{ a swoop and a dart }

A Few Notes About Kansas

photo courtesy of Maddie

When I was little, maybe either in 1978 or 1983, my parents traveled to Kansas for my dad's high school reunion in El Dorado where he grew up until he moved away to Ohio just before his senior year. When they came back, I have distinct memories of my mama making a Very Big Deal about how awful driving through Kansas was: flat, boring, awful, you name it. I've never been in Kansas until today (NEW STATE FOR MY LIST!!!) and as we were driving through, I realized I was driving with an odd feeling of apprehension as I waited for the terrible to present itself. And then I realized I have lived on or near the plains for so many years it just looked normal to me, and that my mama who lived in Ohio her whole life simply wasn't used to it. Haha.

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We did NOT have the urge to stop and see the Biggest Prairie Dog in the World (eeek!) or the five-legged cow (double eeek!) along the way today. Or the baby pigs and live rattlesnakes advertised by roadside sign as an exciting attraction.

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I have never heard of Fort Hays State before, but it is very well promoted throughout the interstate system. Actually, I've decided all Kansas colleges and universities are very well promoted throughout the interstate system. I have never seen so many higher education billboards in my life.

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I thought a lot about Grandma and Grandpa Rinehart today while I was driving.

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Ellie (poor sweet Ellie who suffered through five days in the kennel wondering if we were yet another family to abandon her) was a little perplexed about this drive we went on, because she associates car time with Medicine Bow National Forest, Curt Gowdy State Park, and Vedawoo. But she was so happy to be back with us she played along nicely.

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It took all I could do not to bail on the plan and veer off the road to visit Little Sweden about an hour before we stopped for the night. Another time, Lindsborg, Kansas, another time.

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We're staying at the Homewood Suites in Wichita. It is a fabulously wonderful dog-friendly hotel. As I was explaining to Deanna, after Ella died we made the conscious decision never to stay at another cat-friendly dive hotel ever again. Dogs are far more popular on the hotel circuit than cats... Ellie even got a gift bag. Heh.

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Tomorrow: leaving the wheat fields of Kansas, driving to the humidity of Louisiana. Hopefully I won't be off the grid too long!

 

Phone Photography Project Giveaway Winners!

Thank you to everyone who left such nice/funny/thoughtful comments. I read them all with chacteristic Willis Smiling Disorder : )

Here's the random.org picks before I go to bed:

Christi in MA and sherri, you're the lucky winners! If you haven't emailed by the time I show up in Wichita, Kansas tomorrow night I'll find you to send the redemption code then. And everyone else--you can register all the way up until July 10 but the class goes live July 1. I cannot wait!

Moving Update (Short Version) and a Super-Fantastic Giveaway!

Part I: The Moving Update

+ So the packers are back for a third day, because yesterday they got here late from Denver (with a smaller crew then promised) and then realized they didn't have their inventory paperwork and one of them spent an hour and a half driving around Cheyenne looking for a moving company office that would spot them the paperwork.

+ Three days of packers makes me want to poke my eyes out with spoons. I have stuff to do today. Stuff that should have been taken care of a while ago, perhaps (roll my Wyoming retirement funds from 2000-2002 into my IRA, ahem) but stuff all the same.

+ In addition to packers all week, we also have other ridiculous things happening: the incessant beeping of the crane that is fixing our chimney, the guy who is doing repair work on the brick facing and is two inches away from our windows with his I LOVE BOOBIES! belt on, the giant sinkhole/trench caused by the giant crane two days ago that is two feet from our back door (over the power lines that lead directly to the house), and a giant cottonwood branch that cracked off one of the trees near our house last night while Matt was delivering a couch to Abby and Wes sometime between 10:25 and 10:50 (that's how we roll... I delivered some things for a friend for temporary storage in another friend's basement at midnight on Sunday night). But about the branch: it actually seriously not-exaggerating would have killed someone had it fallen on a car.

YIKES.

It is a two-grocery-store-bottle-of-Frappuccino morning. Judge not, or I'll poke your eyes out with spoons, too.

On the bright side:

+ We have wonderful friends who have taken excellent care of the monkeys here, there, and everywhere this week.

+ When they are present in the house during the packing, they go off to read or play. It's really quite astounding how different moving with an 11 yo, an 8.5 yo, and a 6 yo is from moving with a 5 yo, a 2.5 yo, and a 7 week old. Or any other combination of ages from the past.

+ I cannot think of many more bright side items right now.

 

Part II: The Super-Fantastic Giveaway

Less than one week away—July 1—until The Phone Photography Project kicks off! And yes, if all goes as planned, that is the day we wake up for the first time in our new Louisiana house, after having slept on the floor the previous night. I am nothing if not awesome with timing. At least I don't have a 6 week old this time around (remember that?)

I have said it hundreds of times, but this workshop is going to be so much fun, as well as useful and educational. I spent some time this past week confirming the giveaway sponsors (PicTapGo! Image3D! Chronicle Books! Persnickety Prints! Artifact Uprising! Lots more!) and doing the final classroom review and it got me excited all over again. I was given 100% complete creative control about how to develop this class, and I've couldn't be more pleased with how it turned out. The contributing instructors, who I got to choose, are amazing. The bonus projects are both doable and inspiring; so much so that you might actually find yourself mixing concrete to make something. Or sneaking around to do something nice for a stranger. Or having a whole lot of fun with family and friends as you go out and look for things to take pictures of.

Want to win a spot in the class? I have two to give away! If you already registered, you'll get your money refunded from Big Picture Classes. To enter: just leave a comment to say hi or what you're up to or whatever, I'm not picky. I need all the distraction I can get to avoid poking my eyes out with spoons this week! Our internet is turned off on Friday afternoon and we hit the road for Wichita, Kansas on Saturday morning, so I'll close comments and post the winner sometime before that.

: )

No Murders to Report

Aside: this title could refer to so many scenarios this week. Heh.

A long, long time ago (back in 2009) I wrote here about the $11 Kodak Duaflex camera that the Ebay King bought me so I could experiment with TTV photography (through-the-viewfinder photography). The gist of the story was that inside the camera, we found an old roll of 620 film that the seller missed; Matt suggested that maybe the roll of film would end up being evidence in a cold case murder. You can read the whole story here.

I did send in that film thinking it would take 8 weeks to have it returned. Instead, it took over three years because right after I sent it in, the film lab I sent it to declared bankruptcy and my roll of mystery film got locked down by the courts, held hostage (along with my $40+) in bankruptcy limbo. I even received a notice from a lawyer in Denver that I was not to contact the lab about my property. Geez. So, I just chalked it up as a very unfortunate loss, a new cold case built on top of an old cold case. Hmph.

But then a few months ago, I was thinking about it again, and I got mad. I checked the film lab's website and they seemed to be operating in some semblance of normal—advertising services, accepting orders, etc. My Willis Consumer Gene kicked in and I wrote a very civil nastygram to request my roll of film back.

And guess what? THEY SENT IT BACK. I about fell over. They even reimbursed me for my original payment. If I didn't understand bankruptcy proceedings before, now I really don't understand them. But whatever. My murder film! In my hands once again! I immediately researched a new and more trustworthy lab to send my film off to and found a place with a very cool website that also seemed very reputable: Film Rescue International, located in northern North Dakota. I made the deadline of May 12 for my film to be developed in the next cycle, and waited with great anticipation for my online gallery of images to be ready (they digitize everything; you can order prints if you want on top of the very reasonable developing fee, which is only charged if they can recover images). 

Here are a few of the images:

No murders. Just some photos of sweet old ladies, daffodils, and hollyhocks. Best frivolous expenditure of $29 ever.

Project Downsizing Update

Back in January I wrote about the challenges of downsizing our possessions drastically as we prepare to move from our giant national registry of historic places base home to one that is... drastically smaller. I am here to report some progress on this front.

Downsizing is hard.

The end.

Just kidding.

So every year the base has a base-wide garage sale sometime in May; the last few years I have avoided it because, well, May. Two years ago I pulled out at the last minute because I was afraid it would be the thing that would actually send me to the institution, but this year it wasn't an option. I faithfully kept taking stuff to the basement storage room loosely organized as "GIANT ROOM OF GARAGE SALE STUFF." About three weeks before I spent a day I could ill afford to spend away from working on The Phone Photography Project and worked on organizing areas of stuff; Maddie and I sorted scrapbook supplies into like categories, kitchen stuff into one area, baby stuff into another, and so on. It was nearly impossible to cross from one side of the room to another without putting oneself in peril.

On Thursday before the garage sale I tidied up our loosely organized areas of stuff.

On Friday before the garage sale I started to haul it upstairs.

I vastly underestimated the amount of time it would take to haul 80 billion things (unpriced things at that!) up the stairs. I lost track at 60 times up and down the stairs, mostly because by that point it was 11:30 pm and Matt and I had a moment of utter marital danger in which we were both angrily wondering WHOSE BRIGHT IDEA WAS THIS GARAGE SALE ANYWAY. In hindsight, it was wise for him to bow out at 11:31 and go to bed, while I persevered until 3:00 am hauling/pricing/staging inside my entry way/dragging stuff to the porch that wouldn't blow away.

Because did I mention the wind? And cold? Oh, yes. Wind. And cold. I woke up at 6:05 am on June 1 to a wind chill of 33 degrees. Crap was blowing off the porch as fast as I could set it out. I had to put on my winter coat. I nearly had a meltdown in my front yard on Saturday morning. It was fantastic.

But then people started to show up. Not the looky-loos who come out on a nice day—no, those people had the good sense to stay home. The hard core people showed up though, money in hand, and bought stuff. Every single toddler thing we put out—Hawthorne House (oh my gosh, that was hard), toddler bed, play kitchen, toys, puzzles, 150 books (no lie—I sold about 150 books), furniture, the Most Annoying Lamp of All Time (worked perfectly but had a little pull chain that clinked on the base that drove us literally i n s a n e until we stashed it in the basement a few years ago), etc. The best was when the odd scrapbooker would come up on the porch and discover the scrapbook supply portion of the sale. It was almost comical to witness the wide-eyed glee—even despite the wind and cold, people hauled off boxes of stuff. A few tubs, even.

85% of what I tried to sell, sold. As for the rest: I donated over 200 books to the library book sale room, plus some more to the annual Delta something or other book sale in town (I can never remember the name). I took three van loads of stuff to Goodwill. I kept out some craft supplies to donate to Freedom Elementary's wonderful art teacher for her art room and took those things to her on the last day of school. I have another donation pile that will go to Busy Bees, our beloved preschool. We found a late buyer for Matt's router and saws, and those will go today. I drove to Fort Collins to sell our Kelty to a lovely woman from Greeley; I internet-snooped on her online before I went to make sure she wasn't an axe murderer (she wasn't) and had to reassure my friend Kelli that the exchange had gone just fine when I posted this picture on Instagram while I waited for her:

I find it hilarious that this is the ONLY picture I have from this entire process. A weirdo shot of a gas station parking lot. It nearly did me in, all this selling off our belongings, because you know I take pictures of everything.

When all is said and done, I will go down in history as a garage sale urban legend.

$1237.50, friends. $1237.50.

: )

A Short Story About the Owl and Grace

iPhone photo, edited with the reinvented VSCO Cam app (click to see larger)

I took Gracie, Bridget, Maddie, and Maddie's friend Claudia to the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program for a tour today, where Gracie is a benefactor. She asked her friends not to buy her birthday gifts at her party in December and instead donate a small amount to the RMRP. She faithfully keeps up to date on news from the program via The Owl's Perch, and spends at least 30% of any given day in active thought about owls. I have a lot more to say about this place (and quite frankly, 101 other things that have been going on around here) but for now, this:

Gracie sparkled today. With focus that startled me, with her knowledge of owls that might have startled the wonderful tour guide, with the great horned owl she was lucky to spend a little time with. She was in her element, and it was a glimpse into her future that I've never fully seen before. It's hard to know if the dreams she has now as an 8 year old will weather the test of time some 15 years down the line, but today it didn't matter: today she was an 8 year old with philanthropist credentials, being treated like the legitimate owl scientist she has worked so hard to become.

It was awesome.