computer speakers and clean teeth

WELL. If you ever want a fun time at home with the family, go out and buy yourself two different sets of computer speakers. Set them up with your laptop at the kitchen table and have everybody stand or sit in the living room while you swap back and forth between the speakers. They can't know which speakers you've got plugged in at any given moment. Say, "Do you like Speaker A?....[while Ladysmith Black Mambazo sings, 'rain, rain, rain, rain, beautiful rain']...or do you like Speaker B? A..........or B?" Good conversation will ensue, including people being paranoid that they're selecting the cheapies over the nice speakers. Turns out that people choose Bose speakers over Philips five to one.

In other household news, Molly had her teeth cleaned today. She's Mom's Schnauzer that Luke lovingly calls "Little Gray Turd." No amount of insults can stop Molly from yipping day and night, which is how she has earned her nickname. Jason just emerged from the bathroom with a newly-tamed beard. I guess everyone is going for improvements lately. Other than Mom, who got her toenail ripped off a couple days ago. And Gunther, another of the dogs who is currently eating dirt out of a planter.

So I guess we're all at different points along our journeys.

A bird's eye view

of my folks' place today would've had Jason on the driveway making a plug for the engine of our little VW rabbit pickup (surrounded by the oddest assortment of vehicles ever), Dad out in the corral shoeing horses, me in the lawn trying to collect Beth's pee in a baggie, a confused Beth trying to go pee with a little bit of privacy around here, and Mom inside on the phone, listening to Brother Dave tell about his first run-in with school authorities for living there unauthorized.

We were probably thinking about the fact that Rachel, Cameron, and their friends Bryan and Lisa are on the drive here from Portland to spend the long weekend, thinking about Beth's age-related incontinence, about the coming dark storm clouds, and about dinner, which turned out to be creamed tuna made to the music of Johnny Cash. Oh, and about kicking some Epworth tail in softball last night (which means, and this does not qualify as bragging since this is so much to the surprise of everyone involved, that next week we'll be playing for the championship title!!) .

One of my favorite parts of the day was when those storm clouds had the horses running wildly about the meadow, up to the barn, back down to the meadow, separating into mini-herds and then swirling around to come together.

humanity's interconnectedness

Below are two Youtube videos I like. They seem to go together, in form and content. Jason happened across "Dark Hand and Lamplight," which is a song called "Rank Stranger" that my family, especially Grandpa Gene, sings. The singer is opening for Bonnie Prince Billy, one of our fave musicians. I saw "Women in Art" posted on the space of Jessica C.

Dark Hand and Lamplight -

Women In Art

the camper

Welp, we found a camper, our home for the next little while! We had narrowed it down to a specific model, the Northland Polar, because (A) it is very insulated (a basement model) and we'll be in potentially freezing temperatures out east, and (B) there are older ones out there and thus in our price range. We'd been looking around the northwest for a few weeks, and we found this'un via craigslist in Boise. We traveled there Saturday and arrived back home at 2 am this morning. Jason got a solid 4.5 hours of sleep before work. We haven't figured out precisely how we cut everything so close, but this seems to happen despite our best efforts.


But woo-hoo! We're ready for the big road trip! Or at least we have the raw materials to begin getting ready with. Here are a couple pictures of the whole get-up:




The trip through Idaho was gorgeous. Curvy mountain roads, tall pines, cute little towns. One highlight happened yesterday evening. We had stopped in a town in search of coffee, and we watched a dad teaching his girl (probably 8 years old) how to mow the lawn with a push-mower. She was supposed to be the main driver, and he was standing behind her sort of steering and helping, but any kinetic energy we observed was the result of his efforts, for sure. At one point, he let her take it, and the mower jutted ahead out of her control. She stood there and cried while he hugged her and encouraged her to go inside and get a drink. We could tell all of this because the mower was so loud they had to use gestures.


Speaking of drinks, getting good coffee in rural Idaho isn't as impossible as it might at first seem. A lot of towns have espresso shacks, and we were sure to hit a few on Saturday, on our way down. However, getting good coffee in rural Idaho at 7:00 pm on Sunday evening on your way back to Montana is a real chore. We got to the point of such craving that I attempted to call Mom and ask her to search the web for potential places. She'll do that for us. Mom's our living "ask jeeves" when we're away from a computer. She's rad. But it wasn't happening last night: no cell service through the mountains.


The trip so far had inspired lots of conversations about rural living, and I asked Jason at that point if he would choose rural living if it meant never having coffe. No, he said. He'd rather live in a city if it came down to that, but it wouldn't come to that, because he would be sure to stock up on beans. I like ridiculous conundrums like that, choices you'll probably never have to make, but Jason's not a big fan of them. Anyway, driving along, he had resigned himself to temporary coffee-less-ness, but I still had a frown on my face when we saw a sign for a little place called Syringa. By now I know that the syringa is the state flower, but yesterday we were mostly concerned with how familiar the town of Syringa was with coffee. They (and by they, I mean the 4 people we saw in Syringa...literally) turned out to be quite familiar. They had this delightful little mediteranean restaurant right by the highway, and they made us mochas. Sure, they used Hershey's syrup as the chocolate flavoring, but who cared? Not us. We also got an order of fish and french fries and an order of pita bread with hummus dip and eggplant dip - to go.


Then we hit the road with our unexpected delights. Jason uttered a "thank you, God" for the mochas,which launched us into a 1/2 hour discussion/argument about thanking God for such things as mochas. Jason said that yes, we should, because aren't mochas good and perfect gifts from God? I asked, "Who's to say mochas are good and perfect." We had to pause right there and realize what a dumb statement I'd made. Of course mochas are. Nevertheless, I feel we should wait to attribute other, bigger things to God, because otherwise you can get into this mindset of reading spirituality into not-necessarily-spiritual things constantly, which can lead to actually losing your mind. Jason says qualifying what you're thankful for is the faulty "Bank of Blessings" mentality, like we only have 329 blessings over the course of our lives, and we'll run out if we count 'em up too quick. Rather, Jason holds that God is the Blessed Controller of all things, which I agree with, but there are things I doubt He cares about. Unless of course these mochas, which to us are pure delight, are made from coffee in a country where people are paid only pennies for their labor, etc. etc. We finally agreed that at a bare minimum, thanking God for mochas at least means you're attempting to conscientiously live a life of gratitude, which is indeed good.


Then we realized the main reason this conversation was even happening was that we were each injesting 20 ounces of coffee. I think I can say in good conscience, "Thank God for gack'dness and road trips."

softball

Co-ed church-league softball. Now there's a series of words to strike fear into the hearts of bystanders. Co-ed! Church-league! Softball! Hmm. Ok, so maybe it doesn't sound so tough. But it sure is fun. My dad's little church has three teams in the league; the people here do love softball. I'm on a team with Dad, brother Dave (now at college - booo), my 70-year old aunt, and an assortment of others, and we are surprising ourselves and our loyal fans by kicking some hiney in the year-end tournament right now! Last night was a win that has us in the seat for a top placement. Two more games and we take it, but naturally we're coming up against the hardest teams next.

My family is into brackets. Dad always coached us girls in softball and the boys in wrestling, and he's a strategizer. There's much bracket-talk before, after, and in between games. We have the bracket for this tournament all drawn up, and we're filling it in as we go with the names of the winners and losers. Sounds so harsh. How about winners and....people who get to go home and do other things than softball with the last days of summer. Church-league softball is a staple around my folks' place, so I guess it took Jason's objective perspective to clue us in to the hilarity of the conversations: "Did St. Matthews ten-run Trinity?" "New Covenant beat the liver out of Dwelling Place." And then there's the favorite, which we happily got to use last night: "We spanked Risen Christ." Expect to hear word of our house being struck by lightening very soon.

mi madre hermosa en su jardín de la flor

that is, my beautiful mother in her wildflower garden :)

family reunion in early August

I started this entry a few weeks ago, during our family reunion, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. The deal was, my father and his three sisters, along with as many of their offspring as could make it, were together in the Flathead Valley for two weeks, for the sole purpose of going through all of the earthly belongings of Grandpa and Grandma and my Great Aunt Wilma. Grandma and Wilma actually aren't deceased yet, but they are at that stage of life where you're not sure what stage they're at. Mentally. So we touch and kiss them and hope that somehow they at least feel our love. Here's one of my favorite shots of Grandma in recent years, taken during the spring down in Arizona.



Grandma and Grandpa were world travelers. Sometime in their 60's, they decided to drive their pickup and camper from Alaska down to the very southern tip of South America, stopping off in little towns along the way to be of random help to various churches. At least once they stayed someplace for a few months to give a pastor and his wife a much-needed break to go to the States for medical treatment. Grandma and Grandpa had also lived through the Depression, so throwing anything away was seen as wasteful. They found the most bizarre ways to recycle. So, this sorting process was a huge, arduous undertaking, accented with finding treasures just about hourly, some sad and touching, and some deliriously funny. We picked momentos to take home, and set up and ran the big garage sale. The bee was our mascot; we must've had 50 stingings over the two weeks, and you can see the wildfire smoke in the pics I posted a couple weeks ago. We did also do a few little hikes and sight-seeing trips. Here's a shot from a day in Glacier Park...



Cousin Ralphie with one of the more interesting finds...



A couple phrases that caught my ear during the reunion:

• "Carolyn, have you seen Wilma's bottom teeth?"
• several times daily: "Oh look at this! Daddy and Mama brought this back from __________" (and the blank is filled in with words like India, Peru, Argentina, China, Alaska).

Then there was the incident of 10 people carrying a heavy, old pickup topper from the garage to the yard for sale. Only some people were on the outside edges of the topper where they could actually see, and others were completely underneath it. The garage was narrow, so the topper was bumping things off of shelves. People were tripping over roter tillers, dogs, each other, all the while talking each other through: "Relax, relax." "Drop it just a little." "Hop over that bucket.""Heather, run around and switch to up front." And when they got out into the yard, several people all at once said, "Hey, where are we going?" Typical of my family, believe you me. And I love them to pieces.

Grandpa (seated up front) with his three siblings, Carl, Wilma, and Harold.

new pickup

When our time here in Montana is up (namely, at the end of September), we are embarking upon a cross-country journey with Jason's mom, Barbara, and her cousin, Karen. The four of us will be taking roughly 3 weeks to get from here to the east coast, via the route of the west coast (Washington, Oregon, and California) and then Arizona and Colorado, Indiana, etc. until we get to where we're going. Jason and I then plan to spend a few months out there catching up with his side of the family and exploring that neck o' the American woods, living in a camper.


I say all of that to preface the fact that we've been looking for a crew-cab pickup and camper to make the trip with. So craigslist, ebay, the mountaintrader, and the newspaper have been our best friends these days, or at least the friends with whom we spend the most time. Jason found a pickup that met all our criteria on craigslist a couple weekends ago, so we scurried over to Portland and bought it. Sort of bought. It was the weirdest transaction; long story short, we ended up driving it home without the title and without paying the guy all the money, because of how he has got it financed. Talk about trust on both sides. But he and his wife are fair-trade coffee roasters, have like 5 little tow-headed children, went to the same college I did in Portland, and know some people we do from Whitefish. So it's all being worked out; no worries.


This thing is bright and shiny red, a freaking crew cab, longbed pickup. The only way it feels remotely like "us" is that it is a Diesel, so it gets decent mileage. Driving down Hawthorne Street in Portland after we bought it was an experience. We got the glare, man. We were the enemy of all progressives for driving such a beast. It messed with our psyches. We had to keep reminding ourselves that this is our home and transportation all in one, and it's not for forever. I don't even have a picture of it yet, save for inadvertently catching it in the background of this shot of a grasshopper, but I'm kind of glad:



Now we're on the lookout for a camper.