The Land of Smelly Water

Philoboy and I took a little day trip to the Chickasaw National Recreation Area. Back when I was a kid and my family camped there, it was called Platt National Park.  And it was stinky back then. Course that may have been the mildew in the big green canvas tent we used, a relic from WWII.

There are several nice trails around the Lake of the Arbuckles, well maintained, and easy walking.

CNRA has several natural springs in the area, full of minerals. It's by the town of Sulphur, if that gives you a hint. The water is 65 degrees year round, and crystal clear. It looked inviting, it made music, it was wonderful.

It didn't seem as odiferous as I remembered. Only one spring had a strong odor and taste. Buffalo Springs and Antelope Springs feed the Travertine Creek area, and create these wonderful deep, cold, clear blue-green pools.  I have trouble getting my mind around the fact these springs just keep...springing. Antelope bubbles out from under a rock, Buffalo seeps up though a large gravel pit.  And yes, I understand how the water cycle works, but still... it just keeps coming out.

We visited the nature center at the park.  This guy is an opportunist, if I ever saw one. Hey you!  Where's the original owner of that mobile home?!

And this one looks a little tipsy.  No more partying on the plains, dude!

Whether you call it Chicksaw Recreation Area, Platt National Park, or just Sulphur springs, this is a great place for a day (or two) of adventure.

     Happy Trails, and may you smell adventure in the air!

Meeting Matilda

This is Matilda.  That's not her real name, her real name is Barred Owl, aka Hoot Owl.  The Park Service folks who feed her call her Owly. But I think she looks like a Matilda.

Matilda lives in a cage at the Nature Center of Chickasaw National Recreation Area. She lives there because once upon a time, as Matilda was swooping through the air chasing a mouse, she was hit by a car and broke her wing.  She won't be able to swoop anymore, so her mice are delivered by carriers wearing a Park Service uniform.


I felt guilty that the chatty people in the Nature Center were keeping Matilda from her daily nap.  She has a nice napping place.  Low lighting, soft nesting material.

But Matilda was very gracious about the disturbance to her sleep, and came over for a visit. She came very close and communed sleepily through the wire for awhile.  Looking at Matilda's eyes was the epitome of the word 'fathomless', as in bottomless and unable to comprehend. 

I wonder what she thinks about in there all day.  Does she remember the thrill of outflying the scampering mice? Can she recall the scent of the cedar trees?  Or is she just happy to waddle around, playing nice with the visitors and waiting for mouse a la' platter? I wasn't able to fathom her answer...

All things...

All things bright and beautiful

All creatures great

and small...

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

             
              Text: Cecil Frances Alexander



              Music: 17th cent. English melody; arr. by Martin Shaw

Contemplating the weekend

This is Jessica.
I just spent another excellent weekend with Jessica and some other new friends. We were brought together by a weekend class at the University, and I will be forever grateful that we were.

At first glance we look like unlikely partners in crime. Jessica teaches at the University of Oklahoma. I teach at a community college in Kansas. She's smart, young, and talented. I'm old enough to be her mother. (I'm getting to the age where I could be Methuselah's mother, but I digress).

But in class we discovered some common grounds that connected me to this person from another era.

Jessica's a shooter.  Of guns.  She packs a gun for bear when she's hiking in Alaska.

You gotta love someone like that. (Or at least give them a healthy respect!!) We share a delight of pushing social envelopes and a dislike for stupidity brought on by laziness.  Jessica is the friend I wish I'd found when I was in college.  Except she wasn't born yet then.

And then there's Larry. Larry was the third member of our team, and one of the most creative people I have ever met.  Larry has spiderman tendencies, which means our group got photos from the roof that no one else got.

I thought Larry was cool even before I knew he had a gas mask.

Sometimes friends slip through our fingers like the cool water of a mountain stream, delightful at the moment, something we want to remember forever, but fleeting, and hard to reclaim.

I wish my new friends all the best, and thank you for a delightful, memorable, fun-filled weekend. It was a special time, and we have the pictures to prove it.

I like yellow

I like yellow.  It makes me a jolly good fellow.

I like it sunny and bright, reminds me of sunlight.

I like yellow, in great big lots and in tiny touches around the house. It goes with my sunny disposition. Or at least, it helps keep me from growling.

In all shapes and forms, in all hues and shades.

I also like cows, but the two are not related. I like cow meditative state. I could be a cow.  Don't go there.  I'd like to be a yellow cow, contentedly chewing my cud, contemplating the state of the world and how little I am responsible for it. A butter yellow cow.

Oooh, I might have digressed. So, since I love yellow, I like this new KaleidoScape.

Its big yellow dose keeps from being morose!!

                     Even the cows liked it. 

National Hunting and Fishing Day

Today is National Hunting and Fishing Day. Yes, it's a real day, check it out at National Hunting and Fishing Day.  It celebrates wildlife management and conservation of outdoor resources, and honors and educates those who love to hunt and fish.

I would like to present my own honorarium of outdoorsmen (and women) today- some of my favorite family fishing and outdoor photos of 2010. Not all my favorites, I'm pretty sure you don't have 6 weeks to spare. It was hard, very hard, to narrow it down.  I went through an entire bag of M & M's trying to decide.  Or maybe I found a few photos while I was plowing my way through the orange and black halloween ones.  Sometimes causal relations confuse me.



You know my motto: "There's an outdoor activity for everyone, and everyone should get outdoors."  I really believe that, and think that whether it's roller blading, walking down the street and waving to the neighbors, deer hunting, fishing, or lying in the hammock with a good book, it all counts as outdoor activity.  It's good for your body and soul.  It's brain cleansing. Even a desperate housewife can do it.

So here's my family in the great outdoors, mostly fishing, sorta hunting, and always finding their niche in outdoor activity.


Water ballet.  Or more like, pre-water ballet.

Cousin Jed always hooks something.  It just ain't necessarily always a fish...

One of my personal favorite outdoor activities, backpacking!  And one of my favorite persons to pack with!

Everyone has their own fishing style.  Some are just a little more laid back than others.

This weirdness might be hunting gone amuck!

I hope you celebrate today, just because it's today and you're you and the sun came up.

                           Happy Trails!

Getting Ready

Tomorrow is a special day.  Not as good as Christmas, but pretty important if you consider yourself a hunter or fisherman. A significant day. Christmas is a holiday.  Correction, Christmas is THE HOLIDAY.

If you look at the Book of the Month page, it gives you a hint.  A small, possibly obscure hint. But it also reviews a good book, so it's a win-win or win-neutral deal. This is the book...

Guthrie, Oklahoma will recognize 'the day' with a wildlife expo.  The women of B.O.W will be there promoting outdoor activities for women.  What's B.O.W., you ask?  Check out the Outdoor News Page. This whole blog is kind of a treasure hunt, isn't it? I feel that way about finding my shoes, most days.

The Whee will attend and shoot her bow, try to catch a fish, eat a lot of junk food and Indian Tacos, and probably come home with a cool shirt.  Not because it's a special day, but because she's the Whee.

Advent of adventure

Philoboy Action Figure has a problem. He's getting impatient. He wants to go. He wants to go NOW.

C'moooonnn!  Let's go!  Hurry up!

Wait PAF, I have to finish this class first.
Class, schmass.  There's adventure waiting.  Look, put your stuff in here and let's go!

PAF, where shall we go?  What shall we take?
 I dunno, I'll climb up here and take a look around. Reconnaisance, you know. You can take that Philo guy if you want.  Pack extra food. I like trail mix with a lot of M & M's.

Well, what do you see? Any ideas?
Over that way! I think I see an adventure over there.  Let's just go that way and see what we find.  Bring a compass.

Okay, I'll start making a list of supplies.
List schmist!  Put on your pack and let's go, we're burning daylight!

Wait for it, wait for it... 

A drop of golden honey

One of my favorite childhood memories is of my father suiting up in his beekeeper regalia to check the hives or harvest the honeycomb. The broad-brimmed hat covered in netting that fell to his shoulders, the long sleeved shirt and long gloves.



We would wait impatiently for him to bring in a bucket of the dripping chunks of comb, some of it darker because it was older, all of it gooey and sweet. We would sample the golden drops and try to determine what the bees had been feasting upon: alfalfa? clover? peach blossoms, perhaps?


We would spread the amber goodness on our toast, drop it into tea, or, if mother wasn't looking, eat it with a spoon straight out of the jar.


Then chewing the waxy comb, we formed it into fantastic shapes with our teeth and tongues until we could maul it no longer.


Beekeeping was only a hobby for my father, so as the hives aged and his interest waned, our jobs as honey testers faded away. I now seek out "homegrown" honey at the farmers' market, and ask the vendors not to tell me what they feed the bees. The mystery of that first taste is part of the allure. I long to have a few bee boxes in my own backyard... Wouldn't that be sweet?

The not-so-sweet smell of home

After wild weekends of kayaking (Philoboy) and pajama partying (me), Philo and I have met up back home in Kansas.  Where there was no food in the fridge.  No milk.  No juice.  Not even any crackers in the pantry.

A pungent odor greeted us at the front door, and that odor gave us a knock out punch when we opened the refrigerator.

Because this is a family blog and not a horror show, I am not sharing photos.  Dead, decayed, slimy, melted down to nothing fishing worms.  Left from 3 weeks ago.

Oh, but that's not all, for just $19.95 you also get this Tupperware container of no-longer-metabolizing helgrammites.  Helgrammites?  Nasty creatures found under rocks in the river.  Bite your finger off, they will. Fight like crazy, they will.  Stink to high heaven, they do.

You'd think that since they're in containers, in a cool environment, it wouldn't be that bad. You'd be wrong. Dead wrong.  Slimy, mushy, stinky, grossly wrong.

I don't think I have enough baking soda.  Add that to the list of milk, crackers, and air freshener, will ya?

Adventure scraps

Not that I have anything against second grade projects, mind you; I have a tub of them collected over the years.  I just don't want mine to be one of them.

Her most recent acquistion of scrapbook paper made me wish ever more strongly that this was my forte. This book of papers is called Once Upon a Time, and it is gorgeous.

Knights, princesses, dragons, fairies, mermaids, castles, in short, it's about Adventure with a capital A.

It's the window that a woman with wanderlust looks through and imagines all the fascinating things beyond the next bend in the river.

It's the treasure map that leads you on an adventure, where you discover the journey was the treasure.

It's so beautiful that instead of trying to create something beautiful from it, I'm using a single sheet as art.  I'm going to frame this piece, and hang it on my door, when I am ....

Happy Trails!

Girls Night In!

This was the third weekend in a row of OU home games.  The new is starting to wear off a bit, fighting all the traffic, restaurants full, the occasional driver who forgets this is a privilege, not an entitlement.

Philoboy was off with the boys on a float trip in Arkansas, so it was perfect weekend for a girls night in-avoid the crazy fans, stay in our pj's all weekend, order in chinese.  It doesn't get much better than that- if you have to stay in, of course.

So we start with matching jammies: same pants, different color shirts.  We're too cute.

Check out the Whee's fortune. "You desire to discover new frontiers. It's time to travel." It could not possibly be more perfect for these outdoor girls...

In the meantime, we're only traveling from the food to the television.

Happy Trails, and may your adventures bring you good fortune!

It's all gourd

My early morning jaunt to the farmers' market turned into more of a photo op than a shopping spree.  I was too fascinated by the colors, shapes, and varieties of squash and gourds to think about feeding the family.

All sizes and fantastic shapes!  The little yellow one resembles a space ship. I'm going to pile a few on the table just to amuse me in the same way a kaleidoscope does. And yes, there is a pink one!

Wait- how did these guys get in there?  Do they count as squash?  I'm eggplant ignorant, I'm afraid. My enthusiasm for eating them was squashed some time ago.

These little guys remind me of targets for skeet shooting. Pull!!

What a rainbow of colors and patterns.  Simply gourdeous!!  (ouch, sometimes I really can't help myself).

Wow- this one needs moisturizer every day, and maybe some wart cream.

Speckles, splatters, splines, smooths, crooknecks, there's an entire patois of gourd vending that I never knew existed.

What a bright and shiny way to start my day.  Perhaps I should start looking for produce to put on the table as food.  Wait, pumpkin pie, pumpkin bread, pumpkin butter; I'm good in the gourd section.

  Happy Trails, and may your love of adventure never get squashed!!

Recycled clean

On a shopping safari with my mom yesterday, I found a few items to put away for Christmas. And yes, shopping is very much like a safari.  It requires preparation and gear: comfy walking shoes, a definite list of items, a goal of which savannas (stores), and getting out of the house early to bag the good stuff.

There are predators and prey. The prey are the items on my list; I detest recreational shopping.  The predators are all those people competing for parking spaces as if there were only two items left in the entire mall.  I really think it should be legal to carry at least a paint ball gun for times like this.

Once I ingested two Dr. Peppers to regulate my breathing back to normal after the competitive parking event, we enjoyed digging through the bags to look at our loot and compare kills.  I mean gifts.

I'm most happy with these items, which are intended for holiday happiness, but might get used in my kitchen before that. 

Spaghetti scrubs.  Made from peach pits (gentle) and corn cobs (course), when you pull them from the package they separate into pasta-like strands.  The more you use them the softer they become. And they biodegrade.  Is this great recycling or what!?!?!

You do have to exercise some caution- they are abrasive, so even the gentler peach pit ones should not be used on non-stick surface pans. These babies make Mother Nature proud!

  Happy Trails, and may your adventures be just peachy!!

Fall wrapped in foil

There's a reason Daughter #1 is my favorite child- she buys me chocolate. Unsolicited, no holiday required, just-because bags of chocolate.  Bags, I say, bags!!

Hershey's kisses, special editions for fall, pumpkin spice and caramel apple.  Oh. My. Goodness.  I have a system so that it's not so obvious I'm a disgusting pig about scarfing the whole bag.  I put a few out on the table...

and then like the cheetah going after the unsuspecting antelope, I find the one that's away from the herd.  The one not blending into the decorative, shiny group.  See it?  Right next to the bowl? All by its little lonesome?

Got it!  I melted a caramel apple one in my hot chocolate last night. Heaven!!  And because they're so pretty, they work as a centerpiece.  Edible decor!
Until the bowl's empty.... 

  Happy Trails, and may all your adventures be sweet!!