Yesterday we celebrated Cooper’s first birthday, which was actually last Thursday. A week ago I got a multimedia text from his mom, Erica, containing a photo of him taking his first steps. Clearly we’re still a work in progress here. I gotta give it to him, though: within seconds he was back up and trying again.
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These Bolivian Rainbow Pepper plants were the first things I got really, truly excited to grow. The first two cultivations never even germinated, most of the third was eaten by birds, and this plant here almost died so many times, and took so long to get big enough to put in the ground, that I’d honestly given up all hope. But today, when I stepped outside and saw this sucker on the vine, I almost crapped my shorts. It’s pretty damn exciting, and I hereby proclaim my thumb "green."
I’m stoked to see this guy’s progression, too, because they start out purple, then turn yellow, and then finally, red, at which time they’re ready to pick and eat (hence the name). Lots more photos of this one will be forthcoming.
In other garden news. I’ll be away next week on vacation, and I’ve solicited the help of some local friends not only to water the whole business, but also to keep everything harvested. The cucumber plants, for example, will shut down if more than a few of the plants get ripe, as they get a signal that they’ve created enough mature seeds that they no longer need to fight for survival against the brutal Oklahoma summer.
It’s a pretty big task. Just to give you some perspective, here’s what the patch looked like on April 25, ten days after the official last frost:
And here it is today:
Today I picked our first ripe cantaloupe. There are at least two dozen more just like it:
These things have taken forever to ripen, and, had I the chance to do it over again, I’d give this cantaloupe another 24 hours on the vine to get really good and orange inside. It’s edible (and DELICIOUS), but it just could’ve used more time. I just get so excited! The cucumbers have been going insane - getting out of hand might be a better term for how well they’ve been doing, actually - and I’ve spent a lot of time in the kitchen preparing various iterations of cucumber salad.
Brian had to take THAT photo of me because that’s how he usually finds me - in the kitchen, slicing cucumbers for some recipe or other. The best one I’ve found is my friend Laurie’s; the quickest is one I whipped up really fast - you just slice up a cucumber, drizzle it with olive oil, then salt & pepper it, then pour a whole lot of rice vinegar over the top. Sweet Baby Jesus it’s good. And that’s not blasephemy; I thank Sweet Baby Jesus every time I eat it, especially when I have some roma grape tomatoes to add to the whole mix:
Oh, and I apologize for the lack of Sam Fridays this week. He hasn’t really done anything of note lately. But we’re preparing to go on vacation next week, so I imagine you’ll be getting quite the stories as the time nears!
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I love when these things start to bloom, even though it always signals that summer is about to get seriously brutal.
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This is a sample page from the recently-released comic book by Oklahoma County Commissioner Brent Rinehart, produced for his re-election bid. Rinehart is some piece of work; this fall he’ll be tried on felony campaign fraud charges. You can read the entire comic book here (links to a .pdf) and some background over at NewsOK. (via dustbury). It’s one of the better mental illness pieces I’ve read in awhile; because, as you know, elections to county commission are actually, secretly, battles of Satan versus God.
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In just over a week my family and I are piling into a car - or a couple of cars, we haven’t decided - and driving to west-central Colorado for a week of relaxation. I think I speak for all of us when I say that THIS VACATION IS SO DESPERATELY NEEDED HOLY GOD IT CAN’T COME FAST ENOUGH.
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I couldn’t provide adequate caption for this photo, so instead I’m going to reprint some words of Rich Mullins’ below:
"There are those skies - skies stretched so tight you just know they’re about to pop - skies in whose seamless blue reaches you hear the snap of sails full of wind, sails moving ships like these skies move you, like these skies move oceans, worlds, time… skies stretched tight like balloons at birthday parties, full of breath, light like helium, so light you have to tie them down.
There are skies like that. Skies so light they look like they could easily be lifted away, so light they seem almost to lift you, to suck you out of the grip of gravity.
But it is the sun they lift, these skies - skies into whose perfectly arched and balanced heads any sun would rise and find room therein to shine. These skies stay poised, enormously gentle, like giants across whom children and crawl and play - giants who are strong enough to feel the touch of these little ones and not move one muscle to risk unbalancing or frightening them.
There are skies like that. You have to look up to see them. You cannot find them beneath you or within you. They are "out" there… they are "up" there.
There are these skies.
Skies stretched so tight you just know you’re about to pop standing beneath them. Your lungs may burst from breathing their sizable air - air from their cool heights so tall they scrape the footings of heaven - skies so pure and strong that God built His New Jerusalem on their back. And they reach up toward that Holy City like Romeo scaling the forbidden wall beneath Juliet - skies that go endlessly, nearly forever with the beauty of her face, the quiet, unshaken gaze of her eyes, skies alive with all the virility and tenderness of young love - skies as ancient as time, as innocent as babies held in the Hands of Eternity.
And I was trying to think of how I could encourage you - of what I could say to spur you on, just trying to come up with something. And then I was overcome.
And you might say, "but it’s just a sky" - but you could say that only if you’d never seen it. And you might say, "Oh, the sky is just a metaphor and he’s really overcome by something spiritual, like, say, the love of God." But if the sky is only a metaphor, it is God’s metaphor, and if you’d look up - if you’d just look up…well, I haven’t the words, but…
There are those skies - skies stretched so tight you just know they’re about to pop…"
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It’s really going crazy now. Does anyone want any cucumbers? The tomato, unfortunately, is mine.
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So the other big thing that happened this weekend was that Sam got a test. We’re headed up to Colorado for a week later this month, where we’re renting a cabin that is pet friendly. I had really, really wanted to bring Sam along for this vacation, but he’d never spent any prolonged period of time in the car, and given how excited he usually gets when going for a ride, and the fact that our old, stupid vet had told us not to let him get too excited, I was leary.
But, last week, Sam had a checkup, and the doc said that his heart was fine, go ahead, get him excited, let him run and exercise. He’ll love it. That Friday, we were planning to head out to the Panhandle, and we were taking two cars, the Flynns and us, and they were bringing Hera along.* So I figured it was as good a time as any to test Sam out - if things didn’t work, if he didn’t do well on the long trip, at least it was a short one, comparatively. If he did fine, then at least we’d know.
Sam likes the car:
He was very excited to get to go on the trip. He did really well on the drive up. We kept the windows open a crack so that he could stick his nose out and sniff things as we went by them, and he loved this. After awhile, though, it got too hot for anyone in the car to have the windows cracked, and Sam, like a good boy, laid down in the backseat and just rode along.
He did really, really well the whole way up, as did Hera. Both dogs were so excited every time we let them out to go pee that they actually forgot, for quite some time, that they had to go at all. Particularly funny was when we let them out in Boise City, and Hera decided she NEEDED TO SMELL EVERY INCH OF THAT TOWN OMG.
No less hilarious was Sam pulling me and Brian all over creation. When we stopped in Woodward to let the dogs do their business, Hera and Sam dragged us almost a block away before finally going, and even then, they only did it reluctantly, like ,"if I pee, I have to go back in the car! OMG THE CAR!"
When we finally arrived at the Bed and Breakfast, we found it populated with some other dogs for Sam and Hera to befriend. One of them, Angel, was a dalmation who was mostly averse to Sam’s amorous advances, if you know what I mean, and who snapped at him every time he got close. Another, however, was Star, who was just really friendly and sweet:
Aside from their new friends, Hera and Sam were in Dog Heaven at the farm. Not only were there all kinds of new things to smell, it seems that Sam’s dads didn’t feel the need to keep him constantly on the leash while he was there. He had plenty to occupy himself, and spent a lot of time exploring:
We did leave them in our rooms when we went out to the Three-State Marker at night, and anytime we were away from the ranch, so as not to bother our hosts with their care. But Sam seemed to like it all right in our room, too:
The afternoon after our hike to the top of Black Mesa was mostly spent lazing around in the air conditioning. Once the sun started to go down, however, and the heat waned some, Brian and I took Sam for a walk on the nature trail directly behind the B&B. I kept the leash in my pocket, just in case, but Sam was having such a good time and mostly staying close to us, and so I decided we’d let him walk freely. Which is what he did. He mostly stayed close to us at first:
But after awhile he started getting braver:
When he’d get too far away we’d call to him, and he’d come running back, sorta reluctantly, only to whip around and take off in a different direction:
Boy, he sure did like it out there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sam happier than those two days we spent at Black Mesa. He was into everything:
When it was time to head back up to the Bunkhouse, we called Sam to come, and he ran ahead of us, where we figured he’d wait patiently while we opened the gate and let him through, like he had before. Something had come over him, though, his indominable dog spirit, I suppose, and my sweet, timid dog went squeezing through the barbed-wire fence. Brian and I shouted, and watched with horror as he made his way through that barbed wire, emerging safe and sound on the other side. We checked him for scratches or injuries, but there were none. He had, however, left a present on the fence:
At some point on the walk, Sam did slow down enough that I could capture this photo, which is going to be framed somewhere in our house in the coming week. I love it so much; how awesome is our little family?
Or perhaps the black and white version?
*I’ve been told to say that, for months, I’ve been misspelling Hera’s name; I’ve been calling her Harrah, which is wrong. It’s Hera, like the wife of Zeus. For that, I apologize, and I offer the following: I’ve searched this site for misspellings and corrected them, and here’s photo of lovely Hera’s lovely face. She, like Sam, was crazy happy the whole time we were in the Panhandle. She and her parents went on to Colorado from there, where I also imagine she had a wonderful time:
| The Great Oklahoma Road Trip 2008, Sam Fridays | Comments (5) |
