Author: Bryan

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Bike Tour to Leola

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Mandy and I met up with our friend Kathy this weekend for a quick bike trip to Leola. Forty-five miles or so one-way, camping next to a lake, a trip to a catfish restaurant for dinner… should be a good weekend.

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Our route was nice, mostly rural highways with a usable shoulder.  The roads weren’t flat but the hills were mostly doable.  Of course, even though the three of us rode up nearly every hill we came to, I have to post the one photo I have of Mandy and Kathy walking up a hill. Continue reading “Bike Tour to Leola”

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Backpacking with Hayduke and Isabel

Our friend Isabel just turned five, but she’s been outside a lot.  Her parents are both active, outdoor people – they both cave, and Amy runs and backpacks, and Spike hunts a lot – so Isi’s quite accustomed to sleeping in a tent, to eating noodles while sitting on rocks, to peeing in the woods.  No problem.  Isabel is comfortable in the big wide world.

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So it was no surprise that Isi’s first backpacking trip was a resounding success.  We’d been planning it for months.  We met up at Fairview campground on Friday night and did a quick car-shuttle before dropping into the Ozark Highlands Trail near Ben Hur. Continue reading “Backpacking with Hayduke and Isabel”

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Nose bleed

For some reason, Mandy gets nosebleeds occasionally.  They’re usually not a big deal, with the exception of the one major self-inflicted crash into the red pickup in the McDonald’s parking lot.  But it seems that when she gets one, she gets several of them in a few days’ time. It doesn’t seem to bother her much – they’re messy, but usually easy to control and not much more than a yucky inconvenience.

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Making himself at home

We’ve had a “FOUND PUPPY” sign up out by the busy road for two weeks now.  I’ve only received one phone call, from a woman who lost her little black pomeranian.  “I’m not sure what this dog is, ma’am, but I can tell you for sure he’s not a pomeranian.”

I brought him inside on the first night and slept on the couch with him, since it was chilly and there were thunderstorms. I just didn’t feel right about letting the little guy stay outside by himself. Now he stays outside during the day, while we’re gone, but spends his evenings in the kitchen and sleeps inside, too. Continue reading “Making himself at home”

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Tent Cleaning

Seeing as how this blog’s name is “Past Tents”, you shouldn’t be surprised to find out that we are frequent tent USERS but we’re not very good about maintenance. We tend to leave our tents crammed into their stuff sacks for weeks after a camping trip, without airing them out or cleaning them at all.

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Finally, we had enough of stinky tents and washed all four of them this afternoon. We scrubbed them down with soapy water, rinsed them, and even soaked each piece in Mirzyme to get rid of that wet-tent smell. We hung our strange laundry on the backyard line to dry in the breeze. Worked like a charm.

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Snow Day!

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It’s a snow day!  The snow began to fall in the middle of Sunday afternoon, and by dark we had six or eight inches of white powder.  I tried to take a silent bedtime walk in the quiet blanket of snow, but instead my walk because a sort of proving ground, a laughing kinetic experiment.  Yes, they CAN ride polo bikes and municycles in the snow. Continue reading “Snow Day!”

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I Heart Hydrocodone

I used to have great teeth.  And then they absolutely went to shit.  (This happened around the time Mandy was born, so I’ve always blamed pregnancy and nursing.  I’m not sure if this has any foundation in fact, or if it’s just imaginative fault-finding.)

I kept up with dental work for awhile.  But then there were the single-mommy-with-no-dental-insurance years, and it just wasn’t possible to take care of everything.

So, now that I have good insurance, I’ve been working on getting my teeth fixed.  Last year, we did lots of cleaning and filling and a ridiculously complicated root canal.  This year’s big project is to remove teeth that can’t be saved.  Friday, I went to the oral surgeon and had four baddies cut out.

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CRF New Years

This is Bryan’s seventh New Years at Hamilton Valley, the Cave Research Foundation’s facility at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.  For Mandy and I, it’s the fifth New Years.  It’s become a sort of fixture in our family schedule.  Mandy makes a big deal about having just the right kind of sparkling grape juice, which she drinks right from the bottle at the New Year’s ‘party’ with our friends.

This year, for the first time, our family was asked to handle kitchen duties for one day.  We got up early to cook breakfast for about 40 hungry cavers.  Then Mandy and I got ready to go caving, and Bryan stayed above ground to cook garlic chicken, rice pilaf, and the best lemon pie in the world.

For the first time, this year (because of newly revised guidelines) Mandy’s old enough to cave with regular survey teams in Mammoth Cave. (She went on a trip to Roppel a couple of years ago, but that was a special one-time deal.)  So in addition to her usual long visits with friends, and helping a bit in the kitchen, and hanging around the edges of conversations with people she admires, she actually got to go caving two days in a row.  She was a happy, happy girl. Continue reading “CRF New Years”

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Christmas 2011

We had a good Christmas weekend at our house.  We slept late several days in a row, and we ate Chinese food at two different restaurants.  We went on a long bike ride with a friend.  It’s true that there were lots of presents – we worked together to choose and send gifts to family and friends, and when Mandy got home from her trip to Tulsa, we took turns opening gifts from other family members and friends, and gifts for us from each other.

At our house, Christmas isn’t a religious holiday.  And while we do like presents, we try hard not to focus on them.   We celebrate Christmas by taking the time to stop everything else we’re doing and be with the people we love.  We drink eggnog together and we lay in a pile on the couch, reading, for hours and hours, because it is Christmas, and because these are the people we care most about in the world, and because what we want is to be here, with them, in this warm house, always.