I ran across this video on Anibunny’s blog.

It is exactly what I needed to boost my spirits this evening!

Just a short video (I think I am starting to get the knack of uploading these.)
This squirrel has been visiting to harass the cats for a few days.

Imagine this picture, only in the dark, after a long drive down a rocky dirt road with a six-year-old scared that the bears would get her in the back of the van. That would be us on Friday night, driving to South Skookum Campground. Apparently the ranger I have talked to earlier in the day had been wrong about it being open. It closed on Labor Day, which was the weekend before!

Skookum is one of those wonderful secluded campgrounds, you know, the ones without phone reception? Which is awesome, except when you are stuck out there late at night with no way to tell the people who are coming up the next day that it is closed. However, we are a stubborn resourceful group of Pagans, so with a little bit of exploring by lantern light, we were delighted to find the host site was only 200 yards down the road and that someone had left the outhouse unlocked (double score!)

So we hoofed the basics down there (tents, sleeping bags and diapers,) pitched the tents and settled in for the night. Sal played his Native American flute for a time, a beautiful sound to drift off to sleep with. I did wake up three times during the night. A couple of the times were for Damian’s usual nursing and changing^[1] and once was to the sound of coyotes in the distance and something scamper past my tent (possibly a chupacabra or a baby sasquatch…)

The view coming out of our tents in the morning completely made up for Friday night’s misadventures though:

It even made up for the campground water pump not having it’s handle (I suppose they remove it for the season?) So no potable water other then what we had – not much (whoops!) We intend on buying a manual water filter, maybe a gravity filter, before we camp next; packing water in is way too heavy.

Friday night had gotten down to around 40F so we were bundled up pretty well for a couple of hours, until the sun broke over the trees. I think Damian and Shannon (in the photo to the left) win the most-layers-of-clothing award. Summer baby and So-Cal girl get along well!

Eventually we all were up. Some of us trekked down to the vehicles to retrieve the rest of our supplies and the others got the breakfast fire going. Hashbrowns needed to be rehydrated for catastrophe^[2] which brought around the question of our water supply, if Peter and Andrea didn’t show up with water we would have to drive to Usk to get some. (Luckily they brought a water filter hand pump – Andrea works for Mountain Gear, she is always prepared…)

After breakfast I thought I would trek down to the van to get the few extra things we needed, so I put Damian in the sling and wandered down to the road. It was very peaceful, I grabbed what I needed from the van and headed back. When I was a few yards from the van I saw something in the bushes right beside me so I turned and screamed. Yup, I’ll admit it, I screamed bloody murder. There was a big cat head looking right at me! As soon as the scream escaped my lips, the kitty vanished. I got back in the van for a few while I calmed down. I figured someone would have heard me and come with the bear spray. I waited, and waited, and waited some more. No one came. (They heard me back at camp but thought I was Rachelle, the six-year-old. Great, I sound like a six-year-old.)

Eventually I made it back, all by myself, unmauled. We figured out it was a chupacabra lynx and that is was probably long gone with my shrieking. Damian slept through the whole ordeal of course.

Shortly after the lynx incident Andrea and Peter arrived (with the aforementioned water filter,) we had some pbjs and all went on a hike around the lake.

The trail is an exceptionally beautiful one, full of ferns (I adore ferns!), unusual flowers and mushrooms; as well as tons of birds I could not even begin to identify. There are plenty of places to stop along it and enjoy the view across the lake. The windstorms this Spring did a number on some of the older trees but most of the big ones had been cleared from the path (thankfully since it is hard to duck under a fallen tree with a baby in a sling.) Since Andrea and I love photography we were the stragglers of the group, stopping to take a picture of everything (hopefully I will have some of her photos too eventually.) I had to hurry up at one point though because Damian and I were being sucked dry by mini-winged-chupacabras… I mean mosquitoes. (Yes the chupacabra thing could be seen as an unhealthy obsession odd interest. Dyslexic cryptozoologists untie?)

When we got back to camp we moved our tent (since we had set it up on lumpy ground the night before – imagine that it was hard to see in the dark!) and then sat around and chatted for awhile. As the sun began to set we started our dinner fire. We had so much food! Everyone brought extra to share, my jerky stew and cornbread, some Chinese food, olives, grapes, and many types of cheese. We also made cobbler with peaches, pears and fresh blackberries. Yummy!

After dinner Rachelle went to bed and chatting resumed and the wine came out, apparently we are all quite fond of the stuff so we had three bottles, two reds and a white. Sal played his flute for us. I tried to take a video of him playing it but the sound did not come through that well. The fire crackled while he played and coyotes howled in the distance creating a very surreal scene. It was so amazing having the entire campground to ourselves.

I wanted to stay up into the wee hours talking but alas, motherhood has turned me into an early sleeper. Damian fell asleep in my lap and I was nodding off shortly after so I headed off to bed with my munchkin. The next morning I heard that I missed and excellent debate about will power and guns, dang it! At least I was the best rested of the group (except maybe for Rachelle.)

Sunday morning was gorgeous once again, by the time I wandered out of my tent the sun had already crested over the trees. None of us had watches (our phones didn’t work so they were off and packed away) but it might have been around 9am. I tucked Damian in with Michael and I have to say there were some adorableness awards to be won by my guys. When Damian saw the blue sky and trees outside the tent he got the biggest grin ever. Of course as soon as I touch a camera it vanished but his eyes were still full of amazement and wonder.

Andrea is her pure wonderfulness packed orange juice and champagne, so mimosas for everyone! (After breastfeeding of course.) We laid out on the dock soaking up the rays, watching the waterbugs and shooting the breeze.

Eventually we got around to kindling the breakfast fire and having way to much food once again (better then too little!) Oatmeal, bacon, eggs, sausage, my pancakes and cinnamon rolls. Everything seems to taste better when cooked over a campfire and in good company. We took a long time to eat, maybe because our trip was coming to a close. Eventually though we all started going through the motions and breaking down camp and packing stuff up. We certainly took our time at that too, I don’t think any of us really wanted to leave. At least, we didn’t want to pack all that stuff back up the path to the cars!

Michael’s glasses disappeared at some point and I returned to look for them (nearly certain of not finding them) when I had a rather magical moment. I asked the powers that be to please show me where they were an a dragonfly came from the lake and landed on them. How awesome is that? Old Wild Mama Earth never ceases to amaze me.

The drive home was uneventful and beautiful. After we dropped Shannon and Rachelle off, we came home, ordered pizza, took baths, watched Smallville and remembered how wonderful it is to lay in one’s own bed! I adore camping but it is nice to relax at home afterwards too.

That pretty much wraps out up our trip, it has taken me a week to type this so hopefully it gave you a little glance into our vacationing style. Here is a short video to wrap things up:

1. It should be noted that Damian does not like cold cloth diapers on his booty! I stuck a few in my sleeping bag to keep them warm after traumatizing him with a freezing diaper on his sensitive areas at 3am.)

2. Catastrophe is something Michael makes, it is hashbrowns, eggs, sausage (or bacon) and cheese all scrambled together. With ketchup or sour cream if that is your thing.

~~~

Oh! And there is a new Simon’s Cat video on YouTube:

This weekend my Grandpa Tolman came to visit. Mommy has lots of photos to sort but this is a little video grandpa took of me in Riverfront Park. Mommy and Daddy are talking about ways to keep the girls away from my adorableness as I grow up.

This is World Breastfeeding Week so this Saturday we might go back to the park to support La Leche League International at Kids Day. I want to lay in the grass again, it felt sooo neat!

I know some of Matt’s videos have been around for awhile but I particularly like this one (can’t remember which blog I ran across it on.)

I love to see happy people, I think that is why I love it so much.

I’ve been working on a new website for about 2 weeks, and now it’s ready to share with the world. Quite simply, it’s a catalog of our home videos. Jaspenelle’s Dad bought us a video camera for Christmas, and we have made several videos.

Video by michaelandjaspenelle.com

Most people would use YouTube or some other video sharing site. I considered using them, but I prefer to host web-content myself whenever possible. If you are using a third-party, like YouTube, you have to agree to their terms and deal with their servers and their policies and restrictions. I don’t like being restricted.

The website was actually developed quite quickly – because of several existing open source solutions, I actually had a working (albeit not very pretty) mockup working after a few hours of coding. The remainder of the 2 weeks of development was making things nice and experimenting with different features. It’s built using the following technologies:

Linode

condor.garjasp.com is a Linode 360, a UML virtual server. This let’s me micro-manage everything about my hosting environment, and run any services or software that I need or want.

Ubuntu Linux

The OS is Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition. I would have used Debian, but they are always out-of-date. Previously, this server (when it was known as manticore.garjasp.com) ran Gentoo (of which I was also a developer), but that became too difficult to keep up-to-date and secure.

Apache HTTPD Server

Only the world’s most popular http server. I have an intimate relationship with this beast, and have tamed it quite well. All configuration is pulled from LDAP (using a set of PERL scripts to autogenerate the config on startup) and is highly optimized to the server environment. For the video site, I have some mod_rewrite magic to create the pretty URLs.

PHP

The website backend uses PHP5. This is used to check for a valid video file, generate and read metadata, get a list of available video files, and allow for different templates based on the URL. It will be quite easy for me to extend the video site to have Categories, RSS feeds, or anything else I can come up with.

FFmpeg

After videos are uploaded to the server, they are encoded to FLV by FFmpeg. It is also used to generate the PNG thumbnails.

Flowplayer

Another great piece of open-source software, flowplayer plays the FLV files generated by ffmpeg. It’s highly customizable and scriptable, so I was able to make it do exactly what I wanted.

Yahoo User Interface Library

YUI provides the core scripting components to make the Web 2.0 features easy to create. I use it for easy DOM access and for dynamically loading the video metadata.

Carousel Component

This is an add-on to YUI that I use for the neat scrolling of available videos.

Blueprint CSS

In the past I have used YUI for designing websites and CSS design. I recently heard of Blueprint CSS, and it works pretty well for what I wanted to do. I’m not actually using much of the CSS framework directly – most of my CSS is actually a modified form of it’s classes. It provides a nice reference and jump-off point that YUI just couldn’t provide. YUI requires too much HTML bloat, and that’s something I’ve always disliked about it.

Currently, the code for the website is not in a releasable state – some things are very specific to the current environment. Over time, I hope to get it cleaned up, add a nice admin interface (right now all administration is done via WinSCP and SSH), and make it more configurable, then I may release it to the general public.

Let me know what you think!

This is some of the video Michael and I recently took along the Spokane River. The first clip is from Bowl and Pitcher in Riverside State Park and the remaining ones are from various parts of Riverfront Park in downtown Spokane. The river has crested though it is expected to stay at or near flood stage for awhile, especially with the hot weather and rain still in the forecast.

My kitties are being a little uncooperative regarding the camera this week, so I thought I would post a couple videos a friend sent me with Simon’s cat. They are hilarious!

This past Memorial Day I decided to get in touch with my inner Joseph Smith playing an intense game of stick-pole with my brother-in-law.

Though this is not really a LDS game, I hadn’t heard of it until watching a movie with my in-laws with them where Joseph Smith is playing stick-pole with some guy in a barn.

I have an odd sense of humour.