Ozark Adventure; part II

After spending the night in the Norman Bates Motel version of RV parks, we hit the road early in the morning, to go back to where good honest, middle-middle class people park their shiny pick-ups and RV’s. We met the same park ranger as we had seen the night before there, a Mrs. M. Johnson, and asked her the best way to get set up with a good spot. She let us know that she was very sympathetic towards us and if we would just come back at 12:30, she would make a special effort on our behalf, but there was simply nothing to be done until after 12:00, 12:30 being even better.
We killed a few hours by me carrying everyone though the poison ivy, (I’m not allergic, at least yet –more on this later? -I hope not), fording the beautiful Jack Fork River several times, and the kids lugging many pounds of precious, beautiful rocks around. (I told them they could fill up the back of the pick-up with rocks for all I cared, but I wasn’t gonna tote them around, since I was already hauling all the water and Stuart on my back) Then we showed back up at 12:30 or a few minutes before to talk to the very helpful Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson, but couldn’t find a ranger anywhere.
We drove around every campsite for about an hour, then just parked the stupid truck in a spot marked “reserved”, and went swimming. I came back and unhooked, and went ranger-cruising. Luckily, I bumped into one pretty soon, and asked for Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson. He looked at me like I was stupid and said “She gets off at noon, hasn’t worked a Sunday afternoon for the last 8 years. Lucky gal, cause she gets to go to all them there horseshoe tournaments instead of me.” So much for sympathetic park rangers, but this guy was helpful enough, if a little bitter at Mrs. Ranger M. Johnson for hogging all the horseshoe tournaments, and before we knew it, we were set up and had the grill going.

Our swimming hole was a really sweet spot, complete with a little cliff to jump off of. We had a good time there, except just as I noticed that I only had 3 kids within 100 yards of me, I looked around and saw Grace waaaay downstream and as I yelled at her to come back I noticed her braids disappeared, then again. Then she started screaming/gurgling… For the sake of over-writing long boring blogs, tune in next time!

The Great Foster Ozark Adventure

We loaded the camper Thursday night, we loaded the camper Friday night, and we loaded the camper Saturday morning. Finally, at about 8:00 am, we loaded us up in the pickup and hit the road. As we wound our way towards Missouri, I had a bit of revelation. I have long noticed that many Missourians dislike Kansans, and now I think I know why; the closer to Missouri you get, the more the Kansas people act like Missourians. The most notable was in Fort Scott, where just a cursory drive through the town (only a few minutes from Missouri) revealed such interesting business characters as “Judy’s Iron and Plumbing”, “The Wolf’s Den Tanning Salon” (in a dilapidated old block building with no paint and a rusty tin roof), and even one place with a pig on the roof! No wonder Missourians don’t like Kansans, they think we look just like them! What’s to like? (My wife’s family excluded, of course…)
It took us about 10 hours to get to the Alley Springs Campground, only to find that the campsite we reserved lacked about 10 feet enough to accommodate the length of our camper. By this time it is pushing 7:30, but we thought we found the last spot available (without electricity, but at this point, who cares?), so we unhooked the fifth-wheel, and Brynn started supper. As some of you already know, if 7:30 rolls around and I haven’t eaten anything, usually I’m feeling pretty glum, or perhaps irritable is a closer description.
Anyway, to add insult to insult, after unhooking and getting camp started, I realize that there are 2 posts with the same number on them, and the one further from the road shows that someone has already reserved the spot we are in… So… I load back up, hook back up, and drive to the seediest RV park in the western hemisphere, I’m sure. The guy behind the counter could hardly be bothered to put down his PS3 game controller to look up at me, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to take the smoke out of his mouth, nor to put on a shirt. Oddly enough, their prices were higher than the much nicer, much cleaner state park, the only reason I can think of is that the crowd there was willing to pay a higher price in order to not have state park officials looking over their shoulders all the time.
But all in all, we had an uneventful evening; I finally got my supper, and the kids learned all about bikers and marijuana. Oh, and did I mention the RV park apparently featured a BAND!!! Lucky for us, we were the closest camper to the “stage”, so we didn’t even need to leave the trailer to listen to the old 70’s songs howled out by some brave soul determined to please his crowd of about 15 people, even though it was fairly obvious that he should have been lying down and sleeping long ago. Maybe tomorrow will bring better even better luck.

Garden Lore

So in preparation of the Great Foster Ozark Adventure, Wifey suggests that “we” (meaning yours truly) do some stuff in the garden before we leave, like pull up onions, beets, turnips, and dig potatoes. Since I have put off this task until the temps reached triple digits, I am not looking forward to doing it much, but if there is one thing I can do well, it is doing things I don’t want to do, anyway. So I grab my ‘tator fork, my four children, and my innocent bystander sister-in-law, whose only crime was to not having a pressing project at the very moment that this was going to take place.
For some reason, things weren’t that great this year, production wise. Out of close to 100 potato plants, we only harvested about 10 gallons, though it felt like 100 gallons when digging them out of clay dirt and it is 100 degrees. The rest of it did just “OK” this year as well. It comes as some small consolation that I do have one thing that never fails to grow, particularly in the garden when my children and I are working together. My stories!
I don’t know why I do it, its all just baloney to my older kids and it just confuses my younger kids, none of it makes any sense even to me. My sister-in-law thinks I’m demented and that my kids will grow up very messed up, not knowing who to trust, or when, but I’ve seen first hand that they figure out fairly quick when dad is feeding fibs. Like when we kept digging up Toads in the garden, they didn’t believe me that there is a specific Toad that migrates yearly from Canada, one hop at a time, comes and digs in freshly tilled gardens and then out of that buried toad comes a tuber plant… why else would that plant be called a “potatoad”? Seems like good logic to me. I even had my mother-in-law going for a bit later when I went inside about the migratory toad bit.
Other fibs include how we got our pond; a “herd” of geese were swimming up north and it got so cold so fast that the pond they were in froze around their bottoms. It scared them, and they started flapping and just took the whole pond south with them, until they got tired enough they had to land, and that was right on our place.- lucky us!
One time while at the river, I told them about the strange and mysterious “Goodyear” fish, that is round, black and has scales that look like treads in order lure small children into thinking that it actually an old tire so that it can tackle them and drag them into deeper water to eat them.
I do admit surprise, however, at the occasional tall tale that I can actually pull off. Take the other day when I was asked how the GPS worked; I carefully explained how I captured a small British woman (hence the accent) and put her in a box just under the hood of the pick-up, with just enough holes to see the road ahead with binoculars. Oddly enough this was pretty much absorbed and thought of as generally a good idea. I’m not really sure how I feel about that, but on my old truck I had a “self destruct button” that I was only to use when I knew that I was going to be caught by bad guys and had information that I couldn’t let them have. The only disbelief expressed by my girls at this point was that it was right there in the dash, towards the passenger side, and down low so it could very easily could be accidentally pushed, and thereby blown to bits. “Well,” says I “I never said it was a total picnic having a world-famous yet secret international spy for a dad.” It’s true; it isn’t a total picnic, neither is having a pathological liar for a dad, though.

Stuart's new love

Here is a photo of my little boy, Stu. While I have always encouraged my children to try all kinds of food, especially spicy foods, (since it is almost exclusively our western European based culture that refuses to eat spicy foods, thereby negating 3/4 of the world's excellent food that is to be sampled), I never expected to have one naturally born to it. After much prompting and cajoling, my daughters have finally discovered that they enjoy a small dip of the chip into the "medium" salsa. Stu, however, figured it out before the age of two.

Several nights ago, we had "chips and cheese" as a snack, so the girls wanted a bowl full of above mentioned salsa to go with it. Stu loved it so much that when he ran out of chips, he found that a spoon worked just as well or even better than chips. He ate most of the entire bowl of "medium" salsa with a spoon.

Then the other night I noticed him with green fingers, green mouth, and watery eyes. I asked him what he had been doing, and he showed me a small handful of wet peanuts, and only then did I realize he had been into my stash of Wasabi covered peanuts, just sucking the Wasabi off, then spitting out the peanut. For those of you who know what Wasabi is (Asian mustard/horseradishy/hot sauce), you'll know that it isn't normal fodder for toddlers.

So tonight we all went to Carlos O'Kelly's for supper (kids get "Kid's Meals "for $0.99 on Tuesdays!) and Stu was TEARING UP the salsa! The picture above is his most oft found expression, as it seemed his tongue was hanging out of his mouth for most of the evening, presumably to cool it off. As anybody worth his Salsa knows, if its worth eating, it worth spicing it up!

spring of '09

So here's a little of what's been happening around the Foster Farm-let lately. Because I am such a self-less, loving husband, I have decided to split my time between working in the basement finishing a winter project (started too late to finish in the winter) and normal springtime outside stuff, even though every fiber of my being cries out to go outside and plant, build, and... whatever, just be somewhere besides the basement when its nice outside. (As a side note, this basement project started out as a voluntary surprise thing for my wife, I was going to finish ONE WALL(!), and now I have finished 5, built a big closest, and built copious amounts of shelving in that closet, moved all of our junk into it from old storage space, (& much of Wife's sisters' stuff) and now am firmly entrenched in building a whole set of cabinets to cover one of the walls I just finished.

During the winter, I often get emails from Gurneys, (who guarantee their trees for "as long as you garden", a very foolish warranty to offer to people with a brown thumb like me; but they have been as good as their word on it so far) offering trees for half off, free shipping etc, all of which is fine, except I have exemplified a total lack of self control when it comes to purchasing fruit trees online. Anyway, I got 11 of them delivered all at once, and had a heck of a time getting them all in the ground soon enough. I've still about 5 yet coming, but don't know when; they just show up whenever. So far, since I have moved here 3+ years ago we have planted about 150+ trees and/or shrubs. Who knew that Kansas has a department of forestry where you can also get great deals on trees?

Recently, I also had the great joy of helping Andrew Hawkinson, (friend and Friendly Neighborhood Traveling Used Forklift Tire Salesman) load up a used forklift tire upon his Mobile Used Forklift Tire Sales Unit. This seems an appropriate place for a picture:

My guess is he just drives around to job-sites and asks "hey buddy, I got a sweet deal on this here Forklift Tire. And I'll give you an even sweeter deal if you let me use your forklift to get it off of my van so that I don't have to pick it up again!" Go, Andrew, go! Times are hard, anything to make a buck, buddy!

Also from Isaiah this weekend; apparently at some point last week the kids and Mama went to the Wichita zoo, because he was showing how big these animals were by stretching out his pudgy little arms as wide as they could go, saying ..."they were even bigger than this, daddy! They were HUMONGO!!" So at this point I wasn't really sure what he was talking about, I asked him what animal it was again: "The turd-asauras, Daddy!" This was met with much tittering from his older sisters, and not a few snickers from myself, so, either he meant the tortoises, or the zoo got a new kind of reptile that I am unfamiliar with.

And lastly, the big new thing around here is the new furniture arrangement in the living room. Furniture rearrangement is something that happens infrequently in our house, by some standards anyway; but still more often than I care for and less often than everyone else cares for. But as this was done after a carpet cleaning where all furniture was moved anyway, and I wasn't involved at all in the decision process, and it was complete when I came home; so I guess its OK. The girls noted it looked quite a lot like royal throne room and instantly granted me "Kingship". The duties of king-ship weighed heavily upon me, mostly as (oddly enough) I spent a great deal of time being told to get on my knees for His Majesty's Royal Crown Fitting. You will note His Majesty's Royal Crown on the red pillow in his throne in picture. You will also notice His Majesty's Royal Socks, His Majesty's Royal Sneaker, and maybe even His Majesty's New Royal Blackberry. As an aside, being in His Majesty's Royal court apparently requires much curtsying, giggling, and thumping of each other and younger brothers for not behaving well in front of His Majesty. Still, it is fun to wear the paper crown, and to be called Sire, and be served tea and newspaper while my wife wearily toils away at supper, or whatever she does in the servant quarters of my castle. Its good to be the king!

The abstract concept of time

Its hard to imagine that Isaiah's fat four year old head could actually get stuck in between the front door and the storm door, but apparently it happened. After walking through the blistering cold all the way to Gran and Grampa's house, only to find that they weren't there, he turned around and came home. I am unsure of all the details, because I was working downstairs in the basement and therefore oblivious to all that happened upstairs. The first I heard of it was after Gracie went upstairs for something, then came back downstairs and told me that when she went upstairs, she could hear Isaiah knocking and yelling. She freed him and he was most grateful, telling her that the wind blew the storm door shut before he got the front door open.
The funny part, though, was when he came downstairs - (he was quite unaffected, if still a little blue from the cold) I asked him if he was there for very long. His response: "I didn't really look at the clock; I cant tell time anyway."

Dan, Davey, and Johnny.

In our house, music is a big part of our life. We turn music on when we go to sleep, when we wake up, when we clean up, and when we want to have fun. So we sleep, wake, clean, eat, and dance just for fun's sake to music. We listen to nearly anything that we consider well done, be it classical, classic country, rap or rock, secular or Christian; we like music for music's sake, it doesn't even have to make good sense, we just like to have fun. One recurrent theme in the music in our home, however, is "redemption". For this reason, we hear a lot of Johnny Cash in our musical lives. If you don't know, Mr. Cash led a roller coaster life of sex, drugs, and rock & roll (and country). He eventually found his Lord and Savior, and loved to tell and sing about it in his music in his later years. On one of his last albums that he produced before he died is a specific song that my wife has commented on that reminds her of me, and apparently has done this in front of my Gracie. Tonight she asked me why Momma said that.


Instead of my usual tactic of avoidance of the subject of my "crazy days" (as J. R. Cash puts it), I decided to open up with her some and tell her that years ago I didn't know the Lord and that I was one crazy dude. Her response? "I BET SO!, WITHOUT A WIFE TO CONTROL YOU!!!" I of course informed her that without the Lord controlling my life first, that all of Mamma's efforts would be in vain anyway, even if they weren't already. She was still curious, so we just had a little impromptu bible study and I turned to Psalm 34 and read to her (don't really know why, except it had been on my mind) the first 8 verses, and explained how the Lord responds to people who cry out to Him, and fall before him. And I told them (all of them by this time, as you cant sit on the floor without being mobbed by all in my house) that I had decided to "taste" (see vs 8) and I decided that the Lord was good, and encouraged them to take refuge in the Lord when struggling with things they were sure that were impossible to do on their own. "Taste" I said, "and see that the Lord is good."


For I have tasted; and if you don't already know, the Lord is good. And let us exalt His name together. If you seek the Lord he will answer you; you will never be ashamed.

And interestingly, I noticed only now in verse 11 it states "Come you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord".


Has my prayer not continually been that I could teach my children right from wrong, that I could guide them to fear of our Lord? I do pray that this psalm, perhaps written to "Davey's" own children originally, would have an impact on my own.