explores

So it snowed last weekend, apparently. I don't know I was out of town on a date with my husband!!! Yeah, you heard that right. I have zero pictures of us watching five plays of the Humana Fest at the Actor's Theater of Louisville, nor any photos of us eating several amazing meals (tacos, duck cracklings and grits - wait, what is crackling? might just be too late to find out - and really late night sushi), so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was just what we needed. And while we were gone it snowed.

We have had spring, though, so just to prove it...my dad and his wife were here during a couple of gorgeous spring days, and we headed to Ash Cave in the Hocking Hills.

Whenever I see something of this magnitude, I just imagine being the first people here, following the slowly meandering, totally unassuming creek, when suddenly BAM it becomes a huge drop of a waterfall and there is this cave big enough for a small village before you. It was beautiful.

Rock Pigeons. In the rocks.

The fire tower, on the path to Cedar Falls.

We took the path above the cave, towards Cedar Falls, and immediately the crowd thinned and the woods were peaceful.

the family photo - look, everyone is smiling!

Eliza delighted in snapping these photos of me and my dad. We don't have many recent ones, so I'm happy to have them, but what exactly was going on? It looks like we're in a musical. A very funny musical. I love them.

I'm slowly working my way backwards through the spring, playing some catch-up, so a week before this visit we went up to Columbus with some friends.  When we moved here, it had been a long time since I'd not lived in a city-city, and I panicked a little bit, wondering what kind of homeschool resources we'd find, how we could be narrowing our options just as the girls were getting old enough to do things in the community (I'm no longer so worried), and I consoled myself thinking that Columbus was just a hop, skip and a jump away, we'd just zip up there all the time. We've hardly gone at all, so when our friends discovered we'd never been to COSI, the science museum, they scooped us up in their van and we went.

Our gaggle

The favorite activity: the wind tunnel

What thirteen-year-old doesn't love the jukebox?

YESSSSSSS! Such power. And physics.

Dan picked us up at the end of the day - after the girls made me volunteer for the electricity floor show, the one where they make your hair stand straight up and then send a small shock through a chain of linked hands? - and we had Ethiopian food, which is a huge treat. He was headed out of town for a conference, so the next morning we drove home, stopping at Clear Creek Metro Park, which was huge and beautiful and we'd somehow never been there before.

Can you spy the gnome?

I might have squealed when I spotted these plants. I've known that skunk cabbage grows here, but I've never managed to find it early in the spring, and here it was next to Ramona Lake, waiting for me. I haven't seen it since we lived in the Pacific Northwest, and they are just so cool looking.

This seems long ago in the early days of spring; as I write this, the sun is coming in the window, reminding me that the day has heated up to the predicted 80 degrees and early spring is quickly fading into the past.