Vacation by numbers

I'm back. Here's an irrelevant, Time-sidebar-y rundown:

Drive time to destination: 10 minutes
Pages read while there (various books): 600 +
Total miles of trail hiked during stay: approximately 8
Cumulative minutes spent watching juvenile cottontail rabbits: 30
Total rabbits observed: 5
Calls to children: 3
Times I missed my kids: 1
Times my 3-year old asked his dad about me while I was gone: 1
People I had to pick up after: 0
Messes I had to clean up: 0
Televisions in room: 0
Computers in room: 0
Amount of news received: 0
Windows in room: 8
Possible skink sightings: 1

I must do this every year until the kids are grown and probably beyond (the vacation, not the sidebar). I'm off now to check the news and see if you all held up your end of the bargain and started impeachment proceedings on Alberto Gonzales. I have every confidence in you.

Vacant

I'm entering the escape pod now. Comments, emails and other communications will lie dormant until my return Tuesday or Wednesday. See if you can get Alberto Gonzales impeached while I'm out, will you? Thanks.

When there were no cats, we used chickens

You used chickens?
We used chickens.

My favorite LOLcat has nothing on Wanda, baby.

Garden of freakish delights

Where have I been? Well, there's that whole reading-Harry-Potter thing, including reading the last 70 pages or so aloud to Rocketboy in one sitting. Add to that the arrival of my very first serger less than 24 hours before Deathly Hallows landed on my doorstep and you've got the ingredients for some crazy hermit action. But I'm back. I've even gone outside.

Ordinarily my vegetable garden is parched or getting there around this time of year. But with all the rain over the past few weeks, including 3 inches here since Sunday, vegetation is freaking out. Consider this my once-in-a-lifetime, rainy, midsummer victory garden update.

I had no idea watermelons grow as fast as they do. Last week, I spotted a couple of tiny, stripy melons the size of eggs; today they're bigger than loaves of bread. I've got a couple of softball-sized acorn squash and about a zillion Celebrity and Cherokee Purple tomatoes waiting to ripen, Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes every day, still more Royal Burgundy bush beans, cucumbers (can't remember the variety, but we're getting a giant one about every other day), parsley, a few orange sweet peppers, basil, culinary sage, oregano, and the occasional straggling but still tasty strawberry. My fall planting of sweet corn is coming up nicely, too. Oddly, my chile pequin is struggling this year -- maybe too much moisture in the soil.

Hombre found four avocado seedlings in one of the compost bins a couple of months ago. They are all now more than two feet tall. I'm going to plant them as an experiment when the weather cools off. And the compost itself is breaking down much faster than normal with all the heat and humidity.

What have you been up to? Speak now, because in three days I'm outta here for my little field trip.

Brooding hens

Wanda (l) and Neutron get their mope on

I started to worry a few days ago because the gals still aren't laying eggs. With a little research, I think I learned a few tentative facts: These ant-eating machines appear to be California White Leghorns and might not start laying for another month or two. In the meantime, they're entertaining. Look for their broody acoustic album early next year.

Coming home to roost

I'm just delighted to report that Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti has kindly reposted my Lady Bird Johnson remembrance. Chicken Spaghetti is Thomsen's children's-lit blog, highly recommended for anyone with kids and an interest in reading (heads up, all you resource-hunting homeschool readers). And I don't want to give too much away, but it sounds like she may have some poultry-related news coming soon. Stay tuned.

Harry Potter vs. Tony Hawk

I'm still here. My big sloth doesn't start for another week and 2 days so don't think you're rid of me yet, although everyone's advice has been reassuring.

As the entire media-saturated universe gears up for the running of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I'd like to say a few words about Tony Hawk. First, in the interest of full disclosure, I have pre-ordered not one but two copies of HP in the interest of (a) not having to wait for Rocketboy to read it before I do, thereby avoiding (b) living like a hermit to avoid spoilers until I've read it. Pottermania grows at our house just like nearly everyplace else.

But Harry Potter's not king of the hill here anymore. A few months ago, Rocketboy got a skateboard. After a few tips from his comically overprotective grandpa (who ran alongside the board holding his strapping grandson under the armpits to keep him from falling as he crept down the front walk), Rocketboy soon decided skating was boring. Then he found Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (Rocketboy always refers to the game by its full title). Suddenly, skating looked interesting, if a little bloody.

I was irked. My kid was sitting on his butt pretending to skate when he could be out doing the real thing. But one thing has led to another, and Rocketboy is regaining his interest in nonvirtual skating. Is it funny to hear my kids spouting the skater jargon I heard in my youth? Yes it is. The term 'nollie' was much less ridiculous-sounding coming from that cute, long-haired 17-year old dude than it is from my child who's working on it in the garage.

Of course, the interest in skating has also led to an abiding interest in all things Tony Hawk. One day when Rocketboy asked me for the eleventieth time to look at a video of a trick on Hawk's website, instead of agreeing again that it was totally cool, I broke.

"Tony Hawk is even older than me, you know," I said.

"He's still cool," Rocketboy answered, never taking his eyes from the monitor.

"Maybe I should've married Tony Hawk," I cracked.

"You couldn't have," he said calmly, glued to the screen. "He's already married. He got married two years before you did."

This from a kid who can hardly remember his own birthday. But I'll take it. As much as Rocketboy and I like the Harry Potter books, they've never inspired him to get up and do anything when he's done reading them. If the price of my kid getting outside in the heat and working on his balance and coordination is having to hear Hawk minutiae, fine. 'Nollie' doesn't sound any sillier than 'muggle' when you think about it.

You've got to slack to get saved

Pretty soon I'll go on my fabulous solo vacation. After eight years of hanging around and vacating with children, I'm eager to see how I act without anyone around to read to, feed or clean up after.

I'm also a little apprehensive. The point of this solo trip is to get in touch with the person who exists under the layers of fatigue and Legos and Magic School Bus plot lines. But what if the real me is boring, or worse yet, an asshole? A road trip with screaming kids seems like a frolic compared to a voyage of self-discovery that reveals a troll.

But that's why I need to go. It's easy to hide from myself, or lose myself, with my kids, my family life and my to-do list. I don't want to lose my existential bearings. Someday, sooner than I expect, my kids will be grown and independent, and I don't want to have to add self-rebuilding to the trauma of the empty nest.

Also, I want to sit on my ass. A lot, with the reapplication of sunblock and the arrival of drinks being the only interruptions. I want to get in touch with my inner napper. My late grandmother and her surviving baby sister, now 95, were masters of leisure. I like to think I learned well from them, but I haven't had time to practice those childhood lessons in a while.

Each had her own approach to idleness. My grandma worked like a line cook in her tiny kitchen and washed all her laundry by hand rather than waste quarters at the laundromat, but mostly her days were about dog-walking, reading, playing canasta with friends, watching her "stories" and the sacrosanct daily nap. Her sister, my great-aunt L, was all about charity work, gardening, manicures, sand-dollar hunts along the beach, and the sacrosanct daily nap.

For a non-napper, it was surprisingly easy to slip into their routine when I visited them: Eat breakfast, run a few errands, piddle around with dogs or flowerbeds, lunch and then nap. Not that I slept. But there was literally nothing to do so I was happy to take a stack of the reading material on hand (Guideposts and Reader's Digest at Grandma's, Ladies' Home Journal and Prevention at Aunt L's) and flop on divan or deck chair until the grownups stirred mid-afternoon. Whether this month's marriage could be saved was of no consequence. Doing nothing while the sun shone was radical and contrary to my busy nature. It was the zennest thing I did as a kid, learned by example from two stalwart Baptist ladies.

Now, of course, there's little time for sloth. I have two high-energy children, more than a dozen pets (only eight if you don't count the fish), a spouse who can run circles around me, and a million things I want to do. Oh, and a vegetable garden. And an impending remodeling project. And a blog. Plus the whole free-range learning thing.

It's reached the point where idleness seems like not a luxury but a sin. And that can't be right, because my grandma and her sister were far from depraved. I don't think it's coincidence that they and their third napping sibling all made it to their mid-90s, either. Let there be sloth, I say. Whoever I turn out to be when I have a few hours all to myself, I hope she likes naps.

Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson

One of my favorite Texas women has died. Lady Bird Johnson was 94 years old. She was a steadfast political wife and a savvy media investor, but her greatest impact was as a champion of America's native flowers and natural beauty. She encouraged us to love our landscapes.

Winecup (Callirhoe involucrata), Inks Lake State Park

I didn't know the names of wildflowers when I was little. My mother is from Missouri, and my Texan father isn't into plants. There was one flower in particular that I loved, a small intensely purple blossom that popped up among the bluebonnets and yellow flowers each spring. On walks at the nature preserve, I would stare into the petals until my mother insisted it was time to move. I'd sometimes pick one only to watch it wilt before we got home. I never saw them in nurseries or yards. As I got older I paid less attention to wildflowers and more to school and friends and deciding what I wanted to "be."

When I finally became what I thought I wanted to be, I was newly married, in a technical job with a network-news outfit in Atlanta (no, not that one), and only slowly realized that I was terribly homesick and unhappy in my "glamorous" career. Sometimes I'd dream about those nameless flowers, the fuschia color fluorescing in my head. They didn't grow in Georgia.

During a spring return visit to Austin, I went to the National Wildflower Research Center, founded by (and later renamed after) Lady Bird Johnson. I was delighted to find the anonymous roadside and meadow flowers of my childhood blooming and labeled. I found my purple flower: Winecup, Callirhoe involucrata. Lady Bird Johnson cared enough about these plants to name them and show them off to the world, to insist that they were important. She understood that landscapes make meaning, create context. What validation. That plant craving I had might just be normal.

A few months later Hombre and I moved home to Texas, and I learned everything I could about wildflowers. I went to the Wildflower Center again and again. I wandered the soon-to-be-subdivision ranch fencelines near our apartment. I took pictures. I discovered Sally Wasowski's books and read pretty much everything in the library's wildflower section. We bought a house, and I bought wildflower seeds, rescued plants from construction sites, hunted for native plants at the nurseries. I became a Master Gardener. Our tiny backyard became a Backyard Wildlife Habitat.

When we moved, we chose a place with a big lot so I could garden. We have vegetables. We have fruit trees. We have native understory trees and some buffalograss. To the bafflement of the man who wields the weedeater twice a month, we have backyard flowerbeds full of tall grass and wildflowers, because I'd rather put up with the grass than lose the flowers. We have liatris and lantana, frogfruit and horseherb, Mexican hat and dayflower, bluebonnets and rock rose. We have winecups. I am who I want to be.

I credit Lady Bird Johnson with rekindling my love of wildflowers and plants in general, because she paid them enough attention and thought them worthwhile enough to study, to celebrate, to honor. How many people did she reach this way? I don't know. But a few weeks ago I was volunteering in our church nursery and brought in a handful of flowers from our wildflower meadow to show the kids. As I named the flowers for the toddlers, a teacher asked, "You know what they're called?" Oh, yes. Thank you, Lady Bird.

Cooking with mud

The good news is the washer works again. But for how long? How long?

The bad news is I've got ovenlust. I've run hot and cold on solar ovens for a while now. The appeal of clean, free cooking fuel and a cool kitchen is always offset by the flimsy appearance of the ovens themselves. A cooker made of a jar, cardboard and foil may be a model of thrift and ingenuity, but thrift and ingenuity don't stand a chance against big, hyperactive dogs and the children who love them. The shallow-box-with-glass-lid style doesn't appeal, either. The risk of total oven destruction, to say nothing of cuts and burns, seems too high.

Then I found this: Oriol Balliu's cob-construction solar cooker with a stone foundation to raise it up off the ground. What is cob? Mud and straw. The step-by-step photos are so clear they make it look easy. I'm sure it's not, especially for someone with my limited building skillz. But if I could build this, I don't think anyone -- not even both dogs and both boys together -- could knock it over.

Wouldn't you cook outside all the time with this?

I did a little research and it turns out that what little soil we have in Central Texas is pretty good for cob building. And because making cob involves mashing straw into a ball of mud with one's feet, the kids would get to help build it. Think of it -- I could essentially make an oven out of my yard. Even I'm getting a little woo-woo buzz at the thought of it.

If there's any way to make a water-efficient washing machine out of mud, I'll build that, too.

Labor-saving torture device

Happy Monday, all. I'd have a real post for you today, but my eco-friendly, energy efficient washing machine got balky again, refusing to drain and generally making a nuisance of itself. I spent an hour and a half opening the thing up, inspecting the filter and all the hoses for clogs and found, true to form, nothing but a little organic gunk.

This washer (a Duet) is not quite four years old, and I've already had to call the repairman three times. Based on the decidedly mixed reviews I've seen, my experience is not a fluke. My question to you: Would it be wrong of me to junk this expired-warranty washer and move on? On the one hand, that's a lot of material to toss out. On the other, I'm tired of getting stranded with commercial-sized loads of sopping wet towels and jeans, and I'm so over the tub-and-board method I reverted to the last time the machine flaked out.

Any suggestions for the repair, exorcism, artful destruction and/or replacement of the little front-loader that only sometimes could would be greatly appreciated.

Are you there, God? It's us, chickens.

Wanda can move.

Still no eggs yet. I've been checking not only in their fabulous hay-lined mini-henhouse but also in the hollow they've dug under an enormous shrub out back. Any day now, I guess. Maybe they're waiting for it to stop raining first.

Eggs or not, Wanda and Neutron have won a place in my heart by running or flying to me when I step outside. Their little feet scritch through the grass as they follow me around like puppies. They get along well with the rabbits and don't mind the dogs too much. And there's no sight more divine than watching your pet bird devour fire ant after fire ant.