Fall Days and New Style

Today was a gorgeous fall day. Z and I spent the morning soaking up the sun on our semi-finished (okay, let's just say functional) sun porch while Jason was at work. Then we all took advantage of the sunny and breezy Sunday afternoon to take care of yard work.

 

Here is Zander's first time playing in the leaves.

In other news, Z has just gotten over a cold so I had boxes of kleenex everywhere.

Zander found one of these boxes....

We decided that it was time for Zander to have his first haircut. We tried to hold off as long as possible, but it was starting to obscure his vision so it had to be done.

Drumroll please....

Let me just say that cutting a baby's hair is WAAAAAAY different from cutting an adult's hair. He refused to hold still and I was constantly pulling the scissors away to keep from chopping off his grabby little fingers.

(This is all just a way of me saying that, yes, I know this isn't a good haircut. Cut me some slack!)

Jason decided that the best way to clean up was to vacuum up the hair. And vacuum the baby.

Pumpkin Patch

Jason and I took little Z on a trip to a pumpkin patch with a few other young families. We took a hay ride out to the patch and selected our own pumpkins.

Here is Z with two of his little friends. They all seem pretty fascinated with their pumpkins, which Zander refers to as "ball". Actually, he calls anything round "ball" and he says it with a lilting tone and makes it into two sylables, "baaaa-aaal."

Daddy! Z has started to say something that sounds a lot more like "Daddy" and less like the baby sound "Da-da". He's starting to talk so much, it is really exciting.

Here is what the pumpkin looked like after being gutted and cut up.

But to Zander, it is still just a "baaa-aaal."

Economic Collapse = Gardening

The current state of the economy has strengthened my desire to become self-sufficient. As a child, one of my favorite TV shows was "Good Neighbors", which gave a wonderfully romanticized view of living off the land. Possibly the best thing about owning a house is that I now can finally plant a real garden.

I may have gone a bit overboard, but here's what I planted:
- tomatoes
- sweet corn
- sweet tomatoes (cherry tomatoes)
- yukon gold potatoes
- Russian banana potatoes
- sweet potatoes
- ummm... another kind of potato
- bell peppers
- sweet peppers
- kohlrabi
- arugula
- sugar babies (mini watermelon)
- casaba melon
- soybeans
- bush beans
- pole beans
- eggplant
- zucchini
- lettuce
- butternut squash
- brussels sprouts
- broccoli
- yellow onions
- dill
- pesto basil
- red basil
- garlic chives
- oregano
- aloe (not for eating but for burns etc)
- sunflowers (not in the garden, but as part of a living fence)
- marigolds (an attempt to keep bugs out of the garden)

I can't walk outside without gazing at it. What a beautiful sight.


Our house came with a mature apple tree and pear tree so if things go well I will be making all sorts of fruit things to eat all year! Watch out, soon I'll be buying goats and chickens and making a solar-powered generator.... actually that sounds like a great idea!

Thankfully Zander is pretty happy hanging out in the yard watching me work and entertaining himself - for a little while anyway!

Back in Time

Of all the places I saw in the outback, Watarrka National Park was my favorite. It contains the George Gill Range and Kings Canyon.

Here is a picture of the range from a distance.

Here it is close up.

This place was totally fascinating (and beautiful of course). The rocks are sandstone, and hold the very limited water like a sponge. Vegetation grows out of the stone, sending its roots deep into the cracks and crevices.

The strangest thing was that where the rocks had broken apart, you could see that they were made up of the white sand that covers Australian beaches. They think that millions of years ago there was a sea in the center of Australia (where the outback is now), then as the global climate changed it turned into tropical rainforests. Today, those rainforests are now only in the northern parts of Australia. The center still has remnants from those days, such as the palm trees and what they speculate could be an old coral reef (see the picture below).

They call that place "Lilliput." I kept imagining, thousands of years from now people walking around on the Great Barrier Reef with a guide explaining how this used to all be under the ocean. Crazy.

Supposedly during the wet season, one of the cliffs turns into a waterfall. (I definitely need to see that to believe it). The water runs down into the canyon and there is enough moisture that it maintains a waterhole all year round. It is quite green and lush in that area, so it has gotten the nickname "The Garden of Eden."




It was a magnificent place. We began our hike up to the rim of the canyon at sunrise, which is really a good thing since it gets very hot by midday. The hike began with a steep climb up the side - surprisingly nice despite having just woken up. The air was so clear and even a bit cold. I like that about the desert. No matter how hot it gets during the day, it always cools off once the sun goes down.

During the five hour drive back to Alice Springs I sat up front by our guide and asked him a gazillion questions about the area and what life is like there. It sounds like such a strange mix of people. One fourth are aboriginal, and from what I understand they hold most of the land rights now (sounds a bit like in Fiji). Another quarter are Americans involved in the Pine Gap project. I didn't know what Kevin (our guide) was talking about and I felt too ignorant to ask, but I just googled it and it is some sort of military base that is run primarily by CIA agents. Woah. The rest are Australians, plus lots of tourists passing through, with the largest groups being German and Japanese.

Add all of this into some of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen, and it becomes clear that Alice Springs is a town that I must get to know better.

Monoliths and More

While in the outback, we spent time at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. The land there was beautiful, with that rich red soil and very flat land. Kata Tjuta, also called the Olgas, is a series of large roundish rocks that rise up out of nowhere.

Kata-Tjuta is a sacred site to the Anangu Aboriginal men, and as such a lot of the cultural significance of the area is not know and not accessible to the public.

A close-up picture of the rocks.

Here is the famous monolith, Uluru (aka Ayers Rock).

I had seen many pictures of this place before going there, and to be honest I never knew what the big deal was. When you see it in person, though, it is amazing. The size alone is hard to comprehend, and only 1/3 of it is visible above the land. The surrounding area is completely flat, making it even more mysterious trying to understand what this is and how it got there.

The walk around Uluru is great with caves and waterholes appearing as you round each curve. It took about three hours for us to circle the rock, about 10k total.

It has become a big tourist attraction to climb to the top of Uluru. Despite notices everywhere from the Aboriginal landholders asking people not to do this because Uluru is sacred to them, people continue to do it.

It is a tough climb, too, and several people have died of heart failure on the trip to the top.

The sunset at Uluru was really cool. It began as a bright orange-red. Then, as the sun started to go down, it developed a purple hue. As the purple faded, the shadows got really sharp. Eventually, it faded into a dusty brown. We tried to document this transition in photographs.

Four-wheeling in the Outback

For our adventures into the outback, we decided to err on the side of safety and go with a group. It is possible to rent a four-wheel drive and trek out there on your own, but I hear a lot of stories about people whose cars break down and they never return, so I thought I should not risk it. At least not on my first trip out there. :)

We started out with a day trip around a few historic sites and national parks. Here is the vehicle we travelled in.

It was half bus, half army tank. The terrain is pretty rough, so you need a machine with power.

That's Michael posing on the mamouth vehicle.

The first place on the itinerary was Hermannsburg, a former missionary town which has kept part of the town as a museum giving a bit of history about the role the mission played in the lives of the aboriginal people living there. The museum made it seem like all of this happened very peacefully, with the missionaries learning the Aranda language and the aboriginals learning German, though I get the sense it was not that easy. There is a lot of racial strife going on all around that area which was not brought out in the open for tourists (obviously), but people I talked to tiptoed around the subject and made it pretty clear that there is a lot going on under the surface. Very intriguing.

As we continued on our way, we passed the salt flats.

Remarkably similar to the one I saw in Utah. Oh, I wish I had my photos from my trip to the southwestern US. I would love to look at these side by side.

Hey - check out these awesome lizards with their camouflage.

We drove down into the Finke River. That's something I found really odd. We passed all these "rivers" that had no water in them. Supposedly during the wet season they do fill up and even flood, though I have a very hard time believing that. The drive down into the river bed was really rough. We were belted in, but even with that we were tossed all around our seats going over these huge bumps and dips.

This is me walking in the Finke River. I think I'll have to come back during the wet season. They say it looks entirely different.

We hiked up to this peak to look out over the river.

Here are some views from the peak. That is me trying to get out of the shot (Michael was the photographer for the trip.)

Once we managed to get out of the river valley (another rough ride), we drove to Palm Valley. Way back, 200 million years ago this area was covered with rainforest. Some of the vegetation has survived, creating places like Palm Valley.

We hiked along here for a few hours, then had a picnic lunch. A great start to our trip.