Camping

I would truly be remiss in my duty of chronicling my family's weirdness if I left out camping.  This was basically our entire summer vacation.  That and driving two hours to visit the only other family that could stand us for more than a day at a time.  Every weekend, while my friends were off at space camp, we would pack up the pickup and go camping.  This is because camping (with my family) is inexpensive and because if he could figure out how to do it, my dad would camp on a permanent basis.  Usually we would go to the mountains, but a fair number of times we camped in the desert.  My mom almost never went.  I assumed this was because she hated camping  but I now suspect that she enjoyed having the house to herself for the weekend.  When she did go, what I remember most is the drive up.  Mountain roads = certain death in my mom's mind.  Whenever we'd go around a corner, she brace herself, slam her foot against an imaginary brake and go, "jim, jim, jim, jim, JIM!" in a frantic crescendo. 

Here are a few necessities for camping in my family:
1.  Desert juice: my dad's own recipe for optimal outdoors hydration.  It's basically super dilute frozen oj with some mashed up bananas, if you're lucky.  I hate bananas.
2.  Shovel:  For digging the toilet.  Yeah, it was that kind of camping.  I'm a real expert at not peeing on my legs whilst squatting.  Also the shovel handle doubles as a toilet paper holder.  If Dad happened to remember to pack some. 
3.  Tent:  This was an old canvas army tent that took an engineering degree (or the patience of a giant tortoise) to erect successfully.
4.  Pocket knife:  For whittling our cooking sticks.  We all made our own.  No fancy premade marshmallow sticks for us.
5.  Kerosene lantern:  Any extra fire hazard is a fantastic idea.
Some memorable experiences include: fashioning caveman style clothes out of some curtains we found in an abandoned camper trailer.  Collecting cans on our hikes to turn in for cash later.  Skinny dipping in what was basically a giant mud puddle.  Applying my sister's sunscreen in polka dots because I was mad at her.  And Learning the hard way what poison ivy and stinging nettle look like.
A camping trip was not complete unless we caught a small animal.  Usually a snake.  We subsisted on a diet of hot dogs and marshmallows.  My dad would tell us bear stories from when he was a kid (I'm not sure if this is related, but I have sincere arcotophobia.  I have nightmares about bears, and when I'm out riding my bike in Durango I'm always worried one will come out of the woods and chase me down)

 We always had to check for ticks.  We never found any.


 



But there is a lot of good stuff I learned while camping too. 
1. Leave it as clean as you found it, or cleaner.  This was our cardinal camping rule.
2. I know by sight lots of edible plants.  Thanks dad, that has come in handy so often.  I'm going to be the girl version of Darryl when the zombie apocalypse hits.
3.  I can start a fire with batteries, flint and steel and a magnifying glass.  Another skill I have never used once. 
4.  You can get $155/ton of aluminum cans.
5.  An actual ton is A LOT of aluminum cans.
6.  The Wooly Lamb's Ear plant is supposedly a cure for poison ivy, also it is edible, so if you're starving and just got tangled up in poison ivy and you happen upon some wooly lamb's ear, it's your lucky day.
7.  Always apply sunscreen to your behind.
8.  Wild animals are NOT as afraid of me as I am of them.
9.  Always check your sleeping bag.  There's a good bet your brother put that garter snake he caught in yours.
My family still enjoys camping.  We met up a few weeks ago to camp.  It was great to watch my dad try to teach my kids the Rule of the Mountain and get them to eat lamb's ear.  My sister brought her cat. 

Why not?

Exhibit G: Our Cars

The vehicles my family owns are accessories to their weirdness.

The first car I can remember is our old red Chevy Nova.  It had plaid upholstery.  Like this:


Me in my carpet coat.

Yes, that is a sibling's behind in the photo.  They are climbing onto "the shelf".  The most coveted spot in the car for travel. Perhaps not the safest.  Luckily we appear to have travelled with a foam mattress for extra padding.

What I remember most clearly about this car was that if you lifted up the mat behind the drivers seat, the floor had rusted through, leaving a baseball sized hole.  It scared me a little, but I loved lifting the edge and watching the road zipping by inches away.

Around this time we also had a truck.  Seen in the back ground here (along with what looks like a random axle elegantly decorating our front yard).  I don't remember wearing those awesome overalls.

What I do remember is the hours spent sitting in the curve of it's enormous steering wheel and rocking back and forth.  Often when I get in a car now, I eye it's steering wheel and think "I wonder.."

I am almost tempted until I imagine explaining to the firemen why they need to use their jaws of life to extricate a thirty something year old from her steering column.   My other memory of this truck is the tons (literally) of cow manure we shoveled from the back of it onto my mother's vegetable garden over the years. 

When I lived in this house, my grandmother lived with us.  She drove a Chrysler Caprice Classic.  I remember this because of the way it was beautifully written across the maroon dashboard.  I wanted to write like that some day.  Here she is getting into it behind our pyramid.

The notable thing about this car is it was the one that sat unused and unusable in our yard for many years, earning us full redneck status.

My dad's motorcycle.  This was the best thing ever.  Sometimes when my dad got home from work he would put one of us on the front.  Place his enormous helmet, which functioned more like a paperweight than a safety feature for us, on our head and zip off around the vacant lot across the street.  I don't remember my mother ever riding, but apparently she dared to sit on it once.

The Datsun.  Ah, the Datsun. 



 How to travel in comfort and style:

1. Throw a mattress in the back of your Datsun pickup.

2.  Use old cardboard boxes for suitcases.

3.  Drive 1500 miles with your five children in back. 

Guaranteed to be a vacation they will never forget. 

Other vehicles of note:

-Pooker's first car.  I don't have a picture of this.  I wish I did, because it was unbelievable.  It was some kind of hatchback.  It had been primed, but not painted, so most of it was a matte gray.  Except one door, that had been purchased to replace the former one, it was bright red.  And someone had spray painted 10 life-sized stencils of President Lincoln's profile from the penny in random spots all over it.  This was the car he drove me to and from junior high in.  The embarrassment lives with me to this day.

-Our club wagon van.  I don't remember driving in this even one time.  It sat in our driveway and functioned as a playhouse.  I don't think it ever worked.  Despite Sneet's mechanic skills.  My mom assures me that it functioned for one trip to Yellowstone.  It also had a rusted out hole in the floor, which we covered with cardboard so no one would get hurt on the way.  The cardboard caught on fire because it was too close to the manifold.  After some brief panic, we just ended up throwing the cardboard out the window. 

 



-The Ford Crown Victoria Wagon.

This car served us well for many years.  Usually transporting more people than it was designed for.  My notable memories of it are driving with my best friend's family and my dad put a sign on the window that said "11 kids...not all mine" because so many people were trying to count.  And the time Beadle fell out the not fully fastened back door and almost got run over.   

-Nana's current vehicle.  A smart car.

 





-My parent's overwhelming devotion to their current Saturn.  Which they claim, through some tinkering, gets 40 mpg. 

But truly, what can you expect when you started married life with this?

A sweet Scout 80.

And some killer sunglasses. 

You can only go downhill from there.



Character Witness: Regarding My Mother: The World's Most Excessive Worrier

Now, please don't imagine that this will be my only post about Slugweirta.  This is simply one of the many facets of her weirdness.  My mother is a worst-case-scenario expert.  She can outfret anyone.  On the planet.  Here are a few examples of what I mean.
When I was eight, shortly after the gum incident, I began to notice that I had two weird raisin-sized bumps on my chest.  I mentioned these to my mom.  She gave me a cursory visual exam and deduced that it was likely a very rare case of bilateral juvenile breast cancer.  She made me an appointment with the pediatrician post haste.  I was understandably terrified.  He got us in as soon as possible.  On the day of the appointment, I remember sitting on the bed in the doctor's office while my mom explained the problem to the nurse.  I have to applaud her professionalism because she didn't laugh even one time.  Although she was a little at a loss for what to do.  The pediatrician doesn't typically do breast exams.  So, after having me remove my shirt, they wrapped my chest in paper towels to maintain my decency.  The doctor, who also happened to be my neighbor, determined that I was starting what appeared to be perfectly normal, if a little premature puberty.  Thanks, Mom.  First breast exam at eight years old.  My adolescence was off to a fantastic start.
Once, can it be this only happened once?  Probably not.  Multiple times when Pooker was late coming home from work, Slugweirta called the police to see if he had been in a fatal car accident.  When no accidents were reported she had them issue an APB.  Usually they don't do this when the person is eighteen and has only been missing for an hour.  BUT, she convinced them that he was disabled (he had a mild speech delay) and might never be found if they didn't look for him now.  He might never make an unplanned grocery stop again.  This assumption that anyone who's late is probably dead continues to this day.  Which is a huge problem with my perpetually late family.  If Nana doesn't call her on her way home from work, she will drive the route from her work to her house looking for car wrecks.  I would think that much anxiety could kill a person.
Beadle once asked Slugweirta what first attracted her to my dad.  Her response was she figured if anyone was likely to survive the next ice age, it was him.  Always planning ahead.  For global climactic change.

Ice Age Survivability: 87%

My mother, who was not alive during the Great Depression, is always assuming another one is around the corner.  She is very careful to have no debt.  An admirable trait.  She plants a vegetable garden big enough to feed an army.  She keeps everything.  In fact, she is constantly living as if it is already the 2nd Great Depression.   Her dream is to be entirely self sufficient.  Which is why they bought the home they did.  It has it's own well.  A strong selling point for everyone.  Right?
Slugweirta is a psychologist.  So she is constantly looking for any sign that we might be developing a mental illness.  I think that much stress might give me one.
When I told my mom I was expecting my first child she said, "oh no!"  I'd like to think this was because she had really difficult pregnancies and was worried about the next uncomfortable nine months for me.  But the truth is she was really thinking, "oh no! one more person who might spontaneously combust if I don't worry about them constantly."
I appreciate the concern.  Really I do.  My wish for Mother's Day is that she will spend the entire day worry-free.  Happy Mother's Day, Slugweirta.

My Brothers

I have one older brother and three younger ones.  For some reason we always called the younger ones the little boys, maybe because they were close together, maybe because they got in trouble together a lot, maybe because sometimes there were four of them.  I had a foster brother around their age for a while too.  He is Gummy's oldest son and Muscle Whip's half brother, Slim.  He lived with us when he was four to about six and again as a teenager.  The little boy's favorite activity that I remember is dumping over the fish tanks.  Requiring my mother to have to rescue about thirty little fweebs before they suffocated and to steam clean the fish water out of our carpet.  They did this multiple times.  When Slim lived with us, two of my brothers slept in closets.  One was a big playroom closet off the family room, lined with shelves.  It had enough room for a mattress on the floor and a turtle cage.  The other was a little cubby under the stairs.  I'm pretty sure that's where J.K. Rowling got the idea for Harry's living quarters at the Dursley's.  The other three shared the blue room.  It might entertain you to know that while this was the boys' living arrangement, Beadle and I shared the brown room and Nana had her own.  Seems fair.  But they didn't complain.  One of my brothers once got up in the middle of the night and sleep peed into the closet under the stairs.  Much to the chagrin of it's resident.
Ok. 
I have a brother with quite possibly the largest nose I have ever seen.

I have a brother who has no sense of sarcasm (a grievous fault in our family)
I have a brother who likes puns.  (He thinks they're punny, he would say)
I have a brother who is dyslexic.  This is where numbers and letters appear reversed to you.   Imagine learning to read that way.
I have two ginger brothers.
I have a brother who makes candles. 
I have a brother who can only be contacted through his girlfriend.
I have a brother who is a starving artist.  Really, he will make you a cheesecake for $. 
I have a brother who is in the Navy. 
I have a brother who is very easily embarrassed.  He turns as red as his hair.
I have a brother who frequents the gym.
I have a brother who is extremely shy.  Weirdly enough this is not the one who is easily embarrassed. 
I have a brother who goes skiing.
I have a brother who likes kim chee.
I have a brother who role plays more than he lives in real life.
I have a brother who likes medieval things. 
I have a brotha from anotha motha.
I have a brother who has watched every episode of Star Trek. 
I have a brother who is into Anime.
I have a brother who sleeps in a coffin-sized cubby that was just vacated by another dude 10 minutes before.  Yes, he's one of the ones who used to sleep in a closet.
I have a brother who can't name a single professional basketball player.
I have a brother who still reads Archie comics.
I have a brother who was called a lot of racial slurs in middle school.  Usually the wrong ones. 
I have a brother who is a Marine. 
I have a brother with ADD.
I have brother who could possibly bench press my car.
I have a brother who had to wear head gear.
I have a brother who got sent home from school for wearing a wizard cloak with a hood.
I have a brother who went bald at 22.  Instead of shaving it clean he carefully cultivates his remaining fringe to a voluminous halo.  As if extra volume here makes up for the complete lack of it anywhere else. 

Sorry, anonymous brother.  Don't murder me.
I have a brother who has never watched football.
I have a brother who will drop whatever he's doing to help out a little old lady (my grandma).
I have a brother who speaks Japanese, fluently.  Not the one who likes Anime.
I have a brother who can't tell you who Tom Brady, Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning, David Beckham, Serena Williams, or LeBron James are.
But he can tell you who Samwise Gamgee, Ron Weasley, Padme Amidala, Geordi LaForge, Lee Adama, and Col. Samantha Carter are.
I have a brother who when he sees you says "Greetings" instead of "Hello".
I have a brony.
My brothers are some of the most selfless, kindest guys I know.  They would bend over backwards to help me out even after I've made fun of them so terribly.

Only picture with all the "little boys" and the older one too.