Monthly Archives: August 2012

My Varmint is an imp, pure and simple.  You’d never guess it to look at her.  So sweet and pure and generous, with intelligent eyes that bely a kind heart…she’s every mother’s dream child.

Except for that imp thing.

I wanted to remember a beautiful moment at a beautiful spot in a beautiful state during a beautiful vacation with my beautiful beloveds.  That’s all I really wanted.  Was that so much to ask?

Here’s the spot.

I gathered the my beloveds and took a photo.

Varmint!  Stop it!  Just smile.  We don’t need the goofy tongue, thank you.

No, you may not stick your finger up My Captain’s nose for the picture, either.

Varmint!

I swear you are SUCH an Imp!

AUGH.  You are not right in the head, goofball!

Will you PLEASE be serious?!

Thank you.

Wait….

CRITTER!  Now why aren’t you smiling?!

DOH!

I give up.

Well, we’ve done it.  No surprise to anyone who knows us, or maybe even any of you kind people who read Mamaboe with any regularity.

We’ve bought land for our retirement near Glacier Park, Montana.

Land on which we will one day build a modest log home.  Land on which we will one day live out our salad years with the hopes that our children will visit often, or, at the very least, drop our grandchildren off with frequency for appropriate grand-parental doting and spoiling.

But in the meantime, this pristine woodland will need to be merely protected and stewarded.  14 acres it is, complete with old growth forest of Birch and Pine and Hemlock and Aspen…oh,  and a pure, glacial melt, gurgling creek.  And it’s currently populated with any number of wild birds.

And Bears.

And Mountain Lions.

And Eagles.

And Mooses.

(It was the Mooses that sold me, frankly.)

So this trip to Montana, My Captain and I introduced Critter and Varmint to our real estate investment.

My Captain took Critter for a walk around the perimeter of the property and they came upon a tree that had been well and truly used as a scratching post from a Grizzly Bear.

“Now wait just a minute!”  You cry! “Why do you say those are from a grizzly? I mean, many different animals could have caused that scratching!”

True.  If those scratchings were just regular scratchings.  Many different wild animals like to dig for insects hors-d’oevres, and many like to sharpen their claws on bark.

But see, there is one reason, and one reason alone that we are more than sure it was a Griz.

See that kid?  That 9-year-old boy who stands several feet tall?  He’s about 7 feet below the top most scratching.

This ain’t the doins of a little baby racoon folks.  And if it is….

I don’t want to meet the Mama!

Critter begged for the duration of our trip in Montana for a pocket knife. He wanted to learn to Whittle.

Before we made our decision to support this, we had to consider the following:

1) Critter is the human version of Tigger, only smarter, thank God.

2) Critter is 9.  9 Year Old boys are not known for their discerning judgement no matter how smart they are.

3) We have some nice wooden furniture at home that we’d like to keep nice.

On the other hand:

1) The sooner Critter trains with a knife, the sooner he’ll become proficient at it, the sooner he’ll be less likely to lose a finger or two.

2) We have a small, constantly shrinking window of time where Critter will come to us with these sweet curiosities.  Soon his curiosities’ subject matter will surpass our ability to teach him.  Opportunity is knocking now.

3) Wooden furniture, though nice, is just inanimate, and is fully replaceable.

So we relented.  He now owns several Montana-made pocket knives.  And the lessons began on the trip.

Critter listened.

He worked carefully.

He made some mistakes.

But most importantly,

Critter learned.

And My Captain…

… loved.

(PS, Varmint learned to whittle on this trip too, but that is for another post altogether….)

Varmint is learning life-skills.

Today’s skill was how to stop hemorrhaging.

Well, it didn’t start out that way.  Actually it started out that I was teaching her how to make a peach cobbler.

First she cut her thumb.

Then she cut the crease between her second and third fingers.  (You KNOW how hard that kind of cut is to put a bandage on.)

I finally let her stop yeilding the paring knife when we couldn’t distinguish between the peach juice and the blood.

And then we added a bunch more lemon juice and sugar to cover up any odd flavoring in the cobbler.  You KNOW how the iron flavor of blood can just ruin a cobbler.  I’m pretty sure Martha Stewart covers that in one of her very first cookbooks.

So I guess we can add ‘Camouflaging the taste of blood in food’ to our list of life skills practiced today.

Cobbler, anyone?

It amazes me how hard My Captain worked…how much overtime he had to accumulate…in order for us to afford a two-week camping trip to Montana.  Sure, the airfare from Reagan National Airport to Kalispell, Montana was exorbitant, but he worked for much more than that.  There were camping essentials:  the tent, the sleeping pads, sleeping bags, cookware, food, gas, SUV rental, more food, wilderness outfitting, National Park camping fees, more food, and, er, beer.   It all added up to a rather daunting sum.

But the funny thing is, of all the things we did, of all the adventures and challenges we embarked on, the one activity that gave the kids the most fun only cost $2.00.  That’s it.  The sum total of two cheap plastic rafts from the dollar store.

The rest of that tab was picked up by Mother Nature.

She’s a generous old broad!