To satisfy your curiosity, this is what Sylvan’s been up to.
Wrestling with Aunt Jenny. She forgivingly took a few elbows in the ear.
Raking leaves:
Well, Mommy didn’t carve it, so I had to do something with it:
Being Sylvan
Posted by julie on Tuesday, 20 November 2007, 17:07“Can I be of any help?” (memories of John L. Jones, 1921-2007)
Posted by jonesey on Wednesday, 14 November 2007, 1:03A Birthday
Today would have been John L. Jones’s 86th birthday. He was my grandfather. He died on August 24.
Grandpa taught me many things. I took some of those things to heart, and I learned to do them so well that I don’t even know I’m doing them. Others, I learned to avoid. Still others, I continue to strive to incorporate into my life.
How to Take a Shower
Grandpa taught me how to take a shower. First, you turn on the water just long enough to get yourself wet. Then you turn off the water and soap up, cleaning yourself thoroughly. When you put shampoo in your hair, close your eyes gently — if you squeeze them shut tightly, the shampoo will sting your eyes. When you’re all soaped up, turn on the water just long enough to rinse yourself. Before you get out of the shower, wipe down the walls with a squeegee.
Only much later in life did I learn that this type of shower is called a “Navy shower.” You see, the way Grandpa explained it, this was not some unusual way to take a shower. It was the only way to take a shower. Clever marketing.
I tried it, Grandpa, I really did. I just can’t do it. Taking a shower like that is miserable. I have managed to figure out how to wash my hair without getting soap in my eyes, but that’s about it. I just can’t bring myself to spend less than ten minutes under that hot, relaxing, soothing stream of (did I mention hot?) water. I do think of you every single time I’m standing there, though. So if that’s immortality, grab it. It might be the best kind.
How to Tell a Story
Grandpa passed on to me, through my father, a propensity to tell the long version of any story. As far as we’re concerned, there is no short version. Or worse, we’re telling the short version. I think of him any time I stop myself from telling the extra long version that I really want to tell and preface the shortest possible version I can think of with “OK, here’s the short version.” The short version is always two or three times longer than it needs to be, and I’ve got a relatively mild case of it.
The root of the problem is that we want you to know all of the background information so that you can appreciate the story in all of its fullness. The symptom of the problem is that you appreciate the story less after we’ve made you sit through all of the preambles, prefaces, and prologues. We do it because we love you; does that make it any more tolerable?
The women in our family (Hi, Mom! Stop rolling your eyes, Julie!) have gotten used to it, in the same way that you get used to a sharp rock in your shoe when you’re carrying two heavy bags of groceries down a set of slippery stairs in the dark.
How to Handle Jehovah’s Witnesses
This is the audio from Grandpa’s memorial service: John L. Jones Memorial. It’s a downloadable (42 MB) MP3 file that you can play on your computer or iPod. (You might need to right-click or ctrl-click and choose Save Link As to save the file on your computer.) The story starts at 22:55.
Those of you who did not know Grandpa and might not want to hear the whole service should at least download and listen to his grandson (my cousin) Andrew Allport’s wonderful rendition of a Greg Brown song called Further In. How he made it all the way through, I will never know. It starts at 8:50 in the above file, or you can download the song by itself here. I’ve been playing it again and again. It always surprises Julie to see me cry.
Four Joneses (John, Tom, Chris, and Sylvan). November 2006.
Happy Birthday: 26 Months
Posted by julie on Monday, 12 November 2007, 22:06Dear Sylvan,
“Aunt Jenny has a shoe on her head,” you told me when you woke up. After her four-day visit, Aunt Jenny had already flown away on the plane, but your dreams kept her right here, hatted with a Croc or a Spiderman sneaker. You took quickly to your auntie, even though you hadn’t seen her since March, pushing me away as you asked for Aunt Jenny to take you upstairs for bedtime stories. The night before she left, we took Aunt Jenny out for a Eugene night on the town, to a benefit concert, an evening of music performed by students from the music school the concert supported. You were a fantastic audience member, setting up a baseball game between some knights from a chess set during the piano and flute pieces, then sitting, absolutely rapt, during the west African drumming and dancing.
You have started to tell rather outrageous stories, a chip right off the old Jones block. “What does the mixer truck do, Sylvan?” “It sprays mud in the air, Mom.” And your ridiculous response sets off your giggles; it’s good to appreciate your own stories, because you can never be assured of an amused audience.
A few weeks ago, you told me that the parentheses on my keyboard were “happy birthday moons.” In the language department, you’re very excited about rhymes these days: “Daddy-waddy,” substituting “Daisy” for “Maisy,” exchanging the words of songs for all sorts of nonsense words.
I figured out your chain of thought regarding woolly mammoths, by the way. When I point out sheep, you tell me that sheep are sheep, but little sheep, or lambs, are woolly “lamb-eths.” Given that sheep and lambs do have wool, I see how you’d connect woolly mammoths and lambs. Clever.
In a fantastic feat of deduction, you told us that fire trucks go and get the fire, put it in the truck, and take it back to the station. So that‘s how they put out the flames.
Although we had a cute, plush hand-me-down frog costume waiting in the wings, you kept asking to be either a butterfly or a dragon for Halloween. Craigslist 
came to the rescue again, offering a used dragon costume for $10. Without telling you, I picked it up before your school’s harvest party, and, when you awoke, grumpily, from your nap that day, I asked if you wanted to put on a dragon costume. Ah, as the grump turns. Daddy dressed you in the dragon costume, and you responded, “I’m a soft dragon.” You also picked a name: Smoky, or “Moky.” Appropriate, since not only are dragons sometimes smokin’, but your great-grandfather Julius’s nickname was Smoky.
I’m grateful that we made you a CD for your birthday — a CD packed with songs 
that we like by Bruce Springsteen, Bill Staines, and John Denver, and not the toddler wrangler Raffi — because you have entered the slightly obsessive-compulsive stage of music listening: “Kitters pace in wire (All God’s critters got a place in the choir) again!” Really? For the thirteenth time? Confession: I must have listened to my Born Free record non-stop for three or four weeks when I was a tot.
We sent you to school this morning in big boy underwear decorated with boats and planes and cars. Super-exciting! When you’re at home and naked — and, let’s be honest, your bare butt is quite a common sight around here — you regularly use the potty. Your teacher suggested that you might do well in underwear at school. I brought you home from school today with three wet pairs of big boy undies and a wet sock. You wouldn’t sit on the potty until I got there. When I asked if you’d like to sit, you said, “Yeah!” We sat for twenty minutes, you getting used to the little potty — and dipping your foot in the bowl. Voila, wet sock! Your Dad, who was made to be a parent, made up a very silly, very effective “peed in the potty” dance. I promised him I wouldn’t post a video on youtube.
Love,
Mom
Misuse of Tools
Posted by julie on Thursday, 8 November 2007, 17:35Standing on one’s roof, aiming a leafblower at the tree above, still bright with yellow leaves.
Grand Canyon for the Weekend
Posted by julie on Wednesday, 7 November 2007, 17:55
As Sylvan and I biked to the library this morning, I considered my appreciation and awe of this amazing time-travel thing we do when we fly in airplanes. Yesterday, at precisely the time I was biking to the library this morning in Eugene, 9:45 a.m., I had climbed 1500 feet toward the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I’d started at a campsite on Horseshoe Mesa, and, in another 1000 feet, I’d reach the rim.
Two and a half weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to take a Leave No Trace Master Educator Course in the Grand Canyon. Although already an LNT Master (not to be confused with my position as the Master of Science), I’d like to instruct these courses, which are typically five days long, plus a couple of contract days before and after for planning and wrapping up — an ideal length for a Mom. In order to instruct these courses, NOLS instructors typically take one in order to see how it’s run. A position opened up on this course a couple of weeks ago, and I got a chance to see the Grand Canyon.
The Grand Canyon surprised me with its narrow 
width. I’d envisioned a web of canyons, but the Grand Canyon is, of course, simply the Colorado River’s valley with some impressively eroded side channels running up to the rims. It’s only 12 miles across from the North to the South Rim. That doesn’t make it any less impressive when you come upon it and peer in, but it does make it a little more manageable. I felt like I could have easily made it down to the river and back in two days. I like how walking gives me that feeling of power, that I’d be able to walk down to the mythical Colorado River in just a day.
If you’ve hiked in the Grand Canyon, you’re familiar with trails in improbable locations, like hanging from the side of cliffs. The Park actually has a Trails Historian who, among other things, makes sure that trail maintenance is performed with materials and in a manner similar to those used during the trail’s construction — or at least during its maintenance in the past 200 years. Some Grand Canyon trails may have their origins thousands of years ago, when hunter-gathering cultures lived in the area that’s now Grand Canyon National Park.
We did some minor spelunking in the Cave of the Domes, in the Redwall limestone layer underneath Horseshoe Mesa. I took this photo looking toward the bright sunlight from within the cave’s lobby. Just minutes before, Air Force One had flown over; I don’t know any other aircraft with such an entourage.
The Grand Canyon’s human history extends back 10,000 years, and there’s plenty of evidence of the humans who have lived and worked there for the past 500 years. This cave dwelling is down in Cottonwood Canyon, on the west side of Horseshoe Mesa.
Horseshoe Mesa was a copper-mining hotbed in the late 1800s, at least until the realization was reached that getting ore, even remarkably high-grade ore, out of the Grand Canyon and then to any sort of population center was not cost-effective. Following are photographs of the remnants of that copper industry.
Stone cabin on Horseshoe Mesa, with Horseshoe Mesa Butte behind. The miner Pete Berry’s cabin?
Copper ore. Maybe azurite (blue) and malachite (green). What am I, a geologist?
Wheelbarrow left to stay until it rusts away, near Page Spring.
And, if you were wondering, yes, I could quite possibly have the best husband around, one who not only understands what makes his wife tick (getting away to hike) but works hard to keep her ticking merrily away. This was my last view of the boys when they dropped me off at the airport last week.
Only the strong show up for this one
Posted by jonesey on Sunday, 28 October 2007, 22:16I’ve been running mile repeats, and they paid off today. I ran the McDonald Forest 15K for the first time. It’s all up and down on trails and forest roads, with almost no flat stretches. I ran the first three and a half miles at 3/2 breathing (three steps on an exhale, two steps on the inhale; a poor man’s heart rate monitor) to keep myself at a reasonable pace. I thought I might be going out a little fast, but my breathing felt comfortable, and I was happy with the people around me (they didn’t look as if they should be a lot faster than me — that’s scary and used to happen a lot when I was younger and stupider), so I kept going.
At 3.5, the uphill started. We started at an a elevation of 495 feet, and we didn’t stop going up until we got to 1,300 feet at 5.64 miles. That’s an average 7% grade. The hill was brutal. I walked some sections of it, and I was going almost as fast as the runners ahead of me. A handful of people passed me. I passed one or two people back while I was running, but for the most part, the people who go out too fast and burn up didn’t show up for this race. All of the people around me, and some of the people behind me, were in as good or better shape than I was.
Nowhere was this contrast with a normal road race more clear than on the downhills. Just after the summit of the big hill, we dropped off a cliff, losing over 200 feet in a third of a mile. We regained fifty feet, which felt like more, through an ugly clearcut, and from there, it was almost all downhill for three miles to the finish. I flew on the downhills, but I hardly passed anyone. In a normal race, if I had run that fast, I would have had trouble dodging the roadkill, dozens of people who had blown up on the hill and were limping to the finish. Not today. I passed maybe three or four people on the downhill in mile 8 (dropping 500 feet in a mile, an average 10% grade), and two or three people on little uphill stretches in the last mile.
I almost ran out of gas on the last uphill, a nasty little 90-foot climb in 0.2 miles. I blew it mentally with about 100 feet to go, walking about three steps before the 22-year-old woman behind me yelled at me to keep going. I had just passed her after chasing her for an hour. She verbally abused me, with good reason, and I made it to the top of the hill. Somehow, I found a little bit more in my reserve and managed to zip down the hill to the finish, 0.3 miles and 40 feet of downhill (it felt like a bigger drop). That bit of course may be the most fun final quarter mile of any race course I have run on, with the possible exception of the Burke Lake Park 3-mile cross-country course from my Virginia high school days.
In case the narrative doesn’t describe the hills clearly enough, here are my splits for each mile. I have every reason to believe that these distances were measured accurately, and I believe that my effort was about evenly paced (i.e. on a flat course, these splits would have been within a 10-second range above and below 6:30 per mile).
Mi Split Overall 1 6:40 6:40 2 6:15 12:54 3 7:16 20:09 4 7:47 27:56 5 10:09 38:05 6 8:27 46:32 7 7:34 54:07 8 5:40 59:46 9 6:49 1:06:35 9.3 1:31 1:08:07
Clear Lake 2007
Posted by julie on Wednesday, 24 October 2007, 21:5010/23: I’m currently sitting on the porch, too hot in jeans and a T-shirt, wondering why it took me until 3:30 to get myself out here. The sky is that autumn blue that appears more vivid as a backdrop for fiery maple and sweetgum leaves. We Eugeneans have been offered a reprieve from the early winter weather that has poured 4.5 inches of rain on us this month, more than double our normal October rainfall (it also brought early snow to the mountain passes, snow that quickly melted).
Between the rains, the weekend before last gave us some sunny, warm weather that we used to get up to the hills, heading back to Clear Lake for our new autumn pilgrimage to see fall colors. Next year, we’ll go up a couple of weeks earlier; while still beautiful, the vine maples were past their scarlet prime by October 14th.
10/24: Raining again. That’s because Boston’s biggest Eugene fan is feeling empathy for his Red Sox, who are currently kicking Rocky butt in the rain at Fenway.
But Clear Lake:
We started our Clear Lake hike at the Clear Lake Resort near the highway, since the Coldwater Cove Campground was closed for construction. Coldwater Cove had been our camping destination for the night, but everyone we’d invited to camp with us had bailed out, so the fact that the campground was closed was surprising but not distressing. The 5.5 mile hike around the lake is flat and easy, and Chris started out with Sylvan in the backpack. By the time we reached Coldwater Cove, Sylvan needed to hike, and he especially needed to watch the construction dumptruck have its tire changed and the backhoe dump gravel near the new potty.
The east side of the lake, where the campground is located, is especially lovely with vine maples and lava, and, when you start your hike after lunchtime, the east side is also warm with afternoon sun.
Sylvan decided he needed to hike for the next four hours, into the darkness. “I’m a good hiker.” Yes, that’s true. The trail on the lake’s east side winds through a lava flow. Lava is sharp and scary when your 2-year-old is barreling toward it. Sylvan was game, though, which was alternately patience-trying and nerve-wracking but always encouraging. How’s he going to learn to love hiking if we don’t let him hike, after all?
At the Great Springs, Sylvan was excited about putting his feet in the water — until he found that the water was 38 degrees Fahrenheit! Then he displayed his strength by arching his back and holding his legs up behind him, like a skydiver, as Chris lowered him to the water.
M R ducks. But what kind of ducks? Daddy didn’t know, so Sylvan took a stab. Ducks. They go “kack, kack.”
Walking walking wandering around trees turning around to walk the other way on the trail dog it says woof woof walking running mushroom two dogs running Mommy! ducks I want binoculars! No! walking squirrel galloping.
And it got darker. “Julie, did you bring a headlamp?” Did I bring a headlamp? Are we hiking? Of course I brought a headlamp.
And we shamelessly bribed Sylvan forward with Fig Newmans. He wore himself out enough with about a quarter of a mile to go that he allowed me to carry him on my shoulders.
We ate leftover pizza back at the Clear Lake Resort’s inappropriately-named-for-us “Day Use” area and packed up for home. I had remembered S’mores fixin’s for the first time in my life, but we weren’t going to camp, so, at 9 p.m., I made a fire in the woodstove back home and toasted some marshmallows.
My most vivid memory from Baird and Sara’s wedding
Posted by jonesey on Friday, 19 October 2007, 19:26Baird and Sara got married five years ago today. Here’s my favorite story from their wedding.
We were eating lobster. I sat at a table that was about half lobster rookies. Growing up with frugal parents, I hadn’t eaten lobster very often, but I did grow up in Boston, so my family probably ate it about once a year. It was a Big Deal, and a Major Treat. We each, four of us, got our own lobster.
In any event, I had learned how to eat lobster. I had loads of fun teaching the newbies how to eat this truly strange quasi-insect of a food.
But that’s not my favorite part of the story. After I had eaten my lobster, I paid a visit to Sara, on whom I had developed a bit of a crush. I’m a sucker for a bride. Something about the glow, and the hormones, probably. Anyway, that’s embarrassing, and it’s not the good part of the story. I sat down next to her and made some small talk, asking her if she had enjoyed the lobster.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “This is my third.”
“What, you mean ever? Your third lobster ever?” I figured Sara for someone with vast lobster-eating experience. How could I have been wrong about this? I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.
“No, tonight. My third lobster tonight.”
My brain did a back flip. Wait, what? I had never considered the possibility that someone could, at a single sitting, consume more than one lobster. I mean, sure, John D. Rockefeller maybe, or Louis XIV, or some Roman reclining on a couch just back from a little session with a feather, but not a regular person. Not Sara.
She ate three lobsters.
My world would never be the same.
I went back to my table after a quick stop at the buffet, and I didn’t look up until number two was gone.
Rooting for the Other Team
Posted by julie on Sunday, 14 October 2007, 22:17
No, I won’t say anything about this. I’m talking about Snake vs. Julie. I am not particularly wary of snakes — no more than anyone who’s heard a rattle and jumped a little, hoping the snake isn’t directly underfoot. I like snakes. Really. This guy, after we almost stepped on him as we walked down a closed road, reacted slowly, still thawing after a cold night, allowing me to take out the camera and get down to his level. Then, as I peered through the screen, he was, all of a sudden, MUCH closer and covering distance quickly. This photo, I have to admit, was taken as I scrambled to stand up and not be eaten by the eight-foot-long python:
It is clear to me that Chris was actually saying, “Faster, Snakie!” as this photo was taken.
View From My Window*
Posted by julie on Sunday, 14 October 2007, 20:49On Wednesday, I stepped out of class to sunny skies and a street fair with yummy-smelling pahd thai, so I headed to an indoor ATM and came back outside. It was pouring, so I bailed on the tasty food and went to pick up Sylvan, grateful that I’d brought full raingear. As Sylvan and I biked home, the sun emerged, blinding me with the glare off the street. I really enjoy these autumn and spring days, fickle with their weather. I figured the rest of the day would shape up in similar fashion, so, after carrying my already-sleeping child up to bed, I put the camera in my pocket to show you what 10 October 2007 looked like in Eugene.
1:18 p.m., looking west from bedroom window
1:19 p.m., looking south from bedroom window, through screen. This is the last of the blue sky I encountered on my ride home.
1:27 p.m., looking south from office window
4:26 p.m., looking west from front porch
* With credit to Andrew Sullivan, of The Atlantic, who publishes “The View From Your Window” on his blog, The Daily Dish