We figured out how Mia unlocks Vanessa’s cell phone. She opens the slider keyboard and then closes it. Brilliant! I think I got her hooked on cellphones already by putting The Presets – My People on there. She loves to hold the phone and dance to it.
We ended up camping at Red Canyon in the Manzano mountains last weekend, since Jemez was closed due to fires. It was a nice time. Walmart tents are made mainly to catch the zipper. I am now an expert at unsticking zippers. Pull the stuck cloth from the zipper as you pull it back and forth. It only took us about 2 hours to set up the tent. Yeah, we’re not handy. Lessons learned: Get your tent on level ground, clear the ground of ALL sharp/pointy sticks, pillows are nice.
Mia’s somehow figured out how to unlock Vanessa’s phone…which is quite a feat for a 1-year-old. We’re not sure how she figured it out, but she’s called someone, tried to sign into AIM, and possibly other stuff.
Well, we’re off to the Jemez area for some camping this weekend. We’ve actually convinced Vanessa to come along, which is apparently no small feat!
Vanessa is feeling the crowding of doing home school with 2 kids around. Â Her computer desk is in the living room, which probably isn’t too convenient. Â (Mine is in our closet.) Â So, she has bigger house fever. Â Thus, we begin the long process of preparing the house to sell. Â I think we’d be trading location for size. Â We’re at a pretty sweet location near the mountains right now. Â We’d possibly be moving into the sea of houses on the west side of Albuquerque. Â If you look at Google maps west of the river, it’s just a sea of brown houses.
We must have some kinda city ordinance that declares brown as the official city color or something. Â Anyway, we begin to clean in a way we never have before. Â We’re pulling out sharp metal objects to clean up encrusted plumbing and so on.
I got a cold from the kids. I would like to be frozen until a cure is found. (yes yes, just kidding.) The worst symptom seems to be my desire to whine. A vocals session of Rock Band with visiting cousins the other day did not help my throat any.
For our 8th anniversary, we went to the new east-side Sadie’s on Eubank. So tasty, it’s my favorite Albuquerque restaurant. (For years, there’s only been one in Albuquerque way over on the west side.) The enchiladas are covered nicely in chile and cheese. The salsa and everything else is quite spicy, cause they ain’t afraid. Sopapillas are perfectly soft. It is to cry! I’ve had eight great years with my perfect match in Vanessa…and look forward to more!
Sean seems to have a superpower where he can remember videogame levels really well. I was playing Castlevania before they went to Houston and when he came back a week later, he remembered where to get the goggles in the game (a very obscure item.) If only his memory applied to more important things too.
Tonight, he goes to some sort of basketball evaluation where they see how much the kids know before the program starts. I hope they teach the kids all they need to know, cause I can’t remember much about basketball at all. I just hope he has fun.
Sean and I took a 5-mile round-trip bike ride yesterday (with lots o’ breaks). He did well. We stopped off at a playground and walked across the bridge on Tramway and Copper. Getting across the Tramway/Central intersection takes a while. At one intersection there, drivers have to wait so long to turn right there that they feel they have a pedestrian override when they finally get the green arrow. I once had a car honking angrily at me as I crossed when signaled there…so we didn’t use that crossing yesterday. When we got back, Sean told Vanessa, “We took lots of breaks.”
Sean (5-year-old son) just called me to tell me about his new Lego construction. He seems to have learned the wrong lesson from me…delivering his message and then, almost in mid-sentence, saying, “so bye.” Guess we need to level up our smalltalk skills…and I ain’t talkin’ about the programming language.
Our relatives here in California have a pool. My cousin and I pulled out a 5 gallon bucket as a tiny diving bell. One of us would catch some air in it and push it down while the other would dive and see how many breaths could be taken from the bucket. A big rock is great fun to help you get down to the bottom while holding your breathe.
I think it’s been an awesome few days for Sean. Friday was his fifth birthday. He got a new Sonic game. (He called me up today to tell me he’d unlocked a new level and then again later to say he’d unlocked the other character.)
Then we went camping with some friends in the Jemez mountains near Cuba (New Mexico). It rained heavily the first couple of days. It’s apparently hard to sleep in the rain. It soaked a few tents, causing some early departures. It’s also very noisy. I think you shouldn’t count on sleeping when you go camping…although Sean slept just fine. We took a couple of folding cots that kept us off the ground. They just barely fit into the tent, but worked reasonably well.
I learned that you probably shouldn’t trust a car GPS when camping. Ours starts by asking what city your destination is in. (uh…none?) Also, it seemed to have no idea where some dirt roads were. On the way home, it wanted us to turn into a field behind a closed gate. That’s when I learned about its ability to route to a destination while avoiding a particular part of the route.
The second day’s weather was even worse, with cold and heavy hail. It was apparently free-range cattle country and we saw a huge bull roaming around.
On the third day, I got an ATV ride with a friend. With a good driver, it’s as good as a roller-coaster. He also let me borrow it and take Sean and his cousin riding around a bit. We saw what I think was a wolf in the distance. I learned that you should always wear eye protection while driving them, as I got mud in my eye on the way back to camp. I was driving down the road squinting and passers-by surely thought I was son of Popeye.
It was a beautiful area with a grassy valley, forest on either side, aspen, and an area of rocks to climb on. It was great hiking around out there with me boy. Ug ug ug ug ug.
