I’m just now getting around to looking at the pictures from the Arizona trip last month. Lots of flowers, bugs, birds, and lizards.

Palo Verde

Sacred Datura

Saguaro

Male Broad-billed hummingbird (see also the in flight picture from a couple years ago)

Ornate Tree Lizard

It’s pedalpalooza and there are dozens of rides and gatherings every day. We haven’t been on a bike with Ronin yet, but I finally ordered a kid carrier and helmet for her so we should be on the road by the end of the week. She’s still pretty small so we decided to start with the ibert and move on to a trailer or maybe an extracycle when she gets too big for it.

Anyway not having a way to transport Ronin, we drove to Cirque du Cycling, which is pretty lame I know. We watched the parade, met with friends, juggled a little, and left when Ronin started to get grumpy.

1 candle power



This trike is pedaled with a running motion. A few other bikes in the parade were built by the same person including the wolf bike below.






Wolf Bike.



There are lots of home built tall bikes in this town.






Whenever bikers gather in Portland on a sunny day you can bet it won’t be long before a bunch of naked riders show up.



Aphex Twin?



The parade was followed by Criterium races. We watched the warm up laps but had to leave before the start because Ronin just couldn’t take it anymore. I liked watching this guy on the rollers. Going full speed on that looks pretty scary.

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Ronin has her own room now that we are living in an actual house. Right now she doesn’t play too much in it and so it retains a fresh uncluttered feel. This will surely change soon and forever.

We bought a cheap crib off Craigslist and spent about a thousand hours sanding and painting it a bunch of colors. It was a royal pain in the ass and I do not recommend it to anyone. But I think it turned out cute. The raindrop mobile I also made.

I’ve since replaced the window curtain with a heavy Guatamalan textile, red with embroidered animals all over it. It helps keep her room dark in the mornings when it gets light at 5-freaking-AM. The butterfly ball is just one of those IKEA paper lanterns with 3-D see-through butterfly stickers all over it. The photos on the wall are of Joshua as a baby and my dad in his 20s. (We also have a photo of Grandpa Jeff over by the door.) The “table” is made from a large box containing a desktop computer we likely will never use again ever (not bitter), which I couldn’t find a space for; I covered it with a Mexican textile and put a basket of toys on top of it. The large thing to the left of the table is a giant book of baby animals. Ronin is more than a little obsessed with it.

Opposite the crib are her dressers (IKEA; painted using the same paint as the crib) with wooden toys from Mexico that she miraculously has managed to not break (and she does play with them) and a Subcomandante Marcos doll from Chiapas. The wooden machine to the right of the dressers is a rolling ball toy made for Ronin by our friend Kerstin. On the wall are real and painted butterflies, and a child’s huipil from Guatamala hand embroidered with lions.

More butterflies and a framed Ibis card.

Select a bowl from the stack of bowls on the shelf. Jostle all bowls violently around so that they make an ear-splitting racket; do this for at least two minutes. Put Nigel in a bowl.

Put the bowl with Nigel on the floor. Get the blue pie plate and put it on the floor too. Dog is already in the pot so we can ignore him for now.

Let’s put Nigel in the blue bowl. Nigel pie!

Reserve bowl for later use.

Give Nigel a turn or two in the blue bowl. You may want to put him back in the other bowl and then into the blue bowl a number of times.

[This is the tricky part requiring much skill and physical exertion. I made a video so you can study Ronin’s technique to reproduce at home. Don’t expect to get it right the first time, it takes hours of practice and hundreds upon thousands of repetitions.]

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Dog is done in the pot for now. Let’s get some more ingredients!

Better yet, let’s try the pot out ourselves! You might get stuck in the pot unless you are a little baby. If this happens, scream at the top of your lungs even if the mama is standing RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU just waiting for something to go wrong so she can save you.

That was fun. Let’s get back to cooking.

Here is the baby pan. Let’s put Nigel in it! Smash him in there.

Okay we’re done with Nigel in the pan; put Nigel in the blue bowl now. Put wooden vegetables and corks in the pan. Nice and mix, nice and mix…

When sauteed to perfection, dump them out onto the floor.

Put Dog back in the pot and carefully arrange the wooden vegetables, a champagne cork, and a bottle of travel shampoo.

All done! Time to go to the park!

INGREDIENTS:
1 polar bear puppet (Nigel)
1 dog puppet (Dog)
5 wooden vegetables and fruits
1-2 corks (to taste)
1 bottle travel shampoo

YOU WILL NEED: 1 large soup pot, 1 wee saute pan, 1 mixing bowl, 1 pie plate, and something with which to mix/flail.