Camping, Day 1

The Last Donut

The camping trip started out on a less than auspicious note. The morning began with a donut run, and after glomming down more than their fair share the kids peered over the box with sad eyes and begged me to let them have the last donut. Omaha and I wisely refused.

After that, it was final packing. And this is where things got a little stressful because the children started to act like absolute snots. Or rather, not act, because getting them to do anything was impossible. I'd assembled the clamshell on the roof of the car and started to put all the bedding and tenting into it while Omaha finished up the last of the groceries and campsite utensils. The kids were supposed to be packing their clothes but instead they pouted and lazed and decided not to participate. They drove Omaha to frustration and finally I got mad and lost my temper and started shouting at them.

It upset me, because I don't get angry like that very often at all. I can't remember the last time I was so furious with them. I told Kouryou-chan that I had had it, and we weren't going on the trip because they weren't participating or helping or doing anything that they were supposed to. They didn't want to go camping; they wanted to have fun and leave all the work to their slaves, Mommy and Daddy, and we weren't going to put up with that.

After a few minutes to calm down, during which Omaha and I made a show of doing local chores, I finally told the girls that I was willing to reconsider if they stopped being lazy snots and instead actually packed their clothes. They were pretty good after that. I hated having to drive them to tears to get them moving, but it seemed to be the only thing that worked.

I prepped the kitchen for Dinah's caretaker and then the four of us hit the road, two hours late and already stressed. We stopped at Burger King for lunch, then hit REI for "one last thing!", some pants for Omaha, as well as Half Price Books so the girls would have reading material at the campsite. Yamaraashi-chan bought a copy of The Subtle Knife while Kouryou-chan had brought books 4 and 5 of the Warriors books (sigh, the entire site is done in Flash, how stupid), a series about feral cats that's one of those kids' things, from the library.

We drove down through Olympia. I had to wonder about the kind of people who tailgate what had to be an obviously overloaded car full of camping gear. The old Escort wagon wallowed like a pregnant sow for most of the trip and had serious power problems on uphills.

We'd had trouble getting reliable information out of the park service over the Internet and other outlets. Even the park assistant at REI didn't know much about the Olympic National Park. When we got within range we found out that the park itself was more or less closed, and had been for two years. Ever since the 2006 windstorms, much of the park had been damaged and the current administration had allocated no additional funds to recovering the park.

Kouryou-chan unpacks

We went to a more obscure campsite called Collins on the Duckabush river and set up camp. We inherited a lovely campsite from an older couple and their daughter who had already paid for the night and left us some wood.

The girls set up the tend and omaha made the fire. I got water from the well-- it was coppery brown but the sign insisted it was drinkable. We ate pizza sandwiches (store-bought garlic bread, string cheese, pizza sauce, all heated in the fire). Omaha and I had the burned ones. Mmm, carbon scoring.

After a round of toothbrushing, we slept snugly in a tent that claims to be "four-man" but barely sleeps the four of us, and I did okay. Not great, but okay. I don't know when I awoke to stumble out to the "vault toilet" (the horror, the horror!). There were millions of stars overhead. When I got back into my sleeping bag I was out instantly.

Ad vs. Reality: Burger King Angus Steak Sandwich

One of my favorite sightings recently was "Fast Food: Ads vs Reality," which shows what various fast food products look like in print advertising and then goes and orders the product to see what it looks like in real life. Since, on our way to a campsite my family stopped by a Burger King for lunch, I decided to play along. Below is the print version, and my freshly unwrapped personally hand-made and store-delivered version, of the BK Angus Steakburger.

BK Angus Burger: Ad vs. Reality

Tasty, no?

The Return of the Brain!

Enhanced Interrogation Techniques Were Borrowed from Communist Chinese Manual.

( Only the title was changed. )

"The Dark Art of Interrogation"

( We torture responsibly! )

Jesus's Followers May Have Borrowed A Messianic Cult Tradition

( A stone tablet surfaces and touches off a firestorm. )

Why Is the State Department "Hunting" for Deals for Bush's Oil Buddy?

( More... )

David Ignatius: Cheney Can't Even Get Potentially Illegal Covert Ops Right

( More... )

Christina Comer Sues Texas Education Agency Over Illegal Firing

( Intelligent Design debate... )

The Growing Debt Held By The Public

( Which party has demonstrated better fiscal responsibility? )

Takin' Care of Dinah

Geriatric cat care

When we set out camping, we had to contract with a pet sitting service to take care of Dinah. Our old service had folded, so we found someone else local at Little Furry Things and a young woman there named Jill. She came out the day before and I like her, walked her through the set-up and showed her how we water the cat.

The basics are simple: Dinah gets one pill each from the little containers on the left, one for her blood pressure and one for acid reflux. For the sitter, the pills were pre-filled into pillpockets, little meaty things that are apparently shelf-stable for a while at room temperature.

After the pills, she gets watered. After swapping the needle on the line of lactated Ringer's solution, she gets approximately 100ml of water under the skin every night. I try to make it less uncomfortable by pre-warming the Ringer's in a tub of warm water and lying her on a towel, and she tolerates it very well.

She gets two food packets a day plus a half-cup of dry food (not shown), and we have to rotate her diet because even with the acid reflux pills she sometimes gets nauseous and decides she's not going to eat anything that smells like what she just ate. Rotating her diet prevents her from remembering what made her nauseous, so she'll eat day after day. Eventually the memory of what ailed her fades, and we have just enough varieties to accomodate that.

Jill is local to Burien and areas around here, and having a stranger come into your house and care for your cat can be a strange sensation, but she did great. She was a little more expensive than our previous sitter at $36/hour for about one hour every day, but worth it for peace of mind and Dinah's comfort while we were gone.