We've Got History

I am not a native Californian.

I was born in New Jersey (Exit 5), moved to Maryland at age six and spent the next ten years singing Maryland My Maryland and strolling the cobbled streets of Annapolis.  We moved to California when I was sixteen. The Spanish names hit me like a knock down ice cold Pacific Ocean wave.  El Camino Real, Paseo Padre...so unlike the Pine Trails and Holly Lanes of my childhood.  As we passed the enormous statue of Junipero Serra off the 280, pointing at...pointing at...what?

I didn't care.

Nope.  I was not interested.  I was an Anglophile...a J.R.R. Tolkienophile...  I cared nothing for the Spanish Missions or the Mexican rancheros.  I couldn't even work up much enthusiasm for the 49ers.  I liked old English names that felt quaint and cozy.  You can take your Los Gatos, I'll have my Fox Hollow, thanks.

So as my kids grew I began to be sad that they were missing out on American History by growing up here.  I tried to make up for it when I could, like when the Nina docked at Santa Cruz.  But they wouldn't get the fifth grade trip to Williamsburg that I had so enjoyed, nor would they come across old bottles when digging in the woods.  Sniff.  So I decided to do something about it.  They couldn't grow up immersed in colonial history, but Evelyn could have a fifth grade trip and we'd all go along for the ride.  I planned out a Revolutionary Road Trip.  We spent six weeks traveling from St. Augustine, FL to Boston, MA.

It was even better than I imagined.  We got accidentally locked in the Castillo San Marcos after closing, we sifted pipe stems and pot shards out of the dump behind George Washington's Headquarters at Valley Forge,

But something both funny and necessary happened at Williamsburg.  I was there loving it, being so happy that my kids could have this essential American experience, when a docent asked where everyone in the group was from.  My kids said, "California!"  And the guide said, "Aw.  I feel so sorry for people from California.  You have no history."  And in that moment I saw myself as if in a mirror, and the spell upon me was broken.  I saw my prejudice against California history for what it was: ridiculous!

At the end of the trip I made this vow:

If anything this trip has given me a profound sense that time is short for the vast wealth of things there are to do and see in this world. I vow that when I am home I will not return to sluggish complacency. When I see them, I am going to turn off and follow where the park signs lead.

And we have.  There was this Point of Historical Interest, for instance.  Sometime during the course of this year I decided that we'd done the fifth grade Colonial American experience for Evelyn, so we'd do the quintessential fourth grade experience for Clementine.  Not that we care about grade levels or anything...I just have this paranoia that my kids will feel that they missed something by not going to school...so if something schools do seems particularly fun I try to make it happen.

So we toured old Monterey and learned about the whaling trade and Spanish and Mexican periods.  We'd been to Empire Mine before, and Marshall Gold Discovery Park.

But I wanted to do the gold rush right and proper, immersion style.  The last month or so while I've been barely present here in the blogosphere I was planning a two day trip to live like miners in canvas cabins at Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park.  We'd cook over an open fire, dip candles, make lanterns, and visit the diggins.  Well, on Monday and Tuesday we were there.

Check back in a few days to see how it went.

Dragon

I try to make room in my heart for my kids' dreams.  Sometimes it is a more difficult fit than you'd think.  We have more fish than I would choose.  Bees were not my idea.   I took a deep breath and let Evelyn skin a road kill raccoon even though I am a hydrophobiaphobe (possessed of an unreasonable fear of rabies).  But Clementine's latest dream really put me to the test.

It was a BIG dream.  Imagine a terrarium--a tall one, as tall as a newly 10 year old girl, say--with water at the bottom, home to fire salamanders and fire belly toads, which only make a very cute croaking noise.  There is a waterfall in this dream tank.  It aerates the water and also--now this is clever--creates a spray for the geckos.  Geckos, you say?  Why yes, the house geckos who live and laugh their merry laugh peaceably in the upper portion of the tank with the common anoles and the green snake, creating a harmonious and huge, noisy, impossible to clean and probably stinky biosphere that will take up half the bedroom.

Ok, those were my thoughts intruding upon the dream right there at the end.  But this was a very real and vividly imagined dream. It was a many hours studied dream. A many months planned for dream.  And it was a spectacularly well funded dream.  My mom helped Clem count her money and I nearly collapsed in shock and horror when the tally came to over $500 which put the crazy dream in reach.

In desperation I informed Clem that she had to donate half  her possessions to make room for this thing.  Four days and 6 crates of toys out the door later she looked at me expectantly.  I had promised.

We drove to the East Bay Vivarium, an amazing place which, depending on what kind of person you are, you should either avoid like the plague or make tracks to of a Thursday morning when they are feeding bunnies to the huge pythons and fuzzy chicks to the monitor lizards.  Clem led me to the back of the store and I contemplated the terraria.  The one she wanted was large enough for her to stand in.  I imagined the ladders and even pulleys and harnesses that cleaning this monstrosity would require.

And I began THE SPEECH.

"This is 100% your responsibility.  I am not going to participate in any way in feeding and cleaning and any other caretaking.  You'll have to save money to pay someone to take care of these animals when we go on vacation.  This is 100% your deal."

At this point a man appeared.  I am not sure if I noticed at first his saintly aura.  He said, "Excuse me, I overheard you and I wondered what this `deal' you were talking about was."  He looked as if he might work there or possibly own the place.

I said, "It's a grand plan my daughter has been working on for quite a while.  Clem, tell the man about it."

And she laid out her plan.  And he listened.

When she was done he said.  "Well, I have good news and bad news.  The good news is that you could probably have all those pets, except for the green snake.  Green snakes are exceptionally difficult to care for.  It is nearly impossible to keep them happy.  The others, the fire belly toads, fire salamanders, house geckos, anoles, you could have.  But not in the same enclosure.  Look at all the animals here."  He made a grand sweep with his arm which encompassed bearded dragons, garter and corn snakes, several tarantulas and a huge tortoise that was continually ramming its head into the glass walls of its tank.  "Wouldn't it be easier for me if I kept them all in one big cage?  But they all have different needs, so I can't."

Clementine's lower lip was quivering.

"But you don't really need a whole tankful of pets," the wise, wise man said..  "You need one pet that you really love."

Clem bravely fought back tears.  "But the green snake was the one I cared the most about."

"Ok, so you like snakes?"

"Yes."  Sniff.

"You like to hold them?"

"Yes."

"Well, green snakes don't like to be held.  Corn snakes are a good snake.  Do you mind feeding mice to your snake?"

We looked at corn and garter snakes and after a little bit of discussion we ruled out snakes.

We moved on to geckos.  The man took out a leopard gecko.  Clem shook her head.

So he takes down a different box.  "Now this is going to be the next big thing in geckos.  These guys are from New Caledonia.  They were thought to be extinct."  And he lifts the cover on the cutest gecko you ever did see.  A crested gecko.  (Bred right in the store, whew!)

It was love at first sight.

And he tells us this little guy needs a little tank his size.  Clementine opens the wooden chest that contains her life savings.  Bills come flying out. The man hands us over to Sasha, who will, "get us everything we need for the gecko," and, he (half) jokes "take every cent in that little box."

So we took home Dragon.

He was just the right size for Clem's heart and for mine.

Bad Chemistry

Even after the following experiment I am still prepared to believe that this is a good book.

It is rare, however, that you run into more trouble by following the directions than you would have by winging it.

I read the first experiment, exploring differential solubility and thought it would be a nice intro to chemistry.  As I remembered the challenge was to mix a measured quantity of salt and sand and then try to separate them.

I hoped the kids would try several ideas before they hit on the idea of putting the whole mixture in water and then pouring it through a filter which would let the salt dissolved in water through, but catch the sand.

But then I had to go and take a second look at the experiment.  It calls for sugar and sand, not salt and sand.  So, okay, we did sugar and sand.

The sand was from our sand box which sat open for a while and collected a lot of...umm...organic matter.  So we used a sieve to get rid of the sticks and dead bugs.

Our scale was not so accurate, so we decided to mix 100 grams of sugar and 100 grams of sand.  If all went well we should get back the amount we put in.

One of the kids figured out that the sugar was soluble and the sand wasn't pretty much instantly and shared the knowledge, so I didn't get to witness any scenes worthy of a fairy tale: oppressed children trying to sort the sand and sugar grain by grain.

Instead they ran right to the sink with their jars.

So after running the sand and water mixture through a filter we ended up with several pots of sugar water and several lumps of wet sand.  The sand went into the oven to dry and the sugar water went onto the stove.  Because hey, we'd just evaporate the water, and there would be the sugar, right?

Yeah, right.  Instead we got pots of burnt caramel.

What's worse is that when I wasn't looking the kids ate the dirty burnt caramel! 

At least it was sterile.
Most of the trays of sand hadn't been rinsed, so instead of getting sand back in most cases we got rock hard sand cookies with the filters stuck to them.

Evelyn wanted to get rid of the filter so it wouldn't add to the weight of the sand.   But she didn't want to lose the sand stuck to the filter.  Here was her solution.

She burned away the filter, leaving the sand and a few ashes.

Did we learn anything from this experiment?  Why sure.  Ideas were generated and tried: dissolving the sugar and burning the filter.

We learned that we should have rinsed the sand with water to make sure we'd gotten all the sugar out of the sand.  We learned that if you want to evaporate water to get sugar back you have to be patient, or you will get a chemical reaction.

And I learned that I need to set guidelines on eating the results of our experiments.

The Ichthyology Collection

We have 150 gallons of fish living space in 5 tanks.  Neon tetras dart and algae shrimp clean in Ev's big tank.

In Clem's tank corydoras, upside down and glass catfish lurk beneath rocks and dangle in the plants under the watchful eye of a nine inch long plecostomus.
Clementine mapped the origins of all her catfish: tropical freshwater rivers from the Amazon to Indonesia.

Clem discovered upside down catfish at the California Academy of Sciences aquarium. It is a terrific aquarium and my only gripe is how little information is on display. Lots of cool fish, very little about them. We jumped at a chance to go behind the scenes and meet researchers studying seahorses. Little did we know we'd also get a glimpse at the Ichthyology Collection.

We were introduced to David Catania, Manager of the Ichthyology Collection, who led us through security doors to a concrete room filled with rolling stacks. When we came to the gap in the stacks this is what we saw.

Row upon row of dead fish in jars.

Heaven.




I just love the variety of jars, some from the 1800s.


Almost a quarter of a million jars in this library.

This is a circulating collection.  Researchers can request the loan of a pickled fish and the fish librarian will pull it out of its jar, wrap it in gauze, plunk it in a ziploc and mail it across the world.

David Catania opened up a number of jars and pulled out fish for us to look at.  Some highlights.

Stained to show muscle and bone.

An anglerfish.

Our guide took a look at this and said, "Whose going to be that for Halloween?"
Clem said, "I already have been!"

On the belly of this female Triplewart Seadevil is her mate (between thumb and forefinger).

He attached himself to her and now he's just a hanger on.

A remora.

Flashlight fish.  You can see small live ones in the aquarium.

That light-colored thing is the fish's flashlight.  It glows all the time but pops into a cheek pocket to "turn off."

I love this pic.  Poor guy can barely fit in his jar.

Very strange relative of the seahorse.

 Every family has a strange relative, right?

On their best behavior.

The Icthyology Collection gave me an idea.  I could turn a negative into a positive!  One of the downsides of keeping pet fish is that they die with depressing frequency.  But what if we began an ichthyology collection?

The very morning after our tour one of Clem's corydoras catfish turned up dead.  I scooped him up and stuck him in a jar that was already home to platy eyeballs.  Then I remembered Evelyn's hatchet fish in the freezer.  We were hoping to "return" them, since they died of ich and shared it with all their new friends, but we never got around to it.

So here it is.  The beginning of our very own ichthyology collection.  I surely hope we aren't such poor fish custodians that we end up with a quarter of a million jars like the California Academy.  But I take pride that one of the jars actually came from the Academy.  The one on the right.  No, we didn't steal it from the collection.  We got it at the cafe.  Before the hatchet fish it held some really delicious Scharffenberger chocolate pudding.

I'd like to say that the girls share my enthusiasm, but they think it is disgusting.  Can you blame them when these were once their beloved pets?

On Cuneiform and Throwing Your Clothes Off

George Smith, British archaeologist, was so excited when he translated the Assyrian tablet bearing part of the Tale of Gilgamesh that he tore off his clothes and ran screaming through the British Museum.

I am almost as excited about some writing that has appeared at our house.  Good thing the British Museum is at a safe distance.

Getting the kids to read and write are major homeschooling milestones.  Whether it happens all by itself or it takes a lot of work I think we all sigh with relief and joy when it's over.


Greta likes to do things in a rush.  Last year after her 4th birthday she began to draw with a vengeance.  This year, after she turned five, she turned to writing...and writing...and writing.

Her writing, cryptic, without spaces, apparently untranslatable, bears no mean resemblance to the Assyrian clay tablets.

So I was alarmed when she thrust the first page at me and said "Read it!"  She is prone to paroxysms of self-criticism when I can't figure out her drawings, so I was on eggshells.

I tried the mother's saving tactic:  "Why don't you read it to me?"  But she was so on to that and began to launch into "I didn't do it right!  You can't read it!"

So when my eye fell on this my heart sang.

I can go see Lea!  Good good good.

Thank goodness my friend Judith was at my shoulder.
While I was flailing she read:

her it is the docdr ofics o i will fel betr!
Here it is the doctor's office.  Oh, I will feel better!

After a while I caught on to recurring themes and patterns.
thry hens lav to sit on a bratch
Three hens love to sit on a branch.

EGS
Eggs

What amazes me is the trouble I can have figuring out perfectly phonetic words!  Like EGS.  I really struggled with that one.

The next two speak for themselves:

Grumpy

This one reminds me of...was it an Onion article?...about a humanitarian effort to ship vowels to Vrgorac and Vrbovek and other Croatian cities.

BRD
bird

But this was the one that brought me the most joy. It was a letter she sent to her dad.

Dad
I♥ MOM
I♥ Clem
I♥Ev
I♥Gran
I♥Grapo (Grandpa)
I♥At Kely(Aunt Kelly)
I♥Akl Jon (Uncle Jon)
I♥Eleit (Elliot)
I LAV Amelea (Amelia)
I LAV Grasy (Gracie)
I♥LAV Everyone

Greta wore herself out with all her love and asked Gran to write Everyone.  This one gave me the most joy not only because of all the love, but because she is already using her writing to express her feelings.

That makes a homeschooling mom and writer (almost) happy enough to tear her clothes off and run around screaming with joy.