and sound tonight at the microtel el paso east. the wind is beating at the window, but we are warm an cozy inside again tonight.
after going to bed last night in dallas with temps in the 70s, this morning we awoke to mid-30s with a windchill in the low 20s. and it didn’t get better. the first couple of hours of the drive were windy with some scattered rain/freezing rain, but after fort worth somewhere, it got bad for what seemed like an hour. the scattered showers turned into steady freezing rain and sleet. thankfully, the roads out here are mostly flat, and the ground had yet to get frozen itself, so nothing stayed icy for long. except for the bridges. every time we hit one (oh, every couple miles or so?) the van would shift and wobble until the tires grabbed the pavement on the other side of it again. i know i’m from the northeast, but i will never really enjoy driving in terrible weather like this.
those conditions didn’t last too long, and it was smooth sailing until the other side of midland, texas. i think it was right after we merged from i-20 to i-10. then the freezing rain began to fall in ernest. with the windchill, the van had already been accumulating ice, especially the windshield wipers. we couldn’t keep those cleared off and working well for more than a few minutes. pretty soon, there was only one clear spot to see through, and brian was craning his neck to use it. the grasses and shrubs along the roadside were white with ice. after a couple of treacherous patches, it finally stopped. the last 100 miles to el paso were dry.
so thankful to not be in the car and not to have to be in the car all day again til we are on our way home in a few weeks. so thankful that there was a restaurant nearby so we could chow on gluten free pizza. now if only we could get the much anticipated climbing into this mix! a winter storm warning remains in effect here in el paso through sunday afternoon, so here’s to hoping that the sun will come out (…tomorrow…) monday.
Posted on November 22nd, 2013
two days of driving already, on this our annual road trip. last night we stayed outside of nashville, tn. tonight, dallas, tx. we are on our way to hueco tanks state park outside of el paso, tx.
you’d think that because we travel in a eurovan weekender with a pop top that we’d save some cash and camp in it. well, no. this trip anyway, we have been wimpy. last night we had no good excuse except that it was late, and we were tired. but tonight we have a good reason with lightning and thunder bearing down on north texas. the last time we came this route to hueco we did camp in a koa in the dallas city limits (a very glorified parking lot, as most koas are) and were caught in a severe thunderstorm. it was not an experience to repeat. so here we are, watching the hobbit as we lounge in bed. ah, vacation.
today we drove through some rain in arkansas too. but with two full days of driving under out belts, the trip remains uneventful. read: the van is still running and well. the thunderstorms tonight are the start of what the weather people are calling a wintry mix of precipitation. the temps in north texas, as well as across other parts of the southwest, are to plummet tomorrow and bring along freezing rain and sleet and winds of 20-40 mph. could prove interesting to driving, but i hope not too interesting. i like road trips that are uneventful except for those events (climbing!) which have been planned. who doesn’t?
i hope by tomorrow night to have a boring post to write. one that has us driving with out incident across the rest of texas, with some wind and rain, but not the havoc they are calling for. until then….
Posted on November 21st, 2013
i don’t normally talk about my faith in Jesus on this page, my Christianity. i don’t really feel comfortable writing that really personal stuff here, i think that’s why. i’m not using this blog to gush.
but tonight, i feel the need to talk about sin for a minute. sin is one of those things that people in general don’t really want to talk about. even people who are Christians don’t like to talk about it that much unless is someone else’s sins that’s the topic, or we’re only focusing on the forgiveness aspect of it. i’m not knocking people for it–sin is indeed a terrifying and complex subject, and forgiveness eases it up for us. i love homeschooling my kids so we can talk about sin in a safe place, actually. we can sit around in our living room and it just comes up on occasion, mainly because we read the Bible each morning for a little bit. i feel like it’s important to talk about sin, that we are all broken and all have the disease, and no one person is better or has less trouble with sin than another. the sins might be different, but everyone’s got them, the ones they really struggle with. and that all of us, if we want to be, can be forgiven, we just need to ask. again and again and again.
anyway, (i got a little deeper there than i wanted to!) the point of this is, we were reading Mark 7 the other day. the beginning of the chapter tells us about Jesus arguing with the pharisees (the Jewish leaders), telling them that people aren’t unclean because of what’s on the outside (dirty hands in this case, or not following the traditional rituals of cleaning before you eat), but people are unclean because of what’s on the inside and comes out. sins. sins that hurt other people. there are a lot of sins in the list that comes next, and i won’t go into them too deeply. but i pointed out the sins that kids might have trouble with, like deceit (lying) and lewdness (which i likened to potty-mouth and rudely talking about people’s bodies and bodily functions), and malice (which is hatred). at that point, oren said, “yeah, i lie all the time when i’m tricking seb.” ha! well, i laughed.
and so i was sharing this story with my sister today, and oren overheard me and felt like i didn’t do justice to what he said. then he said this, the quote that i wanted to share, the reason i wrote this whole long post to include…
“why would i be deceitful of him being lewd on me?”
funny!
if this isn’t funny to you, i’m sorry. but i heartily laughed, and so did my sister, and her kids, and seb and even oren, though i don’t think he knew why. i leave it here for your perusal anyway, even if i misjudged the degree of humor it actually contains. it’s at least a little testament to the fact that i still know how to type.
Posted on October 2nd, 2013
hike/run mud creek trail, 4 miles, 800 feet of elevation gain. a barn in a meadow and a boulder filled creek where several family members fell in. oh, and a jawbone of an ass.
hike up/run down, fish creek falls trail, roundtrip 6 miles, 2 thousand feet of elevation gain. no small children or senior citizens :-), fish creek, waterfalls, up-up-up-up, lots of pretty flowers and aspen trees, outrunning the hail storm, down-down-down-down-down.
strawberry park natural hot springs. hot, warm, cold pools… i mean, ponds surrounded by jagged, sharp, slick rocks that i kept falling on. pretty to look at, not to be in after 13 year old niece screamed about a dead fish. ew. when there is water involved, it can be too natural for this one.
drive to denver through cameron pass, poudre river canyon. rocks i wanted to climb but couldn’t, people with tubes to float down the poudre on a hot lazy 4th of july jumping in front of the van, fire branded mountain slopes, lunch in ft collins wendy’s parking lot. starbucks!
4th of july party, my aunt beth’s house, broomfield, co. aunts and uncles, cousins, old childhood acquaintances and lots and lots of food. then, guess what, fireworks. oren’s lost hedgehog, nero.
visit with an old friend, kathleen and her little family, mike and newish baby josie. jaunt to pearl street, boulder, shine gluten free restaurant. guy playing while standing on a tall, blue, string bass. a contortion artist. we DID NOT go in the patagonia store! :-O lizard replacement for oren’s lost hedgehog, nero.
afternoon, dinner, sleeping at sister melissa’s. leftover taco salad, man from snowy river, kid snippets, zzzzzzzzzzzz.
start trip home, through nebraska. drive-drive-drive-drive, harry potter and the goblet of fire, army vehicle museum, smell of old exhaust (surprisingly pleasant), bikes, trucks, jeeps, tanks, hummers, helicopters, lots more tanks with big guns outside, 100 degrees makes me want to drive again.
day 2 driving in nebraska. stop at the strategic air command air and space museum. bombers, fighter jets, helicopters and more. inside of a b-17 flying fortress. airplane models from the gift shop.
2nd night on the road. camping at a koa in illinois. hot, humid, a gurgling stream. birds at dawn and then rain. let’s just get out of here and drive home.
getting home is not home, but brian’s dad’s house. our house in disarray from a bathroom remodel. trip over, but still living out of our bags. wonder when we’ll sleep in our own beds again.
Posted on July 21st, 2013
the history and science and math books are on the shelf, the portfolio for the fourth grader’s year has been sent away along with the affadavit for next school year. what does this mean? well, duh. it’s summer vacation!
the past few years, our family has taken a long trip in the spring, sometimes 3-4 weeks, but one time we went for 6. anyway, taking approximately 2 months off in the spring means that summertime needs to include school. so throughout the past few summers, we have done school about 3 days a week. i love this flexibility that homeschooling affords us.
but this year, our vacation didn’t happen in the spring. in fact, it’s happening now. we morph into a family who has an actual summer vacation. we are in steamboat springs, colorado with my whole immediate family. my sisters, their husbands, their kids, our parents. we are staying in this crazy huge chalet (no, not a cabin for us, people) that sleeps all 20 of us!
it’s right on the side of whatever mountain, within walking distance from the ski lifts. well, we can’t ski, but who needs to ski? brian and i have been on one exploratory run from the front door and found an awesome hiking/running trail that goes on and on forever back down into town. i don’t know that we (read: i, because i have no stamina running) have it in us at this altitude to try the whole thing, down and up, but it’s a compelling thought.
with the rest of the family, we so far have flung ourselves down an alpine slide (which i, ahem, fell off of because i was going sooooo fast) and a short less flingy hike up to lower fish creek falls. really lovely. i think we’ll all try to get up to the upper falls sometime this week, but we want another day or two to acclimate first. hiking in colorado is just so pretty, even when you’re just doing the short touristy stuff…. and it’s affordable.
Posted on July 1st, 2013
today for math seb and i were playing around with and thinking about patterning… patterning with numbers and patterning with shapes. it’s not a brand new concept by any means–patterning is something that is taught or played around with in kindergarten and first grade…. well, every year really, just at a deeper and deeper level. so today we were taking patterning to a different level, and while it wasn’t a brand new concept for seb, he quickly got frustrated, especially when the math curriculum we used expected him to explain how the pattern worked. today i found myself doing seb’s worksheet with him, helping him get the right answers written down. today i was okay with this, but a lot of the time, i find myself bombarded with thoughts like, he really ought to be doing this on his own and isn’t going to learn it very well, or if he was in school, he would be expected to figure it out and do this work on his own.
i think one of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that i CAN walk my kids through tough new ideas, i CAN hold their hand and even show them how to get a right answer and alleviate some frustration for them. the beauty of homeschooling is that they AREN’T in school and i can give them all the attention and help they need–and they might learn some stuff better than they would otherwise.*
now, that scenario is IDEAL. ideally homeschooling is that way. i have to admit that often the reality of homeschooling is more like this: me telling seb he needs to do this work on his own, or at least try to first without my help. he gets frustrated and starts yelling things or trying to rip the skin off his face, and i yell and send him to his room til he gets it ALL done on his own, mister! and no lunch until it is!! sometimes, doubting the ideal gets in the way and makes the real kind of sucky.
today it wasn’t like that though, and in the moment i noticed. i took note that math stayed more peaceful than it had in the past. i took note that we AREN’T in the classroom, so i don’t have to make home into one. i took note, and then sat down tonight and wrote this quick little ditty so that maybe i will remember this concept more often. and the oftener i remember this concept, the oftener a day of homeschooling will be ideal… and real. both at the same time. what a concept.
*this is not to say that parents who have their kids in school can’t sit down with them and help them with their homework in this way too, but i homeschool, so that’s where my focus is.
Posted on May 20th, 2013
i took this picture last thursday, may16. pink new skin has taken over.
this was taken a week earlier.
looks a little less like frankenstein’s monster than the first picture taken 5 days after surgery.
Posted on May 19th, 2013
have any of you noticed that all our doings we have recorded here on anklebiter.net are archived to your right? and if you click on them, you can see stuff we’ve been going through since 2003? it’s amazing to me to be able to do this, though sometimes the links to the pictures don’t go anywhere anymore. but all the text is there. that is pretty cool. we started this blog in 2003 when we were awaiting our first anklebiter, sebastien. and guess what folks, he’s turning 10. so anklebiter.net is 10 years old now too. a decade.
a decade used to seem like  a long time to me. it felt like so long when i realized in 2004 that i had been a rock climber for a decade. at that point, i had never done anything in my life for a whole decade except for being alive. and when brian and i celebrated our 10th anniversary, the only other thing that i had done for a decade was be a rock climber. a decade seemed like such a long time. epic. well, now in addition to being a rock climber for almost 2 decades, and being married for almost 16 years (that’s going on 2 decades, right? can i say that yet?), i have a son who is a decade old. i have been a mom for a decade. and this decade, the decade of sebastien we’ll call it for now, has flown by me, people. blurry fast, like i couldn’t even see that it was happening and, boom. i now have a 10 year old. full stop. whereas yesterday he was just a wrinkled baby squirming in my arms.
a decade ago, with that little wiggly old man attached to me wherever i went, i hardly knew what to do. i hid out with him at my parents’ house for 2 weeks after he was born because i just didn’t know what to do with this guy. i learned some things, enough to eventually go home and care for him and love him without being scared. and ever since then it’s been….wow. i just don’t even have a descriptor for what it’s been. i honestly can’t say if i know a whole lot more about being a mom now than i did then, but i have realized that i absolutely love being with this kid, this now 10 year old, and figuring it out as we go along.
and have you met him? he builds the most amazing stuff out of legos. and he has a super-silly and contagious laugh too, the kind that makes everyone around him laugh when he really gets going. and the toothiest grin you have ever seen. and when he’s serious, he asks the craziest and hardest questions for us to answer, blinking those wide grey eyes of his at us. he is into comics, due to his comic-loving cousins living here now, but not just reading them. seb’s making his own in a comics club that he’s a part of. i saw some of his work today, and it’s amazing. he draws a fairly awesome robot too. and he has grand plans, plans on how all these things he’s working on are going to rake in the money for him some day. ahhhh, seb. happy birthday 10 year old! can’t wait to see what this year is going to bring you.
Posted on May 11th, 2013
so i have found myself, over the past couple of weeks or so, hearing things. like when i’m running and i think i hear my running app start talking to me to tell me that i have indeed  run another mile. i put my phone up to my ear though, and, nope, nothings going on there. so what did i hear? just murmuring voices somewhere? or what about the chime that is reminding me that something is on my calendar that i need to do. or the bell that dings when i get text messages.  the gong that sounds when i get a new email?…….
AM I GOING CRAZY?
or is it just that apple uses these sounds to grab our attention that actually belong to the world around us? or maybe it’s everyone else’s phones.
or maybe i have to many noises coming out of my own.
Posted on May 8th, 2013
