A Little Night Music

Car camping is about much more than making Skyline Cheese Coneys over an open fire (because yes, we totally did that!).

It's about dark nights, starry skies, and rushing waters.


It's about young friendships, good beer, and two interesting Dutch fellows.

It's about the glow of the fire, the way the night air chill smells on your skin and in your hair, the feel of the sleeping bag wrapped snugly around your feet...

And the laughter that roars more poignantly than the swollen guffaw of the Pope Agie.

Wildflower Season

Not only is it finally warm enough to go camping, but it's also finally warm enough for wild flowers! This is always one of the best seasons in the mountains of the West, and like the Aspen season in the fall, it only lasts for a couple of days. Take a sick day and you might miss it!








Of course, it might be worth it to take a sick day to get out into the Winds and NOT miss it!

First Day of Car Camping for the Year!

Mid- to late June, and it's finally warm/dry enough to go camping in Wyoming. Not all of Wyoming; I hear that Jackson is still pretty winterish. But here, a nice, smooth 79 is all it takes to bring Wyomingites out in droves.

We celebrate with a mini-keg of Pilsner, courtesy of Ted the Brewmaster, and by burning stuff, lots of stuff. And we camp close enough to the river so that the stuff we burn is not the National Forest. We might drown in a flash flood, but we won't burn down Lander.

In our Backyard

Our yard doesn't look half bad, considering we are totally inept at yard work. Oh, and the grass on the other side of the ditch has grown out of its awkward stage and now looks windswept, wild, and quite beautiful.

Proof that Velociraptors Walk Among Us!

I would never have suspected that a place as beautiful as the Snake River Valley:


...would be home velociraptors!!!

Snowmelt! Part 2

See, THIS is what happens when all that pretty snow melts...

All Chaos ensues!!!!

This is an interpretive sign explaining that this channel is an overflow channel of the Popo Agie River (the rest travels underground for two miles in what is known as The Sinks), and it is usually BONE DRY. True Story.

Snowmelt! Part 1

See all this snow? It's now all melting and flowing down the streets of Lander. Personally, I think it feels homey.

Obey Giant

The Contemporary Art Museum in Cincinnati is currently displaying the sardonic yet oddly fanciful artwork of Shepard Fairey through his exhibit called "Supply and Demand" (runs now through August 22, 2010!). Originally dabbling in sort of neo-futuristic stickers featuring a warped photo of Andre the Giant with the word "Obey" on them, Fairey is perhaps now best known for his portrait of President Obama (the Hope poster, which, despite any copyright infringement issues, can be seen here), which to this date is the only poster he has ever created in support of any political candidate.

Other works of art feature images of Muslim women, children with guns, oil images, money caricatures, anything to inspire some kind of emotional attachment, abhorrence or generally any reaction from from the viewer. Interestingly, he doesn't seek to animate any particular reception, as long as you feel something or get your little neurons firing. That's really the point of the Obey Giant, to get us to think before we Obey, or to not Obey.

His stickers and artwork appear everywhere: in cities, on buses, the sides of buildings, on telephone poles. Some people are flustered because they have no idea what the art means; other people smile smugly because they think they know. Some have been painted over as offensive, some as ugly and unattractive, some as graffiti. Some have been left as a symbol of our times. His stickers and murals are considered a kind of underground cult demonstration against (or for?) some untouchable, ambiguous notion of human nature.

My husband Jonmikel's own interpretation of one of Fairey's works

For more Shepard Fairey, visit his Web site here: http://obeygiant.com/