Get Off My Lawn!

Slow down everyone, you’re moving too fast

/ Shane / Leave a comment

This has been blogged about so much that it is almost stereotypical for me to blog about it at this point. But seriously people, what’s the rush?

The other day I was waiting in the loose knot of people around the deli counter at the grocery store. “Can I help you?” asked the teenager behind the counter. “Excuse me!” huffed a voice with all the indignity only the old can muster. “You looked right over me!” The teenager was obviously very embarrassed, but luckily, another employee became available at that moment and stepped up to help the woman.

As I watched the lady later spend a full 10 minutes perusing the ice cream section, I couldn’t help but wonder: what was the big rush? Nobody wants to be passed over, but she clearly wasn’t in a hurry, so what difference did a few more minutes make? Why did she have to get so upset? Why did she have to be so entitled?

Getting angry at the kid behind the deli counter is so stressful to both her and you, and yet makes practically no difference in your life. Why do it? Being a nicer person not only enables you to live longer due to all the stress you avoid, but you also enjoy the time you do have more, because you’re not such a sourpuss all the time.

I don’t know if this is getting worse because we’re further sliding into a me-first society, if I’m just noticing it more because I’m an adult now, or if it’s just because I moved to the big city and that sort of thing is just worse here. I understand rushing when you’re in a hurry, and I guess sometimes it feels like we’re just always in a hurry. But lets face it; if you yell at people, then you are not a nice person. Even if I was very internally upset that I was getting skipped, I don’t think I would ever stoop so low as to get huffy with someone over it. I feel like it takes a certain amount of entitlement, to where you feel like your customer experience is more important than everything, even more important than the dignity of the person who is serving you.

Maybe this is just another case for my everyone-should-have-to-work-fast-food-at-least-once-in-their-lives-so-they-understand-how-it-feels-when-customers-constantly-treat-you-like-crap rule. If people understood what it felt like to be on the receiving end, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to dish it out. Then again, maybe this lady had been treated like crap by customers before, but it was so long ago she doesn’t remember anymore. Maybe my rule should allow for “re-upping” every 40 years or so.

Can we at least all just agree to make a concerted effort to just let the small stuff go? In addition to making us all instantly happier, think of how much of a better place the world will be.

Finally, a camping trip where it didn’t rain for once!

/ Shane / 2 Comments

We spent two nights at The Haven, and we had beautiful weather. It was in the 80’s during the day, and down to the 60’s at night. Most importantly, NO RAIN! I don’t know why I’m such a camping rain magnet, but I’m glad my powers were not active for once.

We’re really starting to know our way around the land a little bit. We spent most of the day on Friday carving paths to various things with our new loppers (especially the potty tree). Most importantly, I think we might have found the location for our future tiny house! It’s in a sort of clearer area between a triangle of truly massive pine trees. Well shaded, midway back in the woods, and not too far from a clearing that may serve for fruit trees. Definitely some potential.

Equally importantly, we did find the mythical blueberry bushes towards the back of our property, and they were delicious. We might need to bolster our stock with a few extra bushes next year.

We’re starting to know our way around South Haven a little bit as well. On Saturday morning, we hit up the most excellent farmers’ market, followed by coffee @ Julias. I think this is going to become a Haven tradition (especially considering we all were in need of a real bathroom by Saturday morning!!) Also, strange coincidence, one of the vendors at the farmer’s market was the City Hippie, a family from Evie’s school and a maker of extremely beautiful things. Evie and Ollie did a kids’ activity at the market and colored some canvas bags with fabric markers and stencils, and they both turned out really well. They’re both very proud of their bags and they’ve shown them to everyone they’ve come in contact with since then.

By lunch time, some friends had arrived, and the work portion of our trip was over. Although I don’t think she really realized it at the time, I think that Evie probably had one of the best days of her life. To have friends her age there to play with (who don’t get frustrated with her no matter how bossy she is), to hike with and make up potty stories with, and to hide behind the tent and tell secrets with was about as fun as it gets. We found a dog-friendly beach and all had a great time, even if the water was a little cold and the waves were a little sneaky (some unexpected water in the face a time or two).

Ollie also had a great time with Maya and Elsie (he said his favorite part of the weekend was singing “Twinkle Twinkle” with them), but for his money, he was just happy to play in the sand. All day, every day, nothing but sand. We would no sooner wash his hands or put on his pajamas or whatever, and he’d be back in it again. He had sand everywhere, including what was basically a sand hood over his head and neck, which got pretty disgusting when we were forced to put a layer of vaseline on top of it all. Yuck.

Ollie played in the sand so much he was literally delusional. He shouted in his sleep, “I want to go under the sand!” I thought he must have meant, “I DON’T want to go under the sand,” nightmare style, but he repeated it several times and he definitely wanted to go under the sand. Based on how much sand he had on him, he almost got his wish.

And the best part about The Haven? You can be as LOUD AS YOU WANT:

(I love how Ollie just flinches a lot and looks confused, but still wants to be part of the group.)

Unfortunately, the worst part about The Haven is ticks. We found at least a dozen crawling around at various times, and poor Ollie won the dubious honor of being the first person to have a tick attached to them at The Haven. We checked him pretty thoroughly at bedtime, so it must have crawled up to his head during the night. We handled it pretty quickly and calmly, and Oliver didn’t quite seem to mind, handling it with his usual good-natured nonchalance (“The ladybug bit me!”).

Finally, on the way home, we stopped and picked 7 3/4 pounds of blueberries. Evie in particular did a great job. I was really surprised. The last time she went picking, she did what Ollie did this time, which was basically eat every blueberry that went in her bucket. She was pretty proud of herself, and cried quite a bit when she accidentally spilled her bucket. But she got back to it and ended up picking a full quart by herself!

A great trip and, as always, it makes me want to go back again!

Poison Ivy – An Education

/ Shane / 5 Comments

I am very allergic to poison ivy. I have had it so often, multiple times per summer when I was growing up, and bad enough to need medicine several times. Once, I had poison ivy (I’m guessing) on my face so bad that my eyes swelled shut. I think I can confidently say that I have as much reason to hate poison ivy as anybody on this earth.

And yet, I can’t identify it.

You’d think that I would have this burned into my brain, since it’s almost a matter of survival with me. I have been shown a million times what it looks like, and yet I couldn’t tell you what it looks like, or point to it if I saw it. I would swear to you that I have been shown different things by different people.  The only thing I can tell you is, “Leaves of three, leave it be!” So that narrows it down to about everything in the forest.

And this is just for poison ivy! What about the more exotic things, like poison oak or poison sumac? Well, here’s a little something that will blow your mind: the other day I discovered that poison ivy is the same thing as poison oak. They’re different kinds of poison ivy that grow in different parts of the U.S.

So after eyeing every plant at The Haven suspiciously, I decided to sit down and finally figure this out. Nobody has gotten poison ivy there yet, but for all I know the entire thing is infested with this terrible scourge. So here, without further ado, is an actual picture of what these things look like:

Except it’s not. Because the more you look into it, it turns out that there are hundreds and hundreds of variations on what they look like. So it turns out that everybody’s right, because each instance of the plant looks totally different from all the others. It looks like everything: it’s a shrub, it’s a vine, basically it’s just a leaf. The only thing you can depend on is that it’s green (except when it’s red). So that narrows it down.

So guess what? Even after all my research, I’m *still* never going to be able to identify it. However, my research did manage to make me even more frightened of the stuff. According to the CDC, “When exposed to 50 micrograms of urushiol [the substance produced by these plants], an amount that is less than one grain of table salt, 80 to 90 percent of adults will develop a rash. ” And this article provided me with the frightening sentence, “Using a chain saw to cut down such a tree produces flying poisonous sawdust”. Flying poisonous sawdust! Lovely.

Did I mention how allergic to this stuff I am? I’m getting itchy just writing this.

Haven

/ Shane / 5 Comments

We finally managed to spend the night at the Haven, our new land barony in the hinterlands. It was awesome.

Hiking stick, check!

I don’t know if it was because it’s the longest amount of time we’ve spent there at one go, or if it was something about physically spending the night there, but in any case it was the best trip we’ve had. As much as I wanted to go up there already, I think this trip really lit a fire under me to go back.

And that’s kind of funny, since mostly what we did was hard work.

I guess this face helps her lift?

Hey, watch out for that…branch

I think she’s carrying quite a bit for her size!

We were only there for a short time, but I think we had just the right amount of work planned. Basically, the first day we hiked around until we found a dead tree (apparently THE dead tree…this was harder than we anticipated), cut it down, chopped it up, and carried it back to our campsite.

Chainsaw time

Prepare to feel the wrath of my ax of justice

When we were done with that, we were pretty hot and sweaty, so we decided to go to the beach. Immediately, a thunderstorm blew in. Oh well, we we wanted to cool down, right? The tent ended up leaking only a little bit, and it cleared up for a few hours just at the right time to have a camp fire that night. We even saw a few stars, before another storm blew in and we went to bed.

It rained all night, but the tent didn’t leak. After a very early morning wake up call (4:30…happy father’s day, love Evie), we got back to work. All we had to do was hang up the swing Ron made for Oliver’s birthday. Sounds easy right?

Ha ha ha, it’s funny how close to death I am!

Well worth the near death experience

Actually, the coolest part about doing the swing was that it ended up being a lot more than just hanging up a swing. We found the perfect tree, but we needed to clean it up a little bit. We ended up cutting down a handful of big branches and cleaning out all the scrub under an enormous old pine tree, creating a nice little hollow for the kids to play in. It kind of killed me to cut this beautiful old tree (I know you’ve been around for 100 years, but my kids need to swing), but we made a really cool little area that I think the kids will appreciate for many years to come.

In fact, maybe that’s what made the weekend so great. It’s like we “claimed” the land a little bit by doing some work to it and bending it to our will. Even just deciding where we would camp and how we would organize it, digging a fire pit, designating the wood stacking area, and locating a “bathroom”.

The finest facilities money can buy

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the bathroom got a lot more use than I was feeling was entirely necessarily within a few hours of arrival. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

I will say this: it gets pretty dark and quiet out there at night. Pretty dark and quiet. I had to go get something from the car, and although it wasn’t that far outside the fire light, my back did begin to creep a little bit. Lets just say, nobody took the trek back to the bathroom tree after 10 p.m. or so. I’m sure this is the city-slicker perspective, but it’s awfully easy to imagine something hiding in the woods right behind you.

Which is why, when Matt (on his first camping trip ever) went to the car, I immediately suggested that we all hide in the woods before he came back. Rachael added that we should perhaps knock over one chair to up the creepiness factor. Luna also obliged us by whining worriedly into the dark in the direction we’d gone, which was creeping me out even though I was the one hiding. Unfortunately, Ron was sleeping in his chair, so we just had to abandon him. We wondered which would be funnier: Matt coming back and finding us all gone, or Ron waking up and finding us all gone?

I don’t know if Matt had a moment of goosebumps or not, but, despite the fact that I was able to sufficiently muffle my snickers, he found us quickly enough when he came back. Unfortunately, I probably spooked myself out more than Matt, hiding in the woods like that. My imagination loves nothing more than to run away with itself. (What if she’s not whining because she wants to come with, what if she’s whining because there’s a monster RIGHT BEHIND US!)

I’m having some second thoughts about camping out there all alone.

People without kids are going to have to deal with the fact that my kids might sometimes ruin their day

/ Shane / Leave a comment

On occasion, children have been known to get out of hand. And on occasion, nearby people have been known to remark, or give the stink eye, especially if those nearby people have chosen not to have kids, or have raised their kids so long ago that they’ve completely forgotten the fact that on occasion their kids weren’t the perfect angels they remember them as.

This hasn’t happened to me, mind you, because my children are perfect angels. And also because I have a terrible scowl that is so fierce, judgmental people instinctively know that they can keep their judgement to themselves. And also because judgmental people are usually (but not always) wise enough to save their disapproval for a time when they are safely away from any kind of real confrontation (by which I mean the Internet).

So I have heard some general grousing about children ruining things. Everything. Meals at restaurants, movies, walking in the park, etc. (True story, last weekend Oliver screamed so loud in the bathroom at Meijer that people were forced to flee without washing their hands. My children even ruined hand washing!) And even more than that, I can assure you that I’ve *imagined* more complaining about my kids than all of the actual complaining about kids that has ever taken place put together.

I suppose there might be actual parents out there who really are clueless about what their kids are doing, ignoring them as they run circles around the restaurant, screaming at the top of their lungs, knocking people’s food off their plates, etc. (or at least that’s the way the pearl-clutching old ladies will tell the story to their church group or whatever when they get home) But speaking for the rest of us, I can assure you that we are absolutely mortified by bad behavior, even if we are pretending nonchalance as we hastily wolf down our meal and try to collect our stuff as fast as possible so we can get the hell out of there, crawl into a hole, and die.

As a parent, I try so hard to make sure my kids behave. I feel awful when my kids are awful. I think we do about as well as is physically possible to do, and yet despite our best efforts, on occasion they still cause trouble. Sometimes the kids still shriek at 5 a.m. in a hotel room because they can’t agree on who should get to use the remote like a pretend phone first. Sometimes they still make trouble at a restaurant because they didn’t get the right crayon color, or we forgot to let them order for themselves, or they didn’t have “the right kind of french fries”.

But here’s the thing: all of that is part of learning how to behave.

It could be argued that it’s not fair that my kids are ruining your experience, that my choice to have kids is interfering with your choice to not have kids. I suppose there is some merit to that. However, if you make that argument, then you can’ t complain about how awful kids are these days, or how society is going to hell in a handbasket. Because we’re trying to be good parents, and trying to make our kids into good, respectful people. We’re trying to teach them how to behave. And when you’re learning something, you don’t always get it right the first time (believe it or not, our kids get it right more often then not, and when they don’t, it’s my fault for misjudging the level of tiredness/hungriness/orneriness in the first place).

If we hide in a bunker, never exposing our kids to the real world, then they’re going to end up as weirdo degenerate sub-humans who don’t know how to act in public, or interact with the real world. And ultimately, that’s going to end up disrupting your life a lot more than this one dinner.