London in Oklahoma, Part 2: Casa Cooper

For the second half of our Oklahoma vacation we stayed with London's Mimi and Papa. Mimi had a birthday while we were there, and London got in on some birthday cake.


Naturally where there are grandparents there is going to some spoiling of the little man. London picked up a couple of new trains on this trip, Iron Burt and Iron 'Arry. I am always amazed at the number of locomotives that the Island of Sodor supports, and even more amazed at how many of them have twins. A more cynical person might suspect that some of the characters were introduced purely in the quest for filthy lucre.

Nah!


London also got an engineer's cap. Here he's chatting with Papa about his new trains.


London got to see all three of his great-grandparents this trip, too: Grandma Onie and Grandpa Bud (Mimi's parents), and Grandma Cooper (Papa's mom). Here London is helping Grandma Onie with something--or possibly unhelping. Sometimes it's a fine line. You can also see that, no matter how many other engines arrive, Thomas is never far off.


London relaxes on the sofa with Grandpa Bud. I remembered to take the camera this time, but I didn't get any pictures of Grandma Cooper.


London also got some University of Oklahoma duds. Casa Cooper is a house divided; Papa is an OSU alum and Mimi went to OU for part of her education. A similar situation holds at the Wedel homestead: Todd and I went to OU and Ryan went to OSU. Normally we all get along pretty well, but Todd and I were scandalized when Mom and Dad hung a huge orange OSU sign on the front porch for a few years. I don't know if it's still up or not. I didn't notice it on this trip but it's possible that my brain simply blocked out the offending item.

The best thing that London said on the trip to Oklahoma has a bit of a backstory. London was a little confused about what San Diego refers to. When we got to town we went to the conference hotel, and London kept saying, "San Diego!" He thought that the hotel itself was San Diego. So we'd be at the zoo or one of the museums and he'd say, "I want to go back to San Diego." (Or if it was the train museum, he'd say, "I don't want to go back to San Diego.") We thought it was pretty funny but we didn't give it any thought after we came home.

Then on our last day in Oklahoma Mimi was driving us to the airport on Meridian in Oklahoma City. We were going past hotel row and London saw a big hotel with wrap-around external balconies like the conferenc hotel we'd stayed in, and he pointed and shouted, "There's San Diego!"

Special Feature: the thousand (retarded) faces of Uncle Ryan

This blog is supposed to be about London, but as I was going through the pictures from this trip I realized that I had an inordinate number that showed Ryan looking . . . goofy. I think that's partly because he is goofy, and partly because you'd have to go to Hogzilla to find a bigger ham. Here he is looking dapper and quite mentally challenged in Anna Ruth's hat. Note that although it belongs to a 13-month-old baby, the hat almost fits on my brother's curiously tiny head.


I can't decide if Ryan is yawning here, or simply longing to dine on human brains.


Like me, Ryan has nothing but love for the sauropods. He just expresses his differently.


An homage to Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. This picture makes me laugh out loud every time I look at it. It's the expression on his face. Man, that's priceless.


I found this at the bottom of an old box of magazines. A nostalgic memento of yesteryear, for sure.

P.S. That last one is probably slightly funnier if you know that Courtney was prom queen at Oklahoma State.

London in Oklahoma, Part 1: Casa Wedel

We just got back from a 10-day vacation to Oklahoma. London's Mimi and Papa (Vicki's parents) live in Oklahoma City, and London's Grandma and Grandpa (my folks) live in the country about 20 miles outside of Enid. This time we remembered the cameras and we got a lot of pix, so I'm splitting them up. This post is just stuff from the first half of the trip. Pix from Mimi and Papa's will go up later (hopefully not too much later...).

It is usually no more expensive to stay at a part-sleep-fly hotel than it is to park the car for however long we're going to be gone anyway, so we often stay overnight before we fly. Here's London in the hotel in Fresno the night before we left. We got a Thomas the Tank Engine sticker kit a few months ago, and it came in a little plastic case with a latch and a handle. We call it London's suitcase, and it's just the right size to hold six pieces of track and about 10 vehicles. He can set it up anywhere we go, and we can tear it down and pack it up in about two minutes flat. Very handy.


London helps Grandpa and Grandma fill up a little pool. Mom and Dad live on an acre out in the country, surrounded by wheat fields and pasture. We moved out there when I was about nine years old. The main house is a two-story farmhouse that was built around 1900, but irritatingly I didn't get any good pictures of it. The trailer in the background belonged to my grandparents, who moved from Nebraska to stay with us when I was in my early teens. Both of them have passed on, but it was really great to have them close while we did. Off to the right is the carport that Dad built to protect the Wedel fleet. There are also three sheds on the property, and about 30 big trees (elms and cottonwoods).

It was just about the perfect place to grow up. The buildings and trees give plenty of places to hide and allow for some good strategy when you're trying to sneak up on your brothers. It's far away from everything--the nearest neighbors are about half a mile away to the west, and the second nearest are a mile away to the east. So you could go outside and raise hell without worrying about bothering anyone, which is very handy when you're a teenager. And the place is crazy with wildlife--lizards, turtles, snakes, rabbits, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, coyotes, deer, the occasional bat, and even bobcats and mountain lions. A couple of years ago Mom was coming home from a walk and a mountain lion padded across the road just a few dozen yards in front of her. Then it sat in the ditch at watched her for a while before it slinked away. Mom said it was the most scared she'd ever been.

On this visit I was taking out some table scraps when a bobcat chased a cottontail out of the field behind the house. They ran across the backyard, around the trailer, and back into the field. I saw the whole thing from the fence--they passed within 20 feet of me on both passes. Pretty cool.


The other awesome thing about the ancestral manse is that there is a creek about a quarter of a mile away, and the farmers who own the pasture it flows through have always been pretty relaxed about us getting in there and exploring as long as we steer clear of their cows. No, I've never been cow-tipping. I was always way more interested in catching turtles and picking up bones. We often go down to the creek on walks and throw rocks in the water. Here London is getting in on the action.


From the age of five on we always had pet turtles, but that's a story for another day. I really wanted to catch a turtle to show London, and chelonian fate smiled on us last Friday. I was coming back from Enid with my brothers after catching a movie and we found two box turtles crossing the road. Both Western box turtles, Terrapene ornata ornata, both female, both full grown and apparently healthy. One of them had a small chunk out of the back end of its shell (an old wound and completely healed), but it's not uncommon to find turtles that have survived much more serious injuries, like broken shells or missing limbs. They are incredibly tough animals. I love 'em. Anyway, we laid an old tire on its side to make a temporary pen, filled up the inside with water to give the turtles a cool, shady place to rest, and fed them some watermelon rinds. We only kept them for a couple of days, and turned them loose right where we caught them. London thought they were pretty cool, and the turtles certainly seemed to be happy--the melon rinds were pretty well chewed by the time I tossed them.


Todd, Becca, and Anna Ruth joined us Thursday evening. Anna Ruth is growing so fast. Except for one day this spring when we were passing through on our way home from a job interview, we hadn't seen her since Christmas.


She was a little nervous around me, but on Saturday she finally settled down and let me hold her for a few minutes. Yeah, I get it, I'm scary-looking, har-dee-har.


Ryan also came up Thursday evening, and on Friday he was joined by his fiancee, Courtney Hearst. They just got engaged a couple of weeks ago. London loves them both, of course, but he doesn't always love the camera.


It's best if he doesn't even know he's on camera.


Here are Todd and Becca with the little ones. Neither of the babies looks too happy here, but that's just bad timing. They were both smiling and laughing most of the time.


On Saturday evening Ryan and Courtney drove us down to Hennessey to meet Vicki's dad. There is a Sinclair station there with a rockin' sauropod out front, so of course we had a photo op.


We had a wonderful time. I just wish it could have lasted longer. I find that the longer we are away, the more I miss Oklahoma. Naturally we are hoping for the best here in Merced, but I hope someday our path can take us closer to what I will always think of as home.

London in San Diego

A couple of weeks ago Vicki attended the annual meeting of the International Association for Identification in San Diego. She gave a workshop to train other forensic scientists in her method of determining the season in which someone died from their teeth.

Sounds crazy, right? But every year you are alive, you lay down a band of cementum around your teeth, like rings on a tree. And the part of the band laid down in the winter is dark and the part laid down in the summer is light. So by counting the number of bands and looking at the thickness of the outer band, you can tell roughly how old someone was when they died (roughly because you may not know exactly how old they were when a particular tooth came in), and by looking at the color and thickness of the outermost band, you can tell with a high degree of confidence what season of the year they died in. This is a handy way to cut down the number of possibilities if you are trying to match a dead body to missing persons reports.

People have been doing this with animals for decades, but Vicki was the first person to ever think of determining season at death from teeth in humans. You can read her abstracts about it here; her first paper on it is in press at the Journal of Forensic Sciences.


Anyway, she brought London and me along for a family vacation. We honeymooned in San Diego 11 years ago but we hadn't been back since.


Right after we got to our hotel we had to get some calories in the kid. Here he is chowing down on his favorite food: "Cheeseburger!"


While Vicki was setting things up for her workshop London and I went to the zoo. We got there right when they opened. All the animals were out and about but the humans weren't, which is easily the best way to visit the zoo. Here London has a close encounter with a "hangatang".


We also saw a lazy bear.


This tortoise was also pretty relaxed--and, as you can tell from the angle of the photo, pretty close to the fence. Almost all the animals that we saw were right up at the front of their enclosures. Just in terms of the critters, it was probably my best zoo visit ever.


And of course it was even better because I got to watch my little man see some things for the first time, like these elephants. When we first walked up they were only about 10 feet from the fence, so London was looking as much up as out to see them. One of them exhaled loudly through its trunk and London jumped back and held my leg. He was really spellbound. Took a while for him to relax enough to get this picture.


I was a complete idiot and ran off to San Diego without the digital camera or the camcorder. So all of our photos from that vacation were taken with our digital cameras. Fortunately I traded in my old busted joint a few weeks ago and my new Moto Razr ($20 at Circuit City, can ya believe it?) has a megapixel camera. Not a substitute for even our cheap digital camera, but a lot better than nothing.


We were headed out of the zoo when we saw these goldfish, and London asked me to take a picture of them. So here you go--the first photo on this blog taken with London as the director.


The next day Vicki was actually giving her workshop, and London and I went to the Model Railroad Museum in Balboa Park. They layouts are immense--the largest ones are probably 70 feet long and 20 feet wide. And they aren't just made-up piles of train stuff. Most of the layouts are based on specific stretches of California rail line, and modeled from aerial photos and topographic maps. I think I was almost as impressed as London.


Downstairs there is a model village with several toy train lines. Here London is pushing a button to makes one of the trains run. Needless to say, that button got pushed more than once.


The next day we all went to the San Diego Museum of Man. Here are Vicki and London with some other primates.


We went to Seaport Village for some shopping, too. Here are the lights of my life in front of the aircraft carrier Midway, which is now a floating museum. The Midway was launched in 1945 and retired in 1992, making it the longest-serving aircraft carrier in history.

Here's our favorite London saying from the trip. The freeway onramps and offramps we used to get to and from the hotel were really tightly cranked, so even at moderate speeds inertia made us lean in our seats. London didn't like this at all, and he would yell, "Don't make me fast, Daddy!"