Definitely Not a Happy Camper

What is with all the camping talk lately?

It feels like everywhere I turn, people are talking about camping.  The weather turns warm and people decide to eschew their comfortable, bug-free houses and sleep outside.  Scratch that- they drive hours and hours away from their comfortable, bug-free houses and then they sleep outside.


Here's what springs to my mind anytime someone mentions the word "camping:"

Being excited about getting to sleep separately from the rest of my family in a two-person tent (my dad is a camping purist; no pop-ups or campers for us, oh no; if you're not in an uncomfortable, leaky tent with nary an air mattress in sight, then you're not really camping) with the friend I'd brought along (pretty sure the fact that I always got to bring a friend on our annual camping trips was my mom's way of keeping me from revolting; she's the polar opposite of my dad in that her favorite place to camp is the Holiday Inn).  We'd borrowed the special, just-Kim-and-me tent from our family friend Teresa.  I'm pretty sure I had visions of something like this:


[UPDATE:  Derek read this post the day after I published it, and wasted no time in texting to assure me that if I didn't remove the photo I originally had posted below- of the twins in a pup tent in the original The Parent Trap movie- we would be sued and burned on a pyre, probably at the same time.  I was scared to do a Google search for "girls in tent" for a stock photo, and besides, the Hayley Mills picture is really what's in my head.  So I decided to craft a near-exact duplicate via Microsoft Paint.  Behold, then click on this link so that you can compare how awesomely similar my version and the original photo are.  You're welcome.]

You should definitely click to embiggen.

But what I got instead was a tent that absolutely reeked of dog poop.  You seriously couldn't walk within ten feet of that thing, let alone crawl inside and cocoon yourself in the Plastic House of Crap.  So instead, we decided to sleep in an open-air cart-trailer-thing that a fellow crazy camping family had hauled behind their van.  The problem with the cart was that it was on two wheels, meaning it was always sharply canted one way or the other when unhitched.  Because we're brilliant, we first tried sleeping head down, but it turns out it's difficult to sleep when clouds of mosquitos are swarming your face because of all the blood rushing to your head.  We next tried feet down, but gravity decided to show us who was boss and our sleeping bags kept slipping out of the cart.  This all seemed vaguely funny to a couple high schoolers, but we stopped laughing when the severe storm- featuring pouring rain, lightning, and a tornado- ripped through the area.  By that night we'd decided to just sleep in the minivan, which was dry and way better at muffling the sounds of our impending doom than flimsy tent walls.



Know what else I think of?  Trying to canoe with a different friend on a different family camping trip, but being unable to because a boy in our party decided that it would be just hilarious to spend forever (read: probably about five minutes) trying to tip our canoe.  And it was all fun and games until someone decided to jab her canoe paddle into someone's else face to make him stop.  No means no, Brian.  (In his defense, Adolescent Me did this weird thing where she'd laugh and use a jocular tone of voice even while saying things like, "Stop it," and "Cut it out."  So going from thinking everyone was having fun to having his parents try to separate his lips from his braces was probably a little bewildering.  My bad.)



You can therefore understand why I find this article, Stuff White People Like: Camping, absolutely and unequivocally hilarious.  Like, can't-breathe-while-I'm-reading-it hilarious.



Please tell me none of you are going camping this summer.

Adelaide's Having Yet Another Birthday

On my children's birthdays, I like to torture myself by looking at their past birthday photos.

 Ah, yes.  Adelaide's first birthday.  I went all crazy-first-time-mom on her and didn't let her have any sweets for that first year, with the exception of that one time her Daddy let her have a single taste of his ice cream cone and I half-convinced myself she was going to get instant diabetes.  

Because of all that, by the time her first birthday rolled around, she had (almost) never had any sweets, and had certainly never had the pleasure of tasting the deliciousness that is a Funfetti cupcake.  

Allow me to narrate.

Wondering just what this mysterious object her mother is unwrapping for her is because the previously mentioned overprotective psychopath has been withholding cake for her entire life.

But hey, she's brave.  She'll dive face-first into this thing that looks and smells nothing like the nasty pureed vegetables Mommy's been stuffing her with.

At this point she sat up, a little confused, because there's obviously crap all over her face, and she hadn't yet tasted it.  

Shortly thereafter, however, she drummed up the courage to take a little taste.  Then the feeding frenzy began.

I really wish the sound were better on this video, because what you can't hear is the crazy nostril-panting she's doing the whole time she's cramming that cupcake into her mouth (but you can certainly hear that over- achieving diva bird), and what you don't see is that every so often I have to wipe cake and frosting off her nose; she refused to take the cupcake away from her face in order to engage in such meaningless exercises as breathing.

I was looking for a decent recent photo of Adelaide to stick in here, but this is how she spends half her time, anyway.  I'm calling it good enough.

Happy 7th Birthday, Adelaide!

Tulips!

My previous post was sad, depressing, and dreary.  To compensate, let's talk about something bright, cheerful, and uplifting!

My tulips are blooming!

Aside from a few stems that snapped under the weight of the snow, our recent freak snowstorm had little noticeable effect on the flowers.  Thank the good Lord.

By the bye, did you know that for a time as a child Audrey Hepburn subsisted primarily on tulip bulbs during WWII in her occupied home of Holland to avoid starvation?  It was the one interesting fact I was able to glean from an otherwise dull biography of the actress.  I tell you what, it takes raw talent to make her life seem so boring, but that author did it.  Terribly impressive.  And impressively terrible.

  

Let's take a little tulip tour around the yard, shall we?

Red Impressions!

Pink Impressions!

Orange Impressions!

More Orange Impressions!  I think!

I forget!  

No idea!

Viktor propping up the almost-spent hyacinths and more Red Impressions!

Doesn't this picture give you instant daydreams about our favorite Viking gnome skulking through the flowers, singing "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" in a creepy falsetto, decapitating demon rabbits with nary a break in stride or melody?

No?  Just me?

The new grill/smoker.  Derek calls it "our" new grill the same way I call them "our" flowers.  

I wasn't real gung-ho on getting a new one at first, but I guess I understand why he got tired of taking his life in his hands every time he had to wrestle the lid off our old, rusty, hinge-fell-off grill.  Apparently those lids get super hot when you cook in the contraptions.  Who knew, right?  It was a hand-me-down grill (or as I liked to call it, our heirloom grill) that had surpassed its life expectancy, anyway.  

Derek's excited about his new, masculine cooking toy, and its found a perfect home on top of the old cistern.  Sure, we had to dig up some lilies that grew right under the side charcoal-fire-holder-thingy (that's a technical term), but they really should have been divided long ago.  I separated them into seven sizable clumps and scattered them around the yard.  

And guess what?  Our last snowman finally finished melting yesterday!  

Please Disregard My Last Post

You remember.  The one about spring?


Today is May 3rd.  The third of May.

I suppose I shouldn't complain.  My tulip buds do have a little color.


See?

In related news, I learned that planting spring bulbs on either side of the front steps may not have been the best idea.  Atticus "helped" shovel off the front porch and steps, flattening the tulips and hyacinths that weren't already buried in heavy, slushy snow.  

I am so. sick. of snow.

On a brighter note:  Cassi Renee suggested a magical potion by the name of "Liquid Fence" that could possibly save my future tulips from the demon vermin that inhabit our back yard.  After I read that comment the other day, I may or may not have gone a little Rain Man and paced around the house, chanting "Liquid Fence.  Liquid Fence.  Liquid Fence," to set it permanently in my head.  

I have not gone to the garden store to get any yet, because it started snowing Wednesday night and didn't stop until late this morning, and I was a little afraid that if I stepped inside Earl May and saw all the blooming flowers I would burst into tears.  

They're probably pretty used to that kind of thing at this point, though.

Spring!

Spring.  Thank you Jesus, Spring.

I've seriously had to hold myself back from writing a blog post every single day about how much I hate rabbits.  The above photo is just a small example of the carnage that has been inflicted upon my flowerbeds by rabbits.  

My grandma has offered to buy me a rabbit trap, but... then what?  She says that if you mix crushed ibuprofen with cat food, they'll eat it and be poisoned.  But what do I do with the bodies?  The only solution I've come up with is throwing them on the fire pit and burning them in effigy.  Any other (slightly more reasonable) solutions?  I mean, solutions as to what to do with piles of dead rabbit bodies and/or other ways to rid my yard of them?  And before you suggest human hair, take a closer look at that photo up there; that fuzzy brownish stuff in the middle is Derek's hair.  It obviously didn't work.

Anyway.

I also found this on top of our fence:

Robin eggs!

And I found this at the playground:

Atticus!

Well.  I didn't actually find him there.  I walked there with him.

I'm just going to focus on all these things, and not on the snow forecasted for tomorrow.

Meet the Newest Member of our Family

His name is Victor.

(A quick aside:  My hyacinths are blooming!  Huzzah!)

Victor enjoys pillaging seaside villages, color-coordinating his outfits with the flowers around him, and brandishing his broadsword at greedy rabbits.  I hope.

I'm also pretty sure he OD's on caffeine every morning.

Painfully awake.

It's somewhat rare for Derek and me to so enthusiastically agree on home (or lawn) decor, but Victor was just kitschy enough for me and just Viking-y enough for Derek; thus, V's adoption was sealed.

I was a little leery of Victor the Viking at first, perched there on top of one of our bookcases throughout the winter.  I first read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe at a rather formative age, and have since wondered about every statue I've come across.  What this thing once alive?  Has it been frozen by a cold-loving, Christmas-hating villainess?  

Eventually, however, I got used to Victor's twitchy-eyed stare, and the two of us began conversing on a regular basis.  And by "conversing," I mean I rambled and V listened.  Victor is an excellent listener.

It was a long winter, okay?  Give me a break.

Today's his first day outside.  Am I worried he'll get lonely out there all by himself tonight?  Of course not, hahahaha, that would be crazy, hahahaha!   

On a completely unrelated note, look what I just found on the internets:

She's THIRTY BUCKS (and by "she," I mean Victoria; I've already named her), so there's pretty much no way she'll find a home around here, which is a shame, as she looks like an ideal companion for our Victor, not to mention the fact that she could bash garden vermin with her watering can and bake little garden gnome cookies for visitors.  

It's just as well, I suppose.  I can see myself going totally out of control on this one and adding Viking gnome children and grandchildren.  Then we'd be "those people" in our neighborhood.  If we're not already.

Update:  According to Derek, his name is spelled "Viktor." As in "Viktor the Vikings mascot."  Of course.

Things I've Learned Today

• Rabbits are fast.

• Bricks are heavy.

• I still throw like a girl.