How Birrd Singleheadedly Ended the Prairie Heatwave

We had days and days of hot weather during the last part of June. Sitting at baseball games in 100+ degree heat, I was constantly wiping my sweaty hair off my neck. One afternoon, I decided to get my hair trimmed. Just a trim, nothing unusual. So I drove the Badger's car to the local Great Clips. His A/C doesn't work. By the time I got there, I was nearly cooked. They said there would be a 10-minute wait. I started flipping through the hairstyle book. Looking at the really short cuts I thought "Oh, that would be so nice!" So I made an impulsive decision.

Now, you know how whenever you wash your car, it rains? Well, within 2 hours of my Big Hair Chop a nice cool breeze started wafting over the Great Plains. We've had cooler temperatures ever since. Right now it is 80 and cloudy.

And every time I look in the mirror I say "AAAAH!!! WHO IS THAT????"

Hot!

It's been just a little bit hot here on the prairie this last week. The kids haven't seemed to care-- they still want to ride their bikes and play in the backyard, but they come in so red and sweaty. Yesterday the Badger went out and bought them a wading pool (and some more squirt guns). They were thrilled!

The boys have been playing with squrt guns constantly lately. I had to confiscate them yesterday evening because they were shooting at each other at the dinner table but I'll give them back to them today if they're polite and help me pick up the living room.

The Badger decided to see how the Rabbit would like the pool.

She preferred sitting next to it and splashing the water with her hands.

Cloud Coverage

I have in my possession right now a camera that belongs to my sister and is much better than my own camera. This is because I am borrowing it to shoot a wedding. This means I have to fiddle with it a lot and really learn to use it during the next couple of weeks before said wedding so that the bride will still like me after she sees her wedding photos.

So I took some pictures of the sky the other night. I was impressed. With my old film cameras and with my digital, pictures of the sky usually turn out pretty flat and dull. The sunset has to be really intense before it makes for a good picture.

I looked at the sky the other night and thought, "wow, lovely!" but also "can't get that on camera." However, I decided to try, and I was very excited about the results.

Crocodile, you don't really need this camera back, do you? :)

Under the Oak Tree

May is the most glorious month of the year. Life has been so beautiful lately. I don't know how many times in the last few days I have thought "I am so happy to be alive!" as I have stepped outside on a breezy green evening or biked along a trail through a new-grown meadow.

And you simply can't help but be in love with life if you take a turn in our freshly-installed backyard hammock.

Pull the string and you will rock back and forth, back and forth, just like a baby in a cradle. (Please click this picture to enlarge it. It's too good not to take a close look!)

It's perfect for snuggling.

An oak tree, a hammock, and a beautiful day in May is just about as good as it gets.

An Evening at the Lake

We took dinner to the lake yesterday evening. It was a spontaneous decision, made after the Badger's on-call shift ended and we knew he would be home all evening. That's how it is in this line of work-- you can't plan ahead, but when you suddenly find yourself with an evening off you seize it. We took what we could find to eat in our cupboards and we went.

Yesterday evening was a good one to seize. We were lucky. The lake was idyllic in the cool May sunshine.

The Badger grilled delicious burgers as a high layer of friendly clouds moved over.

As the evening wore on and the Badger fried potatoes, the clouds turned the lake to silver.

We finished off with s'mores and a subtle, shining sunset.

P.S. For our s'mores the only chocolate in the house was some bars of Lindt left over from Christmas (they had been put in the freezer and I forgot they were there else they never would have made it this long.) Toasted marshmallow, graham cracker, and Lindt chocolate make a lovely combination.

A Good Show

With a little bit of pillow-rearranging, we had a terrific and comfortable view of a very dramatic lightning storm yesterday evening.

Wild storms recharge my ch'i. I think we all have something in nature like that, that makes us feel replenished. For the Badger, it's the ocean. For me as a child, it was thunderstorms. I remember the summer we moved to Utah from Minnesota. I was fifteen and very unhappy. I remember just aching for a good prairie summer thunderstorm. From my vantage point on the east bench of Salt Lake City I would watch with excitement as the clouds built up on the west side of the valley, but then I was always let down as all we got was a spatter of rain and a few small flickers of lightning. Oh, I felt so hungry! Eventually after more than twelve years out west I learned to get the same recharge from the mountains and then later the ocean. When we left Oregon last year I thought "How can we move away from all this?" I had forgotten the thunderstorms. I had forgotten how alive they make me feel. They were my first soul food and they taste so good again, after all these years.

Especially when I can watch them from my own comfortable bed, curled up with my snuggly kids.

Bring It On!

As of yesterday, we were in a pretty advanced state of spring around here:

This morning the world looks a little different.

I say, "Bring it on!" We still have firewood and I'm not done with cozy evenings cuddled up by the fire. I can totally handle another few days of winter.

P.S. The Rabbit has learned to climb onto the window ledge. She's pretty pleased, as you can see.

Along the Creek

Yesterday the weather was mild and the kids were suffering from post-Christmas cabin fever so we packed everyone off to a nearby nature park for a loooooong walk.

We stopped frequently to let the kids mess around with sticks and logs and water and stuff. The Badger reminisced about the good times we used to have romping on the beach in Oregon, but my kids were having just as much fun with the prairie riparian enviroment as they used to have on the coast. Kids are great that way. They're just happy to be outside, wherever it is.

Here is a classic portrait of a young boy:

In September this creek flooded badly. As we walked along the banks, we could see all the debris the flood had left behind. Logs, twigs, and grass clumped together as high as my head.

This flood debris made the most enchanting hidey holes for small children.

Just Enough

We didn't get much snow yesterday, but we got enough for Fish

to make a teeny tiny snowman...

A Rare Prairie Sighting

Boy, howdy, we've been getting a lot of rain here. As you recall, my backyard has no drainage. So I now have lakefront property! It's very exciting. It's even attracting new wildlife. This morning I snapped some great shots of the extremely rare Blue Prairie Alligator.

Goodness, they're ferocious things.

They really seemed to enjoy Lake Parsnip.

What's Up With All This Cool Weather, Anyway?

Gustav's Swan Song

We've been getting spattered by the outermost fingers of the dissolving Hurricane Gustav. This is so funny to me. Here were are about as far away from the ocean as you can get and yet the rain that is falling on us right now was sucked out of the Gulf of Mexico by a massive hurricane. I think it's the first time in my life I've ever been rained on by a hurricane, so I feel special.

Yesterday there was a rather dramatic sky as the outer fringe of Gustav descended over our area. I grabbed the camera and ran to photograph it, but BOTH sets of my rechargable batteries were dead. The picture I took this morning is not nearly as dramatic, but it's still Gustav.

A Great Parade

Something like 300,000 people attend the Provo Fourth of July parade every year. People start camping out the night before to get their space. We couldn't do that, but we did have an inside connection for a good parking space. And some nice family let us share their front-row tarp, so we had an awesome view.

It's a great parade, with a lot of variety. There were lots of marching bands, which are always popular with my crew:

I guess I should say they're always popular with my boys. Roo finds them a little disturbing.

The downside of Provo on the 4th is that it's usually 100 degrees by the end of the day. Even though the parade is in the morning, it's usually in the 90s. I left the Rabbit at Bag End with Grandpa because I knew she wouldn't do well in the inferno and the rest of us employed various means of keeping cool.

(A boy scout troop was making a killing selling Otter Pops four for a dollar. For two bucks, we all got sufficiently chilled out. Contrast that to the local minor league baseball game I went to recently where a bottle of water was $2.75 and an Icee was $3.50!)

On Alert

Wow, the weather sure has been exciting here on the prairie for the last few days! This is the fourth night in a row we've had severe thunderstorm warnings combined with tornado watches. Nothing really nasty has hit the Birrd's nest so far, though last night a super-loud crack of thunder woke me up and got my heart pounding at 2 am. We've set up enough beds in the basement for all of us and the boys are over the moon that I'm sleeping in the same room as them. It's nice to go to sleep not worried about sleeping through the tornado sirens, plus it's cooler in the basement. So everyone's happy. The kids actually think the thunderstorms are great fun. Roo says "boom!" and "rainy!" That pretty much sums up our weather lately.

Hail to Homeschool

Last night we had a really awesome prairie thunderstorm. We popped popcorn, then sat on the window seat and watched for nearly an hour as lightning flickered like a strobe light, the flashes sometimes blinding. The rain poured down in buckets, but luckily the hail was only pea- to acorn-sized. I braved the rain to go scoop some off our front lawn for close inspection:

This precipitated (ha!) a long discussion with Bean and sometimes Fish about thunderstorms, cumulonimbus clouds, and hail. We even got out one of my college Geography textbooks and reviewed some diagrams. It was a great homeschool lesson, at 11:30 at night.

I love the concentric rings in the hailstones. It's so cool to think of how those little babies traveled through those huge clouds.

Snow Day!

Fish has been so excited to move back to a place where it snows. This morning we woke up to a beautiful white world, so of course the boys spent the entire day going in and out and in and out and enjoying the snow. Here they are fresh in from outside enjoying a cup of hot chocolate: