires for most of the day while we walked around, but i coaxed him into trying out the handmade marimbas, and a young dad nearby broke into a grin and bopped his head to quinn’s rendition of take on me. While we watched another concert (the shook twins and john craigie) he was having to dig for the stamina to carry on with standing in the crowd, but the simple distraction of putting on my overshirt, tying knots in it, and letting me dance him around, was enough to lighten his mood. Late in the afternoon he finally made his requests known: ice cream, and to watch “one of the plays.” We had walked past several plays in action throughout the day, but he hadn’t shown any sign of wanting to stop, so by this time of day, he had to settle for some acrobatics performances, which he felt was suitable. After his raspberry ice cream, we ordered burritos for dinner, and it was time for us to make our way homeward with just one more stop to buy three sets of fairy dragon wings for our three pancakes.

At karate, he started learning green belt techniques this month. Our sifu’s sifu visited, and quinn wanted to maximize his time at the dojo to overlap with his time here. Sifu Diaz always remembers quinn each time he visits, and is so warm and friendly to all of us. He wanted to watch the kids’ activity known as jump tag (something he hadn’t experienced) before we got down to the business of belt testing. This was my turn to test, and quinn attended as a spectator, and turned out to have observed quite a lot of details about my test, in spite of sitting on the floor in the back with his face in a book. Our dojo marched in the local summerfest parade again this year, and that night rich, quinn and i watched fireworks together.

family firework gazing

family cloud gazing

In usual summer fashion, quinn spent a few days in “office camp” at my work, armed with audio books (he got caught up on wings of fire) and khan academy (he worked on programming, but also thinks he might be interested in the chemistry course, since he can see that the “balancing chemical equations” and “periodic table” units are near the beginning). He also figured out how to watch naruto episodes that aren’t found on netflix, by you tubing them in japanese and reading subtitles. I asked if he was learning any words and he said no, because he had determined that the words are all in a different order from english! Something tells me that if he is determining the order of the words, it is only a matter of time before he starts translating… i love the unexpected learning that can take place in the unstructured pockets of summer.