Peter's Graduation from Basic Training

I love this picture -- the mother-soldier selfie!  It represents one of the few moments of pure joy in recent months; for Peter, a rare off-base leave after ten weeks of deprivation and harshness; for me, an interlude of one-on-one family time that seems to become rarer all the time.

As you know if you've been following my "What I did on my summer vacation" posts, the rest of our family had a lengthy road trip vacation, combined with seeing Daniel off to college in Pennsylvania.  Peter was at Fort Sill, OK doing basic training for most of the summer.  His first full day was the 4th of July (and he didn't get to take a holiday) after more than a week of whatever "processing" involves, which I really don't want to know about.  I was able to fly down to Oklahoma to see the Family Day and Graduation for Peter and his class of soldiers in training -- four platoons of fine young people who worked very hard to learn how to defend our country.  I was impressed.  And this brought the number of states I set foot on this summer to a grand total of 18.  If you count flyovers it would make more than half the states.

 At the Family Day ceremony they did a series of demonstrations of the skills that were drummed into them over the summer. I think they cleaned up the language a bit for us.  I noticed after I parked the rental car and started walking towards the stands that every few minutes there would be some distant thunder.  But the sky was blue and it was a hot day.  It finally dawned on me that... this is an artillery base.  That thunder wasn't thunder.

 Peter received his first promotion at that time... Private E-2, I believe.  After that ceremony I signed him out and took him to the hotel room where we took that selfie... then we hit the mall.  Lawton, OK is pretty much a company town for the Army.  Everywhere we went Peter was being congratulated and I was amazed at how appreciative everyone was.  The White Buffalo gave him a complementary lunch, for example.  We shopped for dress clothes for school... Peter will be having a more or less regular Senior year at Cedar Tree with one weekend a month where he has to report for National Guard training.  And Seniors at Cedar Tree get to wear "business casual" rather than school uniforms.  We saw "Guardians of the Galaxy," which was a great movie at baseline and Peter liked even more because it was the first entertainment of any kind he had had in so long.  And of course, the hero's named Peter.

 The next day I had to wait until 1:00 for the graduation ceremony, and since I'd already seen the mall, I decided to check out the amenities of the park near the auditorium where graduation would be.  There is a small lake, with lots of extremely un-shy geese.  It was very hot, and I decided this was not the kind of park where I could sit and knit in the shade.  There wasn't really any shade.

 The prairie dogs weren't out, and no one was playing disc golf.

 I couldn't shake the feeling that the geese were organizing.

It was a little bit like a Hitchcock movie.  But not very much, because they never attacked.

 There were memorials for the Korean and Vietnam wars.

 Some pretty prairie flowers.  I kept trying to get a picture of the dragonflies, but they moved too fast.

 I decided to go to the Museum of the Plains, guarded by this statue of a Bison Latifrons.

I need one of these signs for my house.

 The old schoolhouse was locked up, but I think they use it for occasional fiber demonstrations,

 I kind of want to read the Little House books again, after seeing so many of the sites on vacation and then spending time in Oklahoma.

 It's really hot there, even in the morning.

 There was this little squirrel hiding inside the wall of the main building.  I used to think squirrels were cute until one chewed a hole in our roof.  I still think they are interesting little animals, if a bit more destructive than I had previously realized.

 I really wanted to edit the spelling of vertebrae.  The Museum of the Great Plains had a lot of exhibits about the early pioneers and about the conflicts during the time Oklahoma was Indian territory.  I then went to the Comanche Museum and Cultural Center.  There were Comanche code talkers during both World Wars -- everyone hears about the Navajo code talkers, but I didn't know about the Comanche.  They have a great story in their own right.

 As we filed into the auditorium the young soldiers were sitting at attention and presumably forbidden to make eye contact.

 Each graduate stated his or her name and hometown before walking across the stage to shake hands with the officers.  After the ceremony they were bussed back to the base, where we had to drive to pick them up for leave time.

Having exhausted most of the action in Lawton, Peter was happy just to hang out in a comfortable hotel room, listening to his favorite music on Spotify, drinking coffee and surfing Facebook.  We had dinner at the Olive Garden and got him back to base before curfew.  In fact, he made it back to PDX before I did the next day.  Then on the following Monday, it was back to school for him and for me... perhaps the real war zone.

What I Did on my Summer Vacation, Part 3

You know how teachers used to assign this essay for students returning to school?  Well, I'm just trying to finish my own before October.  School has begun, there is no getting away from that obvious fact.  I just want to document the brief, shining moments of vacation before school swallows them up.

We boarded the Badger, a ferryboat across Lake Michigan, quite early in the morning for a 4-hour ride.  Steve appreciated the break from driving, and it was a fun change of pace, exploring the ship and relaxing.  At lunch we discovered that Tertia had quite a terrible injury to the inside of her lip from her braces having poked it and then the spot being widened by catching on the braces every time she moved her mouth.  It must have been going on for several days, but she only seemed to notice it after we did and became concerned. We ended up in Mankato, Minnesota that evening.

The next morning we were encouraged to figure out a dentist's office was right down the street from our hotel, and so we showed up bright and early and after filling out some forms, got her in to be seen very quickly.  Thankfully, no stitches were necessary and the solution was simple - put wax on the poky bits until the wound heals.  A little easier said than done but she is much better these three weeks later.  It was a nickel-sized hole and I can't imagine how she managed not to be howling with pain all along.

The next few days of the trip West were taken up with Little House fandom.  This is the replica of the log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin, as portrayed in Little House in the Big Woods.  As you can see the woods are not so big anymore, but it was a sweet little rest area as we were hurrying toward Minnesota.

In Minnesota we found our way to Walnut Grove and the site of On the Banks of Plum Creek.  It is a little private farm, left very unspoiled and undeveloped, where you can see the location of the dugout house and walk a few little nature trails.  There are still lots of grasshoppers around, everywhere you go.

We didn't see the in-town museums in Pepin or Walnut Grove because we were trying to make time across the country; and then later in DeSmet, South Dakota ("Little Town on the Prairie") we only bought souvenir t-shirts and declined the special guided tour that said allow 1.5 hours.  There's a limit to how touristy we wanted to be, but we did check out some of the historic buildings and the free museum.  And the Dairy Queen.  That night we stayed in Pierre.

The next day was a long driving day, with a stop at Wall Drug (is it possible not to stop at Wall Drug?  All of South Dakota seems to lead up to it, and it's a good place for a bathroom stop, and your kids can ride the giant jackalope.)

We stopped that night at Cody, Wyoming, which is a really neat Old West kind of town.  There was a regularly scheduled gunfight at one of the local saloons, and we had a very nice meal.  I decided that someday not too long from now, I want to buy myself some cowboy boots.

Next day we arrived at Yellowstone midmorning, and saw a fair amount of the essentials.  Old Faithful was going off at the same time as a more distant geyser.

The geysers are fascinating, but I really like all the weird mineral pools and thermal features.  We didn't have time to drive through the whole park, but we ate bison chili at the cafeteria and took enough walks to give the girls a taste of the park.  Quarta might have seen a bear as we were driving along at one point, but she wasn't sure.  After leaving the park we made it to Twin Falls for the night.  And the next day we drove all day and arrived home.  The house was still standing, and we had a Sunday and a holiday Monday before the school wars began again.

The travelling was not quite over yet for me, though, because Peter's graduation from Basic Training was the following weekend.  I'll do that travelogue in another post.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part 2

On the great Chapman family vacation of 2014, Daniel was only along for the first part (WA to PA), and Peter was laboring hard at Basic Training in Fort Sill, OK the whole time.  Once we had checked into the Wyndham timeshare resort in Williamsburg, Sunday rolled around again and Peter called to check in.  It was a momentous occasion, with the whole extended family checking in.  The picture probably doesn't do it justice:

We took pictures of people talking to a smart phone on speaker mode.  Sound quality was iffy, especially on Peter's end.  But we got to hear about the things he was going through, and that little bit of contact had to sustain us for another week.

There is an incredible amount of history crammed into the "historic triangle" of Virginia (Colonial Willamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown Colony.)  We bought a pass for our family of 4 that let us into quite a bit, but of course that meant we had to get our money's worth by going somewhere each day.  Truth be told, the girls would probably have been happy swimming at the hotel all day long.  Buy Steve and I, history buffs that we are, made sure they got out to see stuff every day! This is the Colonial Capitol at Williamsburg,

At Jamestown, you could board the three replica ships and imagine what it might be like to make the Atlantic crossing in the hold as an indentured servant or even an investor, confined for months on end to a tiny space on top of all your worldy possessions.  Colonists tried all sorts of industries -- glassblowing, silk, and wine, for example -- which failed to turn a profit, before finally settling on tobacco as the predominant cash crop.

Back in Colonial Williamsburg, the view of the Governor's Palace.  We also had quite a lot of fun at the weaver's shop, the millinery, the gardens, the wigmaker's shop, the silversmiths, the blacksmiths, the print shop, the apothecary... just finding out how people lived in the old days.

We accidentally enlisted in the Continental Army and fell in with a drill sergeant, who trained us in proper musket handling.  It was a little taste of what Peter was going through, and we all appreciated it.  Even though we were perfectly wretched recruits and (shh!) deserted immediately after our first musket lesson.  Fortunately, General Washington found better recruits.

The girls of the family had an afternoon date to the restaurant that invented Death by Chocolate, and there was a lot of relaxing and swimming and talking and eating.  Quarta really enjoyed making friends with her cousins, who are close to her age.  We even did a bit of outlet mall shopping.

Then it was time to go and for our family to start the long drive across country.  We made the first leg as far as Grove City, stopping at Paw Paw tunnel along the C&O canal in Maryland.  Steve really likes canals; think of them as the forerunners of the interstate highway system.

Somewhere along here, I must have picked up the tick that I found on myself in the hotel 12 hours later.  But no harm done, I think.  It's been a few weeks now and no weird rashes or anything.  Weird that I grew up playing in wooded areas, yet this was the first time to my knowledge that I've ever even seen a tick.  But on to more pleasant subjects...

We had a very nice visit with Daniel, went to 2 different churches with him on Sunday, and even had a peek at his dorm room.  The girls enjoyed seeing the college campus and we enjoyed spending some precious time with Daniel before having to say goodbye.

For our adventures along the Westward road, stay tuned for part 3.

A Little Bit of Handwork

I have been neglecting the blog of late, and here are some projects that really deserve to be seen.  First, some of my mother-in-law's quilts that I pinned for her over a month ago:

Pretty and sweet.

This one's intriguing, all in plaids.  You have to step back to see the overall pattern.  She's probably got both of these tied and finished by now!  My own quilting and sewing has not been progressing at all, but I remain hopeful that I'll be able to get back into it now that the school year has started up.  If I can just shake the first week exhaustion.

I have a finished project in knitting to share with the yarn-along.  I started this rug from T-shirt yarn in July or so, after I finished Daniel's Ipad cover.  My original thought was for him to be able to use it in college, but he ended up taking a braided rug that his grandmother made (the same one who made the above quilts).  I packed it along in the car when he and Steve left, and finished it while we were on vacation.  The t-shirts that provided the yarn were some of the boys' when they were small: the "Montana Bear Patrol" and the different striped ones that they got sick of wearing.  Tertia's Pooh dress is the pink, and there are a few other nostalgic memories in there.  I pretty much cleaned out all my t-shirt yarn for this, and it's quite heavy, although not quite as long as I had hoped.  Also on my travels I worked on the Mint Chocolate sweater sleeves, and made several dishcloths, not pictured.

Reading: I am starting Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich after reading some fairly lightweight books over the summer.  Also, encouraged by Daniel, I have an audiobook of Robert Jordan's Eye of the World out from the library, and am a little over halfway through it.  I'm not sure I'm sold on this epic many-book saga quite yet, but I'm a little more interested in it than I was at first.  I won't do a thorough book review this post though.  I hope to bring the travels up to date soon with the next installment(s) of our summer vacation.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Part 1

I took a bit of a blog vacation this last month.  This summer it was harder to blog than it has been, with Peter away at Basic Training.  I started living for the short time he was allowed to call home every Sunday.  It's not like life got put on hold, except that it did, sort of.  The family wasn't quite right because he wasn't here.  Now it's the second day of school and it's really time to make up for all the blog neglect that went on.  I don't say I'm motivated, exactly, but I have missed being able to write.

This was what life was like when I last blogged.  Tertia watering the garden, mugging for the camera.  Pacific Northwest summers are lovely; usually not much rain from July through September.  It's a little-known secret.

Quarta went to summer camp, where she was like this...

And as soon as she came home was like this.

Then it came time to take Daniel back to college.  He is a freshman RA this year, and had to be in Pennsylvania a week early for training.  Steve took him out in the van, stopping for some scenery along the way.

 Arches National Park in Utah.  The girls and I waited a few more days, then flew out to Washington D.C. after Steve had already dropped Daniel off.

 We had one very packed day of sightseeing in D.C., starting with the National Archives, where Tertia took great delight in anything relating to Thomas Jefferson (having just graduated from a middle school named after him).

 She also asked to have her picture taken next to this picture at the National Gallery of Art.  Apparently she remembers this well from her own art class.

The Capitol had scaffolding up around it.  We went through the Museum of Natural History, then past the Washington Monument and down through many of the monuments I had not seen, to the Lincoln.

And Honest Abe is still seated where I remember him.  There is something reassuring about that.  We continued, very footsore by this time, around the Tidal Basin to the Jefferson Memorial.  It was a lot of walking... well over 5 miles I think.  We will try not to do that much walking in one day again, especially with Tertia.   But... it was for HISTORY!

That appeal to history did not work so well the following day, when we toured 3 Civil War battlefields (Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Chancellorsville, although I'm not sure I got the order right) in Virginia.  Not to mention the house where Stonewall Jackson died.  This was on our way down to Williamsburg, where we checked into the Wyndham resort for our family reunion.  You'll have to stay tuned for part 2 for that bit.