Freefalling into Fifty, Because If You Don't Nearly Vomit On Your Birthday Then Did You Even Have One?

So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:

1. I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
2. The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass. 

But I did not actually vomit!

But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.

Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!

The big kid has always been my fellow adventurer--remember the time we strapped ourselves to cables and walked around on top of the CN Tower?--and given a choice among all the people on the planet, she's exactly who I'd want to throw myself out of a plane with.

I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!

MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!

It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--

Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look!

--and the other!

You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off! 

My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--

--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:

I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:

My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!

Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?

Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.

That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!

Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets.

And here we go!

I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!

The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?

Hahahahaha... nope!

Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then!

This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:

And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:

All better!

So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.

It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:

She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:

The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!

The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up!

I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol. 

Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.

A whole bunch of spins.

If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.

So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.

Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!

My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.

Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!

Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:

Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!

So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?

Yeah...

But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.

Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!

Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

We Did The Entire Butler County Donut Trail In One Day Because Sugar Makes You Strong

 

.....or it does something bad to your A1C. My doctor definitely mentioned one of those!

Whatever. The point is, you know we love ourselves a trail! My favorite trails so far have been the Garfield Trail, where the kids earned fun patches for their Girl Scout vests, the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, where we were promised T-shirts but they ran out so instead they gave us hats and Mr. Craft Knife was so distraught about this downgrade that the little kid designed us all our very own We Licked the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail T-shirts (Lactose Lovers Unite!), and the Dayton Aviation Heritage Trail, where we earned my very beloved Wilbear Wright who comes with me on all my travels now because his namesake used to love going new places (such as the sky!).

Oh, there was also the full year that I dragged everyone around on an Indiana Culinary Trail because I wanted a set of wine tumblers!

We love a road trip, and we'll take one on the stupidest excuse. Because if you don't make a stupid excuse to go on a road trip, then how will you discover that there's a restaurant serving authentic British cuisine north of Indianapolis? Or a giant rock in Southern Indiana that you can hike to AND buy an anthropomorphized version of on a T-shirt?

How, I'm asking how, HOW WOULD YOU OTHERWISE learn that people are simply allowed to build their own experimental aircraft, as long as they get it inspected by authorities to make sure that it's not literally just a flying bomb

I'm telling you my greatest lesson so far: if you don't follow life's off-beat trails, you'll never discover life's experimental aircraft that are allowed to fly at life's unmonitored airfields.

Also, it was the big kid's birthday, we were all in the precious same place at the precious same time, and we all had the whole day free. That in itself is a sign that it was meant to be!

Fun fact: we'd originally planned to do this whole Butler County Donut Trail not on the big kid's birthday but on July 5th, which we also all had free. But then when I went through all the donut shop websites to get their opening hours, I discovered... well... DID YOU KNOW THAT EVERY DONUT SHOP IN BUTLER COUNTY IS CLOSED ON JULY 5?

Genuinely, what is that about?

So anyway, a couple of weeks later, on a day that is safely not the day after a federal holiday, off we went upon a strictly ordered trail that maximized the somewhat limited opening hours of the busy independent donut shops of southwest Ohio:

It's funny, because this place had what would turn out to be my absolute favorite donut of the day. Actually, I think this thing is my absolute favorite donut of all time! I'm thinking about it right now and wishing I had it in front of me.

Here it is, in the photo below. Any guesses?

Nope, not the plain glazed that the big kid always likes. Not the fried cinnamon roll that the little kid tried. It's this glorious beast:

It is a giant croissant, flattened somehow and covered with chocolate ganache and chocolate chips. It was INSANE.

And it turns out that there were two Ross Bakery locations on our donut trail map, so I got two of them!

Organizational note: you can freeze donuts. We all basically ordered whatever we wanted at every stop, did not even attempt to eat it beyond the first couple of stops, and put everything into individual plastic baggies inside a bigger freezer baggie when we got home. To warm donuts up you can microwave them for a few seconds until they taste like they're hot from the fryer, or you can do what I do and put the plastic baggie with your morning donut in it out onto the kitchen table the night before to defrost.

If only I could remember what my doctor was saying about my A1C...

Oh, well. Maybe it will come to me after I eat 11 more donuts!

You know you've been on the road too long/eaten waaaaay too much sugar when you, as a family, cannot stop laughing about what is objectively a perfectly normal sign that you don't even have a decent photo of because the person who was supposed to be taking the picture did not understand the assignment. Regardless, there was a storefront for a pizza restaurant. With a bar. That proclaims that it is OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT. For the rest of the entire day, we were all, "Omg, it is 11 pm and I would like an alcohol. I wish there was a BAR that was OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT!"

"Well, *I* wish there was a BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT that also had pizza!"

"But only TRUE SLICES of pizza! Not slices of falsehood!"

"So you want, like, a combination TRUE SLICE PIZZA/BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT?"

I dunno, y'all. We'd gotten up pretty early for this. We hadn't eaten any protein yet other than the bacon on Mr. Craft Knife's maple bacon pizza three donut shops ago. I think we were all a little loopy.

Actually, I just looked up that pizza place, and their tandoori chicken pizza sounds DELICIOUS.

Loopy as I was, I also lost my damn mind with glee when I discovered that Jupiter Coffee and Donuts was having a Summerween event that week!

I'm pretty sure I got one of every Summerween donut, though they're currently still in the freezer.

This was my second-favorite donut of the day. Something something sour cream something?

The beauty of us all being free this day to do the donut trail is that it was actually a weekday, so we could go straight to the Butler County tourism office with our completed passports to pick up our shirts.

On the way, we were all, "Omg, they're going to be so excited that somebody completed the trail! They're probably going to want to take photos of us for their social media--is everyone's hair nice? Ooh, what if we're interviewed? Should we have talking points?"

Lol. We had to STAND IN LINE to get our shirts, there were so many people there for the exact same reason. #notsoquirkyafterall 

But our goal was indeed achieved!

The kids never did inherit the passion for free T-shirts that their father and I honed during college, when people would put tables outside the Student Center offering free T-shirts for signing up for a credit card--AND WE ALL DID IT! I blame their disdain on the fact that 1) I don't think colleges (or the finance industry?!?) allows that kind of shit anymore, and 2) neither of the kids' colleges charge to use the laundry machines, so they do not know the joy of being able to put laundry off for one more day cause you just scored a free T-shirt.

Regardless, Mr. Craft Knife and I still hate doing laundry, and I personally think that these T-shirts are legit. There's a smiling cup of coffee!!! And the donut is holding a little flaaaaaggggg!!!!!!!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which I Go On A Pilgrimage To George Washington Carver's Hometown

And I am really, really, really super chill about it!

Lol, you KNOW that's not true, if only because I have never ever been chill about a single thing in my entire life ever. Much less that it is objectively impossible to be chill about George Washington Carver, THE MOST PROFOUND GENIUS OF OUR TIME, WHO SPENT LITERALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE BEING THWARTED AND DIMINISHED AND STIFLED, WHO WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO REACH HIS FULL POTENTIAL AND YET STILL CREATED WONDROUS THINGS, WHO LIVED SOLELY TO SERVE HIS PEOPLE AND LIFT THEM UP AND DID SO UNDER IMPOSSIBLE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD HAVE CRUSHED ANY OTHER PERSON, WHO LOVED HANDICRAFTS AS MUCH AS I DO BUT WAS QUITE A LOT BETTER AT THEM THAN I AM, AND WHO. WAS. QUEER!!!

Anyway, this warning sign on the front door of the visitor center of the George Washington Carver National Monument amused me:

I hadn't ever thought about it, but I guess you cannot conduct place-based, experiential learning at the monument for the guy made famous by peanuts if you've got a peanut allergy!

Bonus point: this was my fourth national park site that I visited over Juneteenth weekend (which was on a Friday this year), and yet this was the only Juneteenth programming that I encountered. And it was really good!

As part of the program, the park ranger gave a rundown of every national park site that honors a Black person or has an emphasis on the Black experience. It was very helpful!

In other news... Okay, I'm just going to come right out and tell you right away that I have mixed feelings about George Washington Carver's national park site being located at his birthplace. 

On the one hand, I do think that the site does all it can, considering its location, to carefully classify the relationship between George and his older brother, Jim, and their former slaveowners with whom they lived until George left them at about the age of 9 or 10. George himself, while writing a short biographical sketch in his old age, referred to them as "Mr. and Mrs. Carver," said that they were "very kind" to him, and thanked them for his "home training." In signage, the site mainly refers to them as the children's "guardians," which is objectively correct. The children were allowed to live in the former slaveowner's cabin with them, there are no accusations or even oblique suggestions in any primary source material that I can find that the children were ever mistreated, and although they were required to work, there also don't seem to be any accusations or suggestions that the children were worked like servants, and not like boys of that time period whose labor was assumed and required. 

However, I feel like placing George Washington Carver's memorial on the site of these former slaveowners' land, where he lived for only a decade at most but where they lived for most of their lives, centers them shamefully in a story that they have no business being more than a couple of paragraphs in. Sure, his childhood home is where he learned to love nature and handicrafts and first discovered his knack for music and art and learning, but that is nothing to the credit of these former slaveowners. They did not birth him. They did not nurture him as parents would. They trafficked and enslaved his mother, then enslaved her children. Moses Carver gave George his mother's spinning wheel and her bill of sale, but he did not give him her wages or any percentage of whatever profit her labor had allowed him. They didn't pay for his education or help him obtain it. George spent the latter half of his childhood unhoused in search of that education, paying for it himself, getting occasional help from total strangers but none from these former slaveowners.

George himself didn't center these people or seem to hold them close emotionally. This is a man who wrote weekly letters for his entire life to people he'd met once (and sometimes never!), who gave handmade Christmas cards and answered every letter he ever received, who wasted his affection on countless people who did not deserve it, but who did not write his former slaveowners, nor did he visit them more than a couple of times. He even lost track of Moses entirely later in the man's life. If he had an emotional attachment to Moses' farm, it must have been a complicated one, perhaps more centered on his brother and the mother he couldn't remember and the place itself than the people who started his life as his enslavers.

But having George's national monument on this land implicitly centers Moses and Susan Carver. It was THEIR land! The visitor center looks out into what was once their cropland that George's mother, Mary, and then George and Jim after her, were required to work for free:

I guess we're being super neutral in this signage, but George didn't have "to build his own lab equipment from scratch, working with what others saw as trash" because Tuskegee Institute itself was poor, which is what I think the signage implies; he did that because Booker T. Washington himself, the head of Tuskegee Institute, literally would not give him the money to buy a single thing. The Institute had the money to equip his lab--they just wouldn't do it.

The hiking trail passes, and you can walk around in, their house that was built after George left them (again, at 9 or 10 years old!) and so he never even lived in it:

The trail also passes the cemetery where several Carvers are buried with their headstones. There are likely at least two of George's siblings also in that cemetery, but their graves are unmarked and can't be pinpointed. Jim, George, and Mary are not buried here:

I don't like it.

Here's as good a place as any to also add my own personal conspiracy theory that I am VERY suspicious of how a childless couple who were not slaveowners made one, and only one ever, purchase of an enslaved person, and that one enslaved person that this childless couple thought it was important enough to purchase was a thirteen-year-old girl. That thirteen-year-old girl went on, while still a child, to have two children who lived past infancy, and each child had a different person named as their father, and each time, the person named as their father was someone who happened to have already died. 

Since George and Jim, as far as we know, were as childless as Moses and Susan, I guess there's no way to figure it out now, but again: I DO NOT LIKE IT.

Okay, that's all I'm going to say about these people. Also, I am trying to limit how crazy I sound on a daily basis, and this has definitely put me beyond my per day limit for today.

Instead, please look at the footprint of the cabin where George Washington Carver was born, and where he lived with his mother for a very, very short amount of time:

George Washington Carver had no memories of his mother, and never saw her again or knew what happened to her (nor do we!), but as an adult he kept her spinning wheel with him in his home, where friends said it was treasured.

Okay, just let me make this one last comparison: holding onto and treasuring a keepsake from a parent you never even knew vs. never visiting and even completely losing track of the person who supposedly raised you for the first ten years of your life. Moses and Susan Carver did not do right by those children.

Here's a sketch George made of the cabin in which he was born:

The museum at the visitor center states that this sketch was made "later in life," but interestingly, I recently read a biography that claimed the sketch must have been made when he was a child, since it's a bit rough and George quickly grew later in childhood to become an incredible artist. That biography also discussed how ill he was for several years at the end of his life, however, including how he lost strength and mobility in his limbs, so I reckon that the visitor center is probably correct. Even later in life he was still a wonderful artist who wielded his medium, and his tools, as well as he was physically able to wield them.

The national monument has turned much of its land into a peaceful, beautiful native meadow, and I think this, more than anything else on the site other than his mother's spinning wheel, is the perfect memorial to George Washington Carver:

I also loved walking through the woods he explored and played in as a child:

There's a sweet statue of a young George in a clearing in the woods, although by all accounts, including his own, he was very much a scrawny, sickly little fellow and so likely did not very much resemble this healthy, hale child. We'll just say it's a statue of young George's spirit of determination, then:



Although one day I want to go to the George Washington Carver Museum at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, there are numerous examples of George's handicrafts and work projects here, as well:

He had a huge collection of specimens that he could have used for pedagogy, but Booker T. Washington never gave his department the space to display them, and the storage allocated for them was vulnerable to the elements and pests, so much of it was ruined.

Labels and annotations in his own hand!

I walked through a lab clearly set up so that the museum could conduct educational programming, and found what would probably have been George Washington Carver's favorite thing here:

He still gets to teach.

In other news, next year I am 100% figuring out how to grow my own peanut plant in the garden. Peanuts are SUPER nutritious, did you know? And super versatile--you can do SO many things with them, like peanut milk!

You should also keep pigs. They're very gentle, eat lots of scraps, and if you can bring yourself to have them slaughtered they're pound-for-pound very much worth the investment in their upkeep.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!