H is for Helium: Balloon Party

It started with an idea. Balloons, red and blue.

And a birthday boy, of course.

Refreshments were served (there's always room for Jell-O).

Games were played.

Prizes were won.

Cake was served.

And eaten.

For everyone else, there were cake pops!

It seems a good time was had by all.

Happy Birthday to my darling 1-year-old boy!

Flashback Friday: Travel bug

When I was growing up, my family took two epic road trips. The first, when I was almost 8 years old, was to the Pacific Northwest via every state in between Oklahoma and Washington. This trip was really amazing. We camped a lot in our Volkswagon Vanagon (see below), which was always really exciting for my sister and me because we got to sleep in the bed that was up in the pop top. We saw Old Faithful, The Grand Tetons, and Seattle's Space Needle. The photograph above was taken at Yellowstone. (Who's that cute little boy standing next to my sister?) A park ranger there inspired me to pursue a career in the park service (later, when I was working at the entrance gate to Rocky Mountain National Park, I met a woman who had been that ranger's roommate at Yellowstone). We drove into British Colombia, where I remember a waiter at a restaurant hesitated to give me a menu because he didn't think I could read (!). We went on a ferry that had a wonderful hammered dulcimer band, The Wild Rose String Band, whose music would become the soundtrack for every road trip our family took thereafter. On this ferry I also met a man from New Zealand who taught me that (at the time) NZ had 3.1 million people and 65 million sheep.

This photograph is from our second major road trip, to the East coast. This was probably the coolest place I've ever car-camped. I'm pretty sure it was in Tennessee, and the camping spaces were giant decks on stilts. In case you're wondering why my sister is wearing a blue bootie on her right foot, it's because earlier in the summer, she stepped on one of these:
And she had stitches in her foot. I guess she couldn't wear a shoe on that foot, until after my dad removed the stitches in a hotel room in Washington D.C.

By the time this photo was taken, we had been in a car wreck in Virginia (we were rear-ended on the highway by a man who was asleep at the wheel) and so here we are standing in front of our second rental car (a Buick Regal) but still making progress on our trip. Looking back on it, I am sort of shocked that my parents were so willing to persevere on our trip after such a harrowing experience!

These road trips are some of my favorite memories from my childhood. I sure hope to be able to give Little Omi experiences like them when she's a bit older (without the car wreck, obviously).

Thanks, AJ, for this week's theme!

I want my ramune!

We made our monthly pilgrimage to Super Cao Nguyen market in the city yesterday to purchase a 20-lb. bag of rice and a crate of ramen for Big Omi's lunches. If only we had brought our nifty new soft-sided cooler, we could have picked up some frozen mackeral (the yummiest fish out there, in my book) and brought it home for dinner. We'll have to plan better next time. Little Omi got a bamboo rice paddle and a small strainer for her little nook in the kitchen. I picked out some "gourmet" Pocky to indulge in this week.

We always make sure to buy a couple bottles of ramune (pronounced rah-moo-nay), which I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of trying it yet. It's basically a 7-Up type of fizzy sweet lemony soda, but the best part is the bottle it comes in. The mouth of the bottle is sealed with a small glass marble, which you pop into the bottle using a little plastic thingamajig that comes with the bottle. Then, the glass marble acts like the metal ball in a gerbil's water bottle—that is, it drops into the mouth of the bottle as you tilt it towards your mouth so the liquid doesn't come out very fast. When you get near the end and you're really tipping the bottle up, you have to go in and move the marble out of the way with your tongue to get the last few drops. When you're all done, the marble rolling around inside the neck of the bottle makes a wonderful sound. Big Omi remembers being a little kid in Japan and throwing fits to get ramune from street vendors. Little Omi worked hard at getting a sip all the way home from the market.

Flashback Friday

The theme for Flashback Friday this week is "Say Cheese." I didn't have to look too hard in my photo collection to find a good cheesy smile. In fact, I had to narrow it down to this one. Here, my sister (right, in red) and I are mugging for the camera on a horseback ride in Colorado. Every summer our family would go on one big ride that usually involved cooking and eating a meal in the middle. I was always the littlest kid in the group, and got to ride the smallest horse, which I thought was really neat. I loved riding along the trail, our horses in single file, imagining we were on Little House on the Prairie or Centennial. I don't think I was a very skilled rider, though, because my main memory of actually controlling the horse was pulling the reins as hard as I could to try to keep the horse from eating the tall grass, which was strictly forbidden.

...and the living is easy

Since my recent post about how much I am going to miss this summer, I have really been trying to make the most of every day left in the season. Little Omi and I enjoyed this nice dish of berries yesterday, but we haven't been able to use the kiddie pool for a few days. We got a good storm yesterday, which was nice (although now the kiddie pool is quite dirty and needs to be emptied before it becomes mosquito larva habitat), and today the temperature barely topped 90°F, which is not hot enough to sit in the chilly water. Still, we added a new feature to our routine: feeding the goldfish in our little whiskey-barrel pond. Little Omi waves "hello" and "goodbye" to the fish and likes to poke at the lilypads until they start to sink under the water.