No Mark On The Body

I took last week off from work. We decided we wanted to take a real vacation where you visited places and stuff, but we didn't want to spend too much, so we decided to go to Drumheller, Dinosaur Capital of Alberta. I'm pretty sure I'd been there at least once in my childhood, since it was only an hour's drive south of Stettler, my mom's hometown, but I don't think they had the big Royal Tyrrell Museum there at the time.

We drove down on Tuesday. After years of having driven alternately from Edmonton to Grande Prairie/Beaverlodge and Manning/Hawk Hills, I still consider any drive under six hours to be short, but we still had to stop in Stettler for lunch. My grandparents used to live there, and my uncle Dave lived nearby, but they're all dead now, so it's a little bit sad. I resisted the slight urge to drive by my grandparents' old house--I can't remember if it might not even have been torn down.

Drumheller itself was really quite fun. Our motel was across the river from the World's Largest Dinosaur, which was right there with the Tourist Information Centre, a nice gift shop, a "water splash park" with loads of fountains, and an AquaPlex with pools. We climbed the dinosaur...on the inside. It's got stairs, fossil displays, sounds, black light and more stairs. Then you can look out of the mouth(protected from falling out by plexiglass), and walk back down. For some reason my thighs were killing me on the way back down. Well, I never said I was fit.

Then we went out to the museum. It wasn't quite as huge as some museums--the Royal Ontario Museum comes to mind--but we still went straight to the dinosaurs for the kids' benefit. Some pretty impressive fossils, skeletons, and replicas of skeletons there. After that I wandered back to the Burgess Shale exhibit, which was a little disappointing. There weren't much of the actual fossils, which makes some sense because a)they're all so tiny, and b)they're probably being intensively studied, as possibly the only remnants of an entire paleontological period. (Or is that era, or epoch? Too lazy to check.) They did have a big display, behind glass, of Precambrian sea, and lots of pictures of the reconstructed creatures. The glass display was actually kind of funny, because the floor was glass too, and many of the visitors were leery of actually stepping on the glass...

That night we had the usual fun of staying in a single hotel room with the boys. They'd been pillow-fighting and jumping from bed to bed before bedtime, so they were still quite excited and it took them a long time to settle down and go to sleep. We put them in separate beds until they went to sleep, because they wouldn't stop kicking each other. Meanwhile we're sitting in chairs in the corner where we can get light from the bathroom to read and do puzzles(this was when I read most of The Swordbearer). No talking above a whisper. One of these trips we'll be able to afford a separate room for the boys and all that.

Wednesday we went on a fossil-oriented hike. That started out auspiciously with the 10:00 one already being sold out when we got there, but we signed up for 11:00, and then I went back and got some things that we'd forgotten in the motel. While we were waiting outside for everyone else to join us, Luke fell off one of the benches and bonked his head on the concrete. He ended up okay, but he was clingy and unhappy for a while. Hopefully we didn't annoy the other hike members too much. Simon was fairly gung-ho for the whole thing. We started out on a paved path and then moved a little ways into the badlands. The tour guide managed to calm Luke down by giving him her spray-bottle of water. He enjoyed spraying things with it, though he wasn't too good at it, and only by the end was beginning to get the idea that he should always hold it so that the red spray-nozzle is pointing away from him. In general we were at the end of the line, and missed a few of the guide's comments.

Finally we came to a place where they had found a few fossils, which were mostly wearing away since exposed to the elements, and briefed on what kinds of things to look for. I think Simon found a couple of tiny fossils--a petrified wood and possibly a little bone--but I struck out. The laws regarding fossils in Alberta are quite strict--you're not allowed to dig for them on government land without a permit, or something, you can't ship them out of the province, and in general if you find some you're supposed to mark the spot and call the Fossil Squad, in case you've found the tip of an iceberg. Our guide said there was probably a whole vein of fossils inside the hill, but they hadn't gotten authorization to dig there yet.

Then we went to the AquaPlex. It was delightfully uncrowded, after these years of getting used to the busy Millwoods Rec Centre. The kiddie pool was outside, alongside a larger pool, and we hadn't renewed our sunscreen after the hike, but we went out there anyway. I really do enjoy swimming, and wish I could do it more(for the aforementioned MWRC is, as well as being busy, fairly pestilent--I've gotten athlete's foot and at least one ear infection there). The boys wore lifejackets, and we brought both of them into the big pool, but neither of them was brave enough to try to float on their own. They'll be taking swimming classes over the next couple of weeks, so maybe they'll get the hang of it then.

We had supper that night at a Szechuan restaurant on the main street, whose name I can't remember and am too lazy to look up, which had very yummy ginger beef. Luke fell asleep in the middle of supper--almost falling face-first into his fried rice--not a big surprise after his late night. We decided to drive out to the hoodoos. Somehow I thought they'd be bigger, but we took turns climbing around them(on the demarcated path)with Simon, while Luke slumbered in the car. Then we went back to the motel and Simon quietly watched some children's shows on Treehouse(as did Luke, who awoke after a while).

One of the shows, "Timothy Goes To School" was kind of cute, especially with the two bulldog-like twins, Frank and Frank, who have bad German accents and are such total jocks that they can't conceive of anyone being happy who doesn't do well at sports. It's a Canadian show, too.

Thursday morning we went back, after an anticlimactic side trip to Bleriot Ferry. It sounded interesting on the map, but basically it's just a moving platform over a small river, manned by surly, bored men. They didn't charge us, at least, but it wasn't worth it. Lunch in Stettler again, and then back home in the afternoon. Yay, home! A two-day vacation is about as long we can bear, quite frankly.

Oh, and I did get a little bit of sunburn--on the shoulders, probably from the pool, and a little bit in the middle of my chest where I apparently did not sunscreen far enough into the V-neck of my polo shirt. Still better than the horrific forehead burn I got a few years ago--I don't even think it peeled.

The Ensigns of Command

Though we only spent three days on actual vacation, while I took off ten days(including weekends and the holiday today), I wouldn't like you to think that all I did was sit on my butt in front of the computer and read Harry Potter hint guides. No, I promised myself that I would be productive.

So on Friday, I packaged up old computers and flourescent tubes and took them to the EcoCentre. Lord knows why I'd been keeping the old computers around, but they've been sitting in the basement in boxes for a while now. I kept wanting to find some facility by which I could donate them to Zambia or someplace where a 486 would be of use, but eventually I settled for taking them to a place where they would dispose safely of any toxic materials they contained. And it's free! Supported by a tax on new computers, which I would be happy to pay sometime soon if I could just justify buying the rest of the computer.

I decided to keep the DOS 5.0 book, but I threw out the Windows 3.0 disks.

I also scrubbed at least 75% of the kitchen floor. On my hands and knees, none of these wussy mops for me. Most of the time it was just scrubbing without seeing a visible effect, but some places, like under the dishwasher, I felt like I was really making a difference. Plus there was all that dirt in the water when I was done--where had that come from? All we need is another year or so of that kind of dedicated work, and we might have a clean house--except that, of course, the kitchen floor will have gotten dirty during that year.

Yeah, this is why we hate cleaning. Hate hate hate hate hate hate with a passion. But we also don't want to live in this house for the rest of our lives, necessarily, nor do we necessarily want to wait until we can afford to buy another house, move everything in, and then pay someone to clean/fix up/raze to the ground this house for us. Though that would certainly be easier, and I do occasionally buy lottery tickets out of sheer optimism.

Sometimes I wish I could just make a magic cleaning beam go through the house, like the beam that removes the baryons from the Enterprise in "Starship Mine". (I always wondered how well the ship worked after that, with no protons and neutrons...) It would remove all the dirt, dust, invertebrates, hair, mildew, etc., restore all the carpets to a like-new state, fix any broken toys, electronics, plastic, or anything that doesn't work as well as it should. For good measure it should remove all the weeds from the lawn, prune the lilac bush, etc. It'd be nice if it would automatically upgrade my computer, too, but let's not get greedy.