I made a basket. With Iain

Salt Lake City's Museum of Natural History helps us fill the weekends and holidays. Iain can run around commenting on the teeth of long-dead dinosaurs, filling the Salt Lake Valley with water then draining it, and wiggling stuffed birds.

They have a new exhibit on basket-making. It's weird. Beautiful, but weird.

Here's what's weird: to enter, you have to find your way to the back corner of the second floor. This is harder than you'd think. Then you enter through a double set of solid doors. It's so non-obvious they had to put up signs "Enter here!"

Once inside, it's the same kind of exhibit you might see at any nice museum. It reminds me of the old gem exhibit at the Smithsonian, or the costumes at the World War I museum in Kansas City.

The baskets represent both modern and traditional design, but they clearly want to emphasize the emergence of a beautiful new strain of modern basketmaking. Interviews, baskets big and small, and presentations relating to materials all emphasize this new approach.

You can design your own basket, too.  On a large touchscreen, you drag elements onto the round basket and then play with size and color. Pretty fun. At the end, you can email it to yourself.

Or, as in this case, you can enter an email address and then receive the image a week later. No joke. A week. Because that's how email works.

Solitary Pleasures

I made split-pea soup.

It's amazing.

But...I made a lot, of course. I mean, the peas come in bags and the hamhock is a certain size and inevitably the result = half a gallon of soup.

What to do? No soup for parents: peas and ham are verboten for one or the other. No soup for spouse and child: peas.

More soup for me, I guess. Oh, darn.

OMG Utah

 I saw this sticker on a truck yesterday at Emigration Market.

I meant to take a picture but feared the owner. Happily, someone on the internets saw it, too. Source.

So...I think this means...does it mean that? I think so.

Questions

I was sort of prepared for his questions. He might ask, "Does God have feet?" I knew that.

I also knew he might get into why cycles. "Is the Earth round?" Whywhywhywhywhy etc.

I was not prepared for the random questions. That is, questions that make sense and have a context but the context is Not Now.

Example: it's bedtime. Ok, it's way past bedtime. He's not asleep. As usual. I go in to hug him and tell him to be quiet and he asks, "What color is PufflePuff?" I can't remember. I say maybe purple. He says, "That makes sense because they both start with P." "It's Hufflepuff, honey." "Right, Pufflepuff."

"Are they the best wizards?" Then I explain about jocks in Griffindor and brains in Ravenclaw and baddies in Sytherin. I don't know what to say about Hufflepuff. It doesn't matter. He's over it. I walk away and two minutes later I hear: "E I E I Oh..."

???????

Sleepy Toes

It's the sleepy toes that get me. They're just so...munchable.

Parenting

That awesome moment when your beloved child vomits all over the restaurant.

Joy.