Abby helped Daddy make some beef and veggie stew on Thursday. She’s a good little sous chef, but her fingers often stray a little too close to the cutting board. Don’t worry, she made it through with all her digits intact.
Mama let her play with the lipstick on Saturday.
Copperhead Falls seen from the top.
This past weekend found me making yet another journey to our summer home in Northwest Arkansas to deal with the aftermath of the Epic Ice Storm of 2009. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do any manual labor this time. I just paid a man I hired over the over phone to climb up in our once magnificent shade trees and cut down the hanging limbs. I realize hiring people over the phone to perform work the results of which you won’t see for a week is fraught with hazard but it worked out well this time.
On my way back to Little Rock, I detoured over to the Buffalo River to hike Indian Creek and see Copperhead Falls and Tunnel Cave Falls. The hike is billed as a dangerous one, but I found it less hazardous than the hike to the slot canyon on Shop Creek I took a few weeks ago. Indian Creek is actually the next drainage over from Shop Creek. An ambitious hiker could do both in one day if he started early enough.
Abby stood with a stiff, but warm, wind flapping her dress and said “It’s springy out here.” We took her tricycle to Two Rivers Park and toured some of the walking trail. On the way back she noticed a field with scattered jonquils/daffodils and made a beeline for them. Even though I’ve showed her a better way, she has been picking the yellow flowers all over Little Rock by grabbing just below the blooms. She comes up with very short stems that make it impossible to put them in a vase or glass or something.
Then she noticed a small yellow butterfly and took off after it. She didn’t catch it, but she had a good time running through the grass. I was running around too, but she didn’t get a picture of me.
Gina’s birthday was on Saturday. (She’s doing pretty well for only being 25.) Because we went out of town for the weekend, we didn’t get to do the cake thing. And Abby loves the cake thing. On Monday, Abby and I went out and got one of those half-size birthday cakes and a bunch of candles. Abby helped Gina blow them out.
After the candles were out, Abby went to town on the cake. Well, she went to town on the icing. A little while later she said her tummy hurt and she didn’t want anymore cake.
We wrapped our adventures in Natchez by dining at the Castle restaurant on the grounds of Dunleith. For some reason we were expecting an exceptional dining experience, but all we got was average for a nice restaurant. We got off to a bad start when the waitress informed us the kitchen was out of filet mignon, which is both Gina’s and my go-to dish when we want to put on the fancy.
We woke up Saturday to cool temperatures, something we hadn’t expected just two days ago when the forecast called for springlike weather in Natchez. The forecast had taken a turn for the cold by the time we left Friday evening, so we packed coats, scarves and long underwear. I’m a hater of the cold, but I decided not to bitch about it like I normally would. This trip is for Gina’s 40th birthday and I didn’t want to ruin things like I normally would.
After a pretty long drive through deepest darkest Arkansas and Louisiana, we arrived at Dunleith, our antebellum home in Natchez, Miss., for the next 36 hours.
OK, I changed up the old Post Irony a bit. Well, actually, all I did was make it wider. It’ll display the horizontal photos larger, and hopefully it’ll give me some options in displaying the vertical photos. I shoot a lot of verticals and they always look weird on the blog to me. We’ll see how it goes.
Unfortunately, the changes don’t apply retroactively to all the other posts. I’d have to go back and upload the photos all over again to make them fit the wider format. It bugs the crap out of me.
The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.
Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.
I got a fancy new tripod and ball head a couple weeks ago and I haven’t really gotten to break it in. I’ve been using an el cheapo model from Wal-Mart for a long time, but I got sucked into the thinking that a decent tripod is worth the big bucks. So I went all out (for me anyway) and got a carbon fiber number from Manfrotto. I paid a little extra to get the carbon because it’s lighter and I do a lot of hiking with my camera. I did get to try it out on a hike and though it’s bigger and more stable than my old junky tripod, it’s about the same weight. The shots of the waterfall I got on that hike weren’t even good enough to put on the blog. The tripod was an excellent buy. It does make a difference. I also was never convinced that a ball head would be that much better than the pan head you get with the cheap ‘pods. I was wrong. It makes a world of difference in the ease-of-use department.
