Elf Sternberg

There's no water at this campsite, so I've been running water through the PUR pump filter into our five-gallon jug, and I now know what it takes to fill five gallons teaspoon by teaspoon: it takes about an hour. Even with the river, water is pretty dear out here. I did that this morning, as I was the first to wake up and I wanted my coffee.

Kouryou-chan wanted to spend all of her time in my lap, more for her own obnoxious entertainment than for comfort, but she was very helpful making the toast over the fire. As learning experiences, Omaha and I have bought both of the girls pen knives and let them work with the fire because, quite frankly, I have no interest in raising my kids in Pierson's Puppeteer-like soft-room captivity. The world has sharp corners.

Note to self: the camp axe needs sharpening, and the cheap rubber blade cover is dead, so I should by a decent leather one.

I did the dishes while Omaha had the girls make lunches of chicken salad sandwiches. I taught the ladies how to use a camper's can key. Yamaraashi-chan mastered it right away.

We drove to Murhut Falls, pictured above. I've learned a lot about panos, including less is more when it comes to frame count. You can never have too many frames in the beginning, but picking the right ones out of the collection is just as important as having them in the first place.

We walked up the ridge, passing a herd of YMCA kids coming back the other way. When we got to the top of the ridge, we climbed down a treacherous rockway to the bottom of the falls, where I took the upper left photo. We ate lunch.

Kouryou-chan's ankle was bugging her on the way back. We worried that she had strained it in ballet, so when we got back Omaha wrapped it in an ACE bandage.

Omaha confessed to enjoying the peaceful afternoon, but was a little frustrated that with all this nature the kids and I were engaged in reading our books. She likes the outdoors more than I do, I think; I find the solitude relaxing and the exercise an extra benefit, but she's more the other way around.

Omaha decided to take a walk and disappeared for a while up the road attached to the campsite. This make Kouryou-chan freak out a bit, and we chose to do an orbit of the campsite. Soon, her ankle hurt enough that I was carrying her, but finally we all found ourselves back at the campsite, Omaha included.

One thing Omaha and I have learned is that Kouryou-chan has a very definite hunger clock and resetting it with even a little food will result in "I'm not hungry" at mealtimes. So we declined her begging for Gorp or string cheese while we made dinner.

Dinner was Omaha's Mac & Cheese; hers is made on a stovetop, while I bake mine, and the kids like both much more than Kraft, blessed be. After that we did fire-baked apples dipped in brown sugar and cinnamon, a game of Gimme The Brain, and bedtime.

In the annual tradition of American families everywhere, we drove out to the farm country just south of Seattle and picked our pumpkins for the annual sacrifice. Soon, we found ourselves at Carpinito farms, where Yamaraashi-chan insisted on pulling the cart even though it was much too heavy for her. After Omaha had bought some kettle corn, we walked out into the fields and started to look for the perfect pumpkin.

After picking our three pumpkins, the girls wanted to do the corn maze. There were two, one with the suggestive outline of a pterodactyl, the other a tyrannosaurus rex. We did the T-Rex. Inside there are six stations where you can punch a hole into the map you're given, so you can acknowledge that you've been to all six. We got lost at one point and ended up in the dinosaur's toes before finding out way back to the backridge where post #2 was, so we did them out of order. Kouryou-chan was great about finding our way through the maze, but Yamaraashi-chan couldn't get into the spirit of it. "Why do you look at the map?" she said. "That's no fun." I don't think she quite got the point, or she had a different one from the rest of us. Anyway, we had a good time and took our hauls home.

For a variety of reasons, I'm going to take parts of my LJ friends-only. Posts that I normally mark as "life" or "family" will now be available only to people on my friends' list. And that includes my love life. Who I'm sleeping with is not my kids' business, and Yamaarashi-chan, at least, can read my LJ. And more importantly, as I've gotten older I've learned the need for at least a little privacy.

There will still be a lot of traffic on my LJ. After all, writing, programming, movies, wine, food and the rest aren't aspects of my family life and I'll be willing to post those as often as usual.

But if you want to read my LJ for the more domestic elements, I recommend you ask to be friended, and I will welcome you into my LJ.

I awoke Friday an hour before everyone else, made myself the first batch of coffee all week that actually tasted good, and finished The Atrocity Archive. That poor book; it has a child's footprint, marshmallow stains, dust on the cover, and a slight scorching across the top. It's almost apropos. When Omaha and the girls awaken, we eat cereal and then break down the campsite.

Breaking down the campsite was an adventure. The girls helped me by folding the tent, putting away their clothes, and policing the campgrounds for fallen trash, of which there was surprisingly little. I packed the roof of the car with more stuff than we left with, but it all sat quite nicely and when webbed into place is going nowhere. Omaha directed the packing of the back of the car, and soon we were ready to go.

We drove up to Tipsoo Lake, ten miles northeast of the campsite, and had our lunches of tuna or PB&J, and then we were off up the trail to Nachez Peak.

Nachez Peak was odd in that it travered from the federal park to a federal forest, so at two points along the trail we passed a tree with all sorts of dire warnings about what you're not allowed to do in a park on one side, and all sorts of dire warnings about what you're not allowed to do in a forest on the other. This trail was middling-length, about 3.5 miles, but the first part was almost entirely up, and Kouryou-chan had chosen not to wear her hiking boots but instead her Dora the Explorer sneakers, which didn't have the traction needed. She kept slipping and sliding and at one point bonked her knee quite painfully. I had to weild the band-aids and BZK.

At one point, we were passed by another family and the young girl of their group was singing a campfire song and our girls just started singing along so naturally and instinctively it was disturbing. "You are now one with the collective," I intoned, making Omaha laugh. We were slathered in sunscreen because this trail was high and almost entirely exposed. It had views across vast flowery meadows, and when we got to a lookout point along a cliff the girls had a giggle experimenting with echos off a sheer mountain face a half mile or so away. We reached an unnamed lake and the girls again waded in to cool their feet and Kouryou-chan got the camera and took pictures. Man, I look grungy.

We made it to the peak, where I shared more GU with Kouryou-chan. Yamaarashi-chan declined, saying she didn't like the texture at all. Smart girl. You don't eat that stuff for the texture. We passed some people on the way down, and Kouryou-chan's skidding and halting became a real problem. She fell once more, re-opening a scab on her knee and making her want to give up and be carried down the mountain.

Yamaarashi-chan saved us all by singing YMCA camp songs, some cute like "Dandy Bear," and some gruesome like "Baby Shark," but all of them with call-and-response or sing-along portions on which Kouryou-chan joined in, and soon she forgot her ouches and the soreness in her calves and the two marched on together. Perfect sisters in so many ways. She really was the hero of the day and helped us make it back to Tipsoo Lake in one piece.

We drove home. I actually listened to Omaha's advice this time (despite strong evidence that men cannot actually hear women's voices clearly) and we were soon back in familiar territory.

Grungy and disgusting as we were, we went to the Claimjumper. Yamaarashi-chan asked "What kind of restaurant is this?" I told it her it was a meat restaurant. "No, I mean, is it Chinese, Japanese, French..." I said, "It's meat, honey. Really." And so it is. Sadly, though, the meat was the least part of the meal for me; the charbroiled asparagus and blue cheese wedge were much more tasty than than ribs.

We got home and immediately dunked the kids into the bath. While we had been gone a new bottle of MOP Kid's Shampoo had arrived in the mail, and we double-dipped their hair and made sure they scrubbed themselves and when they were done we could not see the bottom of the bathtub. Then it was Omaha's and my turn, and we went to work on ourselves. Afterward, everyone got moisturizer for hands, feet, and face, and checked for sunburns. The only one seemed to be on the back of my neck-- all in all, a good record, considering.

We put the food and perishables away, dumped a ton of things into the laundry queue, and went to bed. Oh, it was so nice to sleep in my own, clean bed. I'd let the mattress air out all week, and that with the fresh sheets led to the most delightful and solid sleep I'd had in months.

Our Wednesday breakfast was scrambled eggs with cheese. I would return home later to find that there's a much easier way than what Omaha did, but Omaha just cooked them on the stove and they were excellent that way. Waking was good today, not stiff at all. In fact, I was less stiff than I've felt on previous trips.

I tried the coffee that I'd brought. I had ground them before the trip and they tasted stale, even after a few days. How people bought tins of ground coffee in my parents' age befuddles me.

The hike of the day was to Clover Lake, 2.5 miles round trip, mostly down to begin with, meaning mostly up to the end, with a stop at Sunrise Lake. We walked through vast subalpine meadows buzzing with insects-- flies, beetles, but also huge butterflies and at one head of flowers so many bees the buzzing was audible yards away.

Clover lake was beautiful and sufficiently low above sea level that we were allowed to wade into it. The higher you go, the hardier to cold and thin atmosphere and hence the more fragile to other forces are the microecosystems of the mountain-- other forces including human tramping feet. The girls tried it and came back with chilled feet. The sun bore down like oven coils, so maybe that wasn't a bad thing. Much more sunscreen was applied.

As predicted, the hike back up was brutally hard to both children and adults, requiring a good many stops and one confontation with Kouryou-chan. She just would not drink "her" water. We made it into a game that she could steal from the adults' water bottles if we could drink from hers, and that kept her sufficiently hydrated to keep her cheerful all the way up the side of the mountain to Sunset Point and our car.

We drove all the way to Sunset proper, a huge flower-covered mountaintop meadowland with a tiny knicknack store, where we bought the girls candy bars, and a large ranger station where I bought a more up-to-date trail map and listened as one of the rangers paid a creepy amount of attention (I thought) to a 12-year-old girl dressed like America's next great starlet but with that awkward, unsure, full of "Ok!" voice that comes from getting too much attention.

We made it back to the campsite and tried to make beer-can chicken. It worked, mostly, and with buttered noodles and steamed broccoli it was all delicious and perfect. The girls went over to a campfire circle reserved for the rangers and listened to some nice old lady talk about volcanoes. Omaha and I read, and I made it about halfway through Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archives before going to bed myself.

I am tired. I am sore. I've had a lot of fun. We started out Monday late, after a breakfast of cereal, packing up "the last few items" which took us until 2:00pm in the afternoon. Our biggest crisis had been that our previous packing crate, a 30 gallon monster, was too big to fit into the car with two children and the 26 gallon cooler. We lucked out that shastaw had given us some unused 18 gallon containers, and I quickly retrieved one and repacked the car with it. The few items that could not fit completely got packed around it. When we were done the car was fit to explode, and the tents and camp chairs were bungee'd very securely to the roof.

I took the wrong road and made the trip an hour longer than it needed to be, but eventually we made it up into the mountains. We were running low on gasoline and I had to stop at the one town, with the one gas station, for forty miles in either direction from Enumclaw and Yakima, that being Greenleaf, where they wanted gasoline for $2.769. We would learn, on the way out, that a week of rising oil prices had led to a weekend price of $2.999. I filled the tank anyway and bought a bag of beef jerky. Yummy!

The girls tolerated the trip very well, playing and singing. When we arrived at the campsite by the White River we discovered that the credit card machine was dead and they took cash or checks only. I had left my checkbook at home, and Omaha found she had only one check left. A disaster! We left an IOU with the camp host; I would drive into town the next day and get cash needed to make the trip possible.

We set up the tent and put out the pads and sleeping bags, and then we made a fire for dinner. We had a helpful but nosy neighbor who introduced himself as Doug and his wife as Beatrice. Her taste in literature, if the book in her hand was any clue, went to Triumphalist fantasy novels (pre-Rapture mythology that an outbreak of Evangelical Christianity will result in the vast majority of humanity becoming Christian). He was helpful in that he leant us his hatchet, as I had forgotten mine, and I needed it to split firewood. He was nosy in that he was fascinated with the radiant heat oven Omaha was experimenting with while we made hamburgers. He said "It [was] so nice to see a whole family, still together, everyone working and getting along so pleasantly." Mindful of his wife's reading, I made polite noises, pulled out of some Promise Keepers literature I had once read, to the effect that society didn't make it easy but we were determined to make it happen anyway. He nodded gravely with understanding.

The hamburgers were fabulous, and the "oven" worked quite well, toasting the fries. It was a delicious dinner. Afterwards, while we were cleaning up, I snatched the last of the fries off Omaha's plate and she looked at me. "You're like a raccoon!" she said.

We put the girls to bed in their tent, because by then it was very dark. They brushed their teeth and went to sleep after some healthy giggling. After an hour or so while Omaha and I read our books we went to bed. I could hear the river, very low as the snowpack last winter was very shallow, hissing and crashing less than a hundred yards away. Every once in a while I heard that curious thumping sound, a kind of negative pressure wave. The stars were beautiful.

Yamaarashi-chan has come to live with me and my family, and that entails certain legal re-arrangements, some of which involve dealing with the child support enforcement officer to whom I charitably refer as Cog In The Machine #4. (For previous adventures with Cogs In The Machine #2 and #3, read Wheels, Cogs, Social Workers from September, 2003.)

Today, I received a letter from Cog In The Machine #4, and I opened it up. I had some idea of what to expect-- and what that was is really none of your business. What I got instead was unexpected.

It was a request for a hearing, claiming that the obligor parent was unemployed and could not pay child support. It bewildered me; such arrangements have nothing to do with the state of my case. And I looked up at the header and realized that Cog #4 had put someone else's case mail in the envelope she was sending me. The name, the case number, everything, were for a different case.

This really bothers me. Because it means that some of my case paperwork may have ended up in yet another mail envelope. It tells me that my case worker is either incompetent or overworked or both, and has poor procedure in place for reducing these kinds of errors. And because I have in my hands private and personal details about a family-- indeed a tragedy-- in which I have no stake and about which I really, for the sake of privacy and propriety, should know nothing at all.

I have called Cog #4 and let her know about the error. But I had to leave voice mail and she won't be back in the office until Tuesday. Let's hope the problem gets resolved quickly and professionally.

Well, I spoke with the placement officer for the local school district and they said that it was too late to try and transfer Yamaarashi-chan to a higher-performance school for the year. The only one reasonably within reach had recently acquired new territory that had filled up their program for the year, so it's the local or a private school. There are a few, but I don't know what we could do for transportation yet.

Kouryou-chan is eating like a bird, and it's showing in her behavior; she's been cranky the past day or so. She didn't each much of the stir-fry last night, although Yamaarashi-chan ate all of hers. This morning when I went to fill their lunch boxes for camp I discovered that Kouryou-chan hadn't eaten her sandwich yesterday at all. No lunch, no dinner... she ate a huge breakfast this morning, asking for double the usual raisin bran, I packed her favorite kind of sandwich, and dinner tonight's her favorite (tortellini with home-made marinara). They provided Nutri-grain snack bars at the Y, even, and she seemed to like those. I'll get calories into that kid one way or another.

I'm a little worried about the new neighbor kids, especially the oldest boy. The evangelical family to the West are also SCA types, and the boys take out their agression with junior boffers and wooden shields. The boy from the East, on the other hand, seems to take delight in crippling insects, pulling the wings off flies, and making them do his will. He enjoyed my expression when he described how he'd broken a butterfly's wing so "it could be my pet." Icky. I hope it's just boy stuff, but I never did anything like that.

And I am Mr. Housework. I vacuumed the upstairs rugs, took a crevice tool to all the moulding, dusted everywhere. And when I had the living room floor cleared I did a GTD thing: I took all the miscellaneous paperwork from the kitchen, that had been piling up everywhere, and I sorted it. Scheduling stuff (local catalogs of events, summer guides), magazines, printed recipes, stuff for Omaha to sort (actually quite small), stuff the kids produced, coupons, and take-out menus: each got their own folder. I'll have to wait until I get home to label the folders properly: Kouryou-chan used up all the tape in the labeler. I found the cat's rabies vaccination paperwork from last month and put her new tag on, only two weeks late. I found the paperwork from my MSA and called them about the latest account transaction, and they admitted they'd made a bureaucratic mistake in sending me a check and renewed my direct-deposit. And Covad, the local DSL reseller that supports Speakeasy, came out and finally (finally!) hardened our line (we have to pay an extra $5 a month for the privilege because we're too far from the POP for a standard line) and after two years I'm actually getting the 1.5Mb/s I was promised.

Yesterday, I took my family to watch the gay pride parade, and I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Part of the reason that I wanted to go was because I want Yamaarashi-chan to feel that her mother's family isn't broken or wrong because her mother happens to date women and is doing so with the express purpose of finding someone with whom to spend to the rest of her life. And if Pride were to be about that-- that gay people are just like straight people, that poly people are just like mono people, the differences are large but not worthy of significance-- then I could feel comfortable going to pride.

But Pride isn't about that. Pride is an awful lot about sex.

I don't know that it's appropriate to introduce my five and eight year old to topics like the rampant syphilis among gay men, especially not with a giant light-sabre weilding penis as its spokesthing.

And as I wandered around the festival and watched a gaggle of middle-school girls dressed in their goth-loli and kinderslut outfits, I had to wonder if, in five years, I'm going to be talking to Yamaarashi-chan about her own taste in clothing. Do they think of it as just "dress up" or are they trying to attract the hormonal and predatory eye of every straight man who walks past? I don't want Yamaarashi-chan or Kouryou-chan to get the idea that I approve of her doing those kinds of things; sex (and sexiness), like wine, is a privilege that comes with maturity.

The Pride committee advertised that this year's parade would be "more family friendly" than in years past. I don't think it quite made it. It still made it seem like there was a lot about being gay that was mostly about sex. And I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that as a life's focus-- at least, not as an option presented to young children.