a-camping we went

This year our ward finally had a ward campout (this has not happened since before we moved here five years ago). We had a fun time. Dinner was hot dogs and assorted side dishes. After eating, Kevin and Ryan had some adventures (including Kevin getting wet at the lake) and Heidi and I chatted with friends by the fire. When it was dark most of us sat around the fire and sang campfire songs and primary songs. Somebody brought some marshmallows and Kevin did a great job roasting one all by himself. The Empeys had some glow sticks that they let Kevin and Heidi play with, which is always fun when you're a little kid.

We went and got ready for bed, including a trip to the bathroom, and then tried getting the kids to go to sleep. We also had to kick some daddy long-legs out of the tent. Ryan left again and I kept working on getting the kids in bed. Kevin probably would have settled down okay, except Heidi could not comprehend that we were sleeping in the tent. After I tried to explain that we were sleeping in the tent, she kept saying, "No, I don't like this tent!" I finally let the kids have the flashlights for a while and search for spiders. It was fun to listen to their chatter and watch them explore the shadows. After a while I took the flashlights away and Heidi laid down on Ryan's sleeping bag right next to me. She settled down a little better there, and the kids finally fell asleep.

By this point Ryan had been gone for quite a while. I suspected that he had stopped by the fire and was talking to some friends, but I figured I should make sure so I wouldn't be sitting there worrying that he was lost in the woods somewhere. So after I was satisfied that the kids were sleeping pretty deeply, I went back to the fire, and Ryan was there talking with two friends. I ended up getting slightly disoriented and couldn't find our tent, so I went back to the fire pit and Ryan pointed me in the right direction. I fell asleep pretty quick. Ryan ended up talking for three hours, which was nice because he doesn't get to chat with friends at church very often. He shifted Heidi over to the sleeping bag that the kids were sharing (opened up and covered with blankets).

A few hours later Heidi woke up and kept yelling "I need space!!" at Kevin because whenever he moved the blanket shifted. It took a bit of work to get her to calm down. In the midst of this, Kevin sat straight up and said, "Oh! Are all of my friends sleeping in their sleeping bags?"

Overall the kids did pretty well. Kevin knew what was going on and did a great job going to sleep.

In the morning Ryan helped make breakfast (pancakes, bacon, and eggs). We didn't get a lot of sleep, so we were pretty ready to be done after that, so we packed everything up and left. We were asked to clean the church, so we went and did that before coming home really tired.

Memory Lane: How remembering my childhood helps me understand my kids (kind of)

When I was little, maybe three years old, I got a hold of a bottle of Head and Shoulders. I took it out into the living room, sat down under the piano, and proceeded to dump the entire bottle onto my head. It got into my eyes and hurt really bad. My mom called a neighbor to come watch my little sister while I got my first shower. I can only imagine how long it took to rinse it out.

I'm pretty sure I am not exaggerating when I say it was an entire bottle. When we moved out of the house fifteen years later, there was still a very large greasy spot on the carpet that had the unmistakable smell of Head and Shoulders, and I know the carpet had been shampooed several times by the Kirby salesman, so it must have been rooted into the carpet pretty deeply.

Another time, my mom was sick in bed. I wanted to do something to help her, and it occurred to me that I could help by getting the mail. Our house was on a dirt road 1/4 of a mile a way from the highway, and our mailbox was at the start of the dirt road on the highway. My dad was working in the garden and he saw me try to go walking up the road, so he warned me that it wasn't safe and I should not go up there because I could get run over. But I couldn't imagine myself getting hurt, so I didn't think it would be a problem. I just waited until he was somewhere else and then set off up the driveway while he couldn't see. It was all going great and (at least from my perspective) I had gotten pretty far up the driveway (I wasn't even half-way). Then, to my horror, an enormous red combine turned from the highway onto the dirt road. I was going to get RUN OVER by a combine! I knew it would be a close race, but my only hope was to turn around and run as fast as I could back to my house. I didn't look behind me, but I was sure that the combine was practically on my heels. Against all odds, I made it back to the house safely, and I think my dad realized what I had done and said I told you so. For a few years I was certain that I must be an incredibly fast runner because I had outrun a combine. (Now I know I could probably walk at a casual pace and still be going faster than a combine at its fastest speed.)

It's interesting how most of our childhood memories get fuzzy with time. I am glad I have held onto a few, because remembering them helps remind me that to my kids, the strange things they do probably make perfect sense. To me what I had done was completely rational.

On that note, I have cleaned up a small swimming pool in our bathroom twice in the past week, which is partly why I was thinking about these stories. I did send the offending party to time out, but I think I handled the situation a little more patiently than normal. After it happened the second time I opted to remove the plug from the sink so the kids can't plug the sink and then let the water run over the sides and onto the floor (this obsession with playing in the water has been a bit of a problem lately, although normally it was not this bad). The thingy on the faucet says it lets out 2 gallons per minute, so it doesn't take long for the sink to overflow. (We changed that out too for one with a slightly slower flow.) I was really annoyed that I had to sop up an inch of water off of the floor, but at the same time I had to admit that I used to enjoy filling the sink up with water and floating things in it, and when I was little I didn't notice that water was getting all over the floor, and the kids probably aren't doing it with the intent of making a lot of work for me. I figure it's probably better to unscrew the plug than to keep fighting them about it.

This post sounds kind of like a Christmas letter, but it's been over a month since I've written about our family, so I guess that's what happens.

We are alive and safe and haven't gone completely insane yet. The semester's only half over, though, so there's still plenty of time.

Kevin is going to preschool at the New Adventures Kids Club and having a great time. It is three mornings a week. I hear from his teachers that he is participating a lot more now than he did in the beginning. He does the activities and the worksheets and he is getting better at tracing the letters (which he completely refused to do before preschool started). He loves taking something to share for "Show up time" (i.e. Show and Tell--they bring something that starts with the letter of the week) every Wednesday and he often acts out preschool scenarios like circle time with Heidi. Kevin's teachers often tell me how much he loves to be their helper, which makes me pleased. I am really glad we made the decision to send him to preschool this year because it has helped him in so many ways. Heidi and I came along for their first field trip to the fire department on Monday and we had a nice time. One of the firemen put on all of his gear, including the face mask, so that they could see what a fireman looks like in his suit. I thought it was a really good idea because if a kid was trapped in a house during a fire it might be kind of scary to see a fireman in a full suit.

Kevin is also doing soccer at the YMCA every Saturday morning. He usually stays on the field now. We're still working on getting him to actually participate. He seems to move around more if there are cute little girls to follow around. (Her name was Rosie.) (She had blue eyes.) (Don't tell Kevin's other girlfriend who lives upstairs.)

Heidi goes to a play group for a couple of hours on Wednesdays. The moms take turns watching the kids. We try to do a little lesson about the letter of the week, but mostly the idea is for the kids to play with each other and the moms to get a break. I am also trading babysitting on Mondays and Fridays with the mother of another boy in Kevin's preschool, so on Mondays during preschool Heidi has a friend over and on Fridays during preschool I am kid-free.

Heidi likes eating plain tortillas. Preferably in stacks of five or more at once. (Yuck!) I have to hide them so she doesn't waste an entire bag at one go. Kevin likes wrapping the leftovers on his plate in saran wrap and putting them in the fridge for later. And yes, he often does come back and eat them later. They both like cooking scrambled eggs. Interestingly, they are not as interested in eating said scrambled eggs. They claim that somebody else should eat them.

My GIS class is proving to be very time-consuming. I am convinced that ArcMap occasionally decides not to work just because it doesn't like me. On Saturday I was trying to work on a portion of the homework assignment, and even though I followed the directions exactly I kept getting error messages. Three hours later I came back and tried again, and did the same exact things I had done before, and this time it worked. Then yesterday I ended up spending the entire day on the last part of the assignment. We were supposed to make a model that tells ArcMap to go through a series of steps and repeat (iterate) those steps for all ten files in a folder. It would either stop after the first file (it was not iterating) or get caught in a loop where it repeated the steps over and over for the first file. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. Ryan looked at it when he got home and said it was a problem with ArcMap, not me. We finally sacrificed enough chickens and Ryan did the right dance as the model ran, and it worked half an hour before class started. It was not me, it was ArcMap. Since it was about a quarter of the points on the assignment, I opted to hurry and finish it and get to class ten minutes late. (I told my teacher that ArcMap doesn't like me and he completely agreed. It's a really useful program, but it definitely has a lot of bugs.) It can be really stressful because often I can't move on in a lab until I figure out the part that's not working, and there have been several times when I've basically spent the entire day on Monday trying to finish before class because I had problems all week. Most of my dreams these days are about making maps (which is really annoying because that's a really boring thing to dream about). I am glad I'm taking the class, though, because I am gaining a lot of skills that will be useful if I need to apply for a job.

For my research project, I acquired some precipitation samples that had been collected at UNC-W and did the Strontium chemistry for them. I am working on scheduling a time to sample some well water. It looks like I am also going to collect vegetation from various places in my study area, burn them to ash, and then do the Strontium chemistry of the ash. (I don't really know how that process works since I haven't done it yet.) As part of my GIS class, we are supposed to do a project related to our research, so I am going to use remote sensing, precipitation, and elevation data to find out whether the Sr concentrations or 87/86 ratios in some rivers could be changed by a single storm. I noticed that some of my precipitation samples had Sr concentrations that were higher than the Sr concentrations in some of the surface water I sampled last year, so I was curious to know if a storm could affect the Sr chemistry of the water in those spots.

I am very ready to be done with school. This is my eighth year of college and it's getting harder and harder to balance my school responsibilities with my family and church responsibilities. Next semester I will probably just be taking what Ryan calls a "fluff class." I'm thinking choir. Ryan has been taking care of a lot of the housework and staying with the kids a lot so I can do homework. I would never have made it this far if he hadn't refused to let me drop out. I have grand plans for making Halloween costumes this year, but at this point I don't even have the fabric, so we'll see.

Ryan passed his preliminary oral exam last summer and he is working on getting data and papers done as he works toward getting his dissertation written (expected graduation date: May 2015). He also has a "minion" (i.e. a high school student who comes once a week to do research). He is serving again on the GPSF Senate and as the Student Parent Advocate. Check out the awesome post that he wrote on his blog about evil villain lairs. Also check out the interesting posts from his on-going "Stories from My Mission" series.

US Geological Survey shut down too

The above image is what you see if you go to www.usgs.gov. That's the US Geological Survey. It is a wealth of resources for geology research, and I would likely have used data from the website this semester for a class I am in. I know there is a significant portion of my department who would like to use data from the website.

I am not going to take any sides about whether the Republicans or Democrats are right on this issue. Honestly I think most of the people in both parties don't care very much about the United States and they don't really care that our country is getting deeper and deeper in debt.

But the Obama administration is handling the shutdown like ten-year-old drama queens, and I think the USGS is just one more example. If they had simply told the people employed by the USGS to not come in to work until the shutdown is over, what probably would have happened would be that the website would still be up, but there wouldn't be any updates and if there were any technical issues they wouldn't get fixed. It's completely unnecessary to shut down most of the website. And this seems mild compared to other actions they have taken, like putting guards around the World War II memorial so people can't go see it. These are not required cutbacks. They are putting our tax money into raising up a stink because they want the press to have plenty of material for making the Republicans look like jerks. It's incredibly childish.