I Did Not Jump into the Tar Pit and Wallow Around in Tar While Screeching with Joy, But It Was a Close Thing

Do you ever get pissed that you can't visit every place in the entire world and see every cool thing that there is to see?

There are so many exciting wonders to experience, and we're missing almost all of them!

Even though I'm all the time, nearly constantly, missing out on nearly every magical thing to see and do, it IS satisfying to see just this one magical thing that I've longed to experience since the first time I learned about it.

Welcome to La Brea Tar Pits!

The website is really confusing because it makes it seem like you have to pay the admission price just to see the tar pits, but when we got there it actually seems like the admission is only for the museum and the tar pits are free? Or at least there was nobody to take our money at the kiosks around the perimeter of the park, only at the museum. That actually makes the museum kind of shockingly expensive for a family of four, but at least the kids could pull out their student IDs to knock a couple of bucks off. 

Tangent, but ever since my kids have grown up enough to be considered "adults" for the purpose of most admission tickets, I've realized that Adult admission to places that encourage you to go as a family, like museums and zoos, is a fucking RACKET. I swear they bump the price to make the Child ticket at half the price feel like a deal, and it's not even so unreasonable when you split the difference, but those four adult tickets stacked on top of each other are a LOT. I think multiples of adult tickets should get some kind of puny discount, because otherwise we're going to have to start drawing straws to see who gets to go into the cool stuff and who has to sit in the car.

Ah, well. What even is money on a vacation, especially not when there are mastodon bones to look at!

And ground sloths!

Antique bison!

American lion!

The tar pit stuff is all crazy interesting. Check out this little bone that a rodent was once upon a time eating on!

And this knife blade that was purposely coated in tar!

This camel that died with stuff stuck in its teeth!

The two most superior animals to ever have fallen in the tar pits are OBVIOUSLY dire wolves and saber-tooths. 

We're at the point in family life where when I tell every family member to go and pose dramatically with the saber-tooth recreation so I can take all their photos, even the most unenthusiastic family member just sighs and obeys.

Guess who the most enthusiastic family member is, though?

Ahem.

This is my favorite exhibit:

Check out 404 dire wolf skulls! I was only sad because the display goes up so high that I couldn't get the best look at half of them:

This is me looking straight up.

Here are the best dire wolf skulls:

The bones are so cool that it kind of makes you forget that starving to death while being stuck in tar is a horrible way to die, and actually suffocating to death in tar is even more horrible. The museum had an interactive display to demonstrate how hard it is to pull yourself out of tar:

Yeah, I could have NEVER.

Outside the museum, there's a park (that may or may not be free?) that encompasses many of the extant tar pit sites:

Didn't pack bug spray, oops:

The lake pit looks the most tar pit-ish to me, but I think it might actually be the least accurate looking:

The "lake" is groundwater and rainwater that's collected in an abandoned asphalt excavation. Tar and methane do bubble up through it, but I *think* the proper tar pits that trapped all the animals were actually pretty shallow.

This is more like what I think the tar pits would have looked like, if you can imagine secret tar also under all the dirt and leaves around the puddle of visible tar:

There aren't any current active excavations of the tar pits, but as you walk around you can see photos from old excavations, and an open pit that looks like the workers just stepped away for a lunch break:

The current and ongoing project involves going through a huge amount of material collected via rescue paleontology during the construction of the LA County Museum of Art next door:

Papped a paleontologist!

I was having so much fun peeping through fences to look at all the named tar pits--

--that it actually took me a long time to notice that there was tar bubbling up EVERYWHERE! Little puddles and sticky bits were all over, sometimes marked--

--but often not. Since it's not a national park site or anything, the big kid helped me collect a little souvenir:

My little tar stick is my favorite souvenir from this trip!

I could have stayed for the rest of the day, just rolling around in little tar pits and poking around looking for bones, but there was not a speck of shade, and I had long ago worn out the patience of our least-enthusiastic participant, ahem, so I reluctantly allowed myself to be dragged out and into the awful LA traffic. 

I had a few ideas for other places to stop at, but omg the traffic was so horrible that the only place we ended up visiting was Milk Bar. It's crazy expensive but I'd heard it was absolutely delicious--

--and it was!

I was especially thrilled with my pint of soft-serve ice cream layered with cakey parts and fudgy bits and crunchies. I also brought my pint jar home as a souvenir, and I fondly look forward to building my own layered ice cream creation and eating it with a wooden spoon.

But that's for later. Tomorrow we go to the aquarium and make up our own food tour!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo
• Day 4: Maritime Museum and Somali food
• Day 5: Sea lions and San Diego Padres
• Day 6: La Brea Tar Pits and Beverly Hills
• Day 7: Aquarium of the Pacific and a DIY food tour

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!

Translating the Mayan Glyphs Really Brings Out the Asshole in Some People

Went to Mexico in 2022 and somehow didn't try a single "Mayan" rum cake, dang it!

Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To me, the most interesting through-line of this book is how the actions of petty academics served to hinder, stall, and otherwise thwart the translation of the Maya glyphs for decades. I have some small experience with petty academics who care WAY more about their self-proclaimed role of thought police and their self-imposed mission to maintain the status quo of their field than they do actually progressing knowledge, and I am always on the lookout for others willing to spill the tea on that same topic. And dude, does Coe spill the tea! You need to get yourself some popcorn to munch while you read about Thompson’s career-long power play that served absolutely nothing but his own sense of self-worth. I wouldn’t have found this book nearly as interesting without that play-by-play of who tried to ruin whose career for personal reasons, who wouldn’t admit that someone else was right and kept bitching about it endlessly, who was low-key racist and who was high-key racist, etc.

Do you want to know how to call someone racist without calling them racist? Coe shows us how via his thoughts about another academic:

“Having met Gelb but once, many years ago [...], I cannot really call him a racist. His book, however, is very definitely infected with that sinister virus of our time.”

There was also a Nazi sympathizer, a German-born, Louisiana-based researcher named Hermann Beyer who had to be forbidden to wear a swastika at work, who was later sent to the Stringtown Concentration Camp in Oklahoma at the start of WWII and who subsequently died there.

Chichen Itza, 2022

Coe is also VERY (and undeservedly!) snarky about archaeologists--or, sorry, about “dirt-archaeologists,” as he puts it. I kind of got the idea that he thinks they’re stupid. What’s up with that? The digs and the exploration of the jungle and the finding bits of stela with carvings on them are the best part!

Seriously, though--Thompson was such a jerk! He was so convinced that the Maya were illiterate magical shaman ignoramuses that he wouldn’t believe that they had a proper written language, and kept making every peon under him say that the glyphs were, like, pretty pictures that spoke to your heart or something. And he did this for upwards of forty years! And when people started finally actually translating the glyphs anyway (thank goodness for Knorosov!), he did his best to ruin all their careers and talk shit about them and keep them from getting hired, etc. Imagine if you were trying to translate the glyphs and some of his peons were on your hiring committee. Or your tenure committee. Or were peer-reviewing your article. Or in the audience at the conference where you’re reading your paper. Or on your PhD committee. Or your grad school application committee…

Chichen Itza, 2022

There’s another villain in this story, though: that absolute asshole De Landa! I hate that guy. Like, yay I guess that he wrote down a sort of syllabary that researchers finally figured out they needed to use to connect the written glyphs to the spoken language, but we wouldn’t have needed that second-hand source if De Landa hadn’t, you know, BURNED 99.9% OF THE MAYAS’ BOOKS! He even wrote about it in his diary, being all, “Jeez those guys screamed and cried when I burned every book they’ve ever written. What a bunch of dumbasses.” Racism has clearly been holding back our understanding of the Maya and their language ever since we first met them.

Our cast of heroes is charmingly eclectic, including the previously-mentioned Knorosov, much of his work done while trapped in the USSR, as well as a female artist from Tennessee, and a homeschooled child. All of them, I think, illustrate the importance of different perspectives when trying to solve a tricky problem. All of them, notably as well, exhibited grace and the spirit of collaboration and absolutely zero ego.

Chichen Itza, 2022

As far as actually translating the glyphs, I was interested to see that, from what I understand after reading another book on how Egyptian hieroglyphs were first translated, they work sort of similarly to those hieroglyphs. With 20/20 hindsight, one would think that the Maya researchers would have leaned more heavily on the example of hieroglyphs, but I guess that everyone has to hobble their own way towards truth. Except for Thompson--he’ll just try to kneecap you and then when you fall down he’ll step on your neck.

I’d been hoping for an explanation or a reasoning for why Maya glyphs are so decorative, but Coe, perhaps because he’s studied them for his entire career and thus no longer sees them as so extraordinary, didn’t ever point out their structure as notable, even though they very, very, very much ARE. They’re so beautiful and fancy, and every glyph has its own writer’s interpretation of how it’s drawn. I LOVE it.

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I did, however, learn a lot of interesting facts about how the Maya language reflects its people’s obsession with time. I was already interested in the Maya calendar and the Long Count way of dating, and now I know that precision of time is also inherent in their language. No imperfect tenses for you in the Mayan language--you have to know exactly when every action was, is, or will be completed!

I also thought that the focus on classification was interesting. Not only do you have to know what time something happened, but if there’s a group of something you want to talk about, you can’t just name it--you also have to classify it. Considering how much variety there can be in the construction of a single glyph, the language the glyphs are expressing is SO precise!

One more interesting tidbit: Coe writes about Naj Tunich, a cave containing glyphs and art that was being investigated, that “[t]he cavern walls, lit by their flashlights and photographic equipment, had many other surprises, not the least of which were realistic homoerotic encounters.”

Realistic homoerotic encounters, you say? Tell me more!

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Happily, some of what Coe writes in this third edition of his book is now out of date. Coe writes, for instance, that “Mexican law forbids the teaching in schools of the Yucatec Maya tongue.” That is no longer the case. I’d be very interested in learning Maya, as well, but I don’t know where I’d even begin--I already checked DuoLingo, sigh. I’m also very interested in the four extant Mayan codices that De Landa didn’t manage to get his hands on. Trying to see all four will let me travel the world, although it’s shameful that only one gets to still live in Mexico.

P.S. View all my reviews

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The Spring and Summer of the Puff Quilt

Tbh, I'm not sure if the kid really even wanted a puff quilt that much, ahem, or if she was just expressing admiration for them and then I jumped on it because it looked like a cool thing to make.

Oh, well, because she's got one now!

This puff quilt has been THE project of half the spring and most of the summer. In and around getting the kids settled back home and enjoying them as hard as I can, taking little trips here and there, dealing with the never-ending brokenness of the lawnmower (first it was the drive belt, which cost so much and took so long to have repaired that when the mower immediately broke again I spent another full week messing with it myself and busting all my knuckles in the process before realizing the solenoid ground wire had corroded, and then as soon as my really shitty fix for that worked the mower belt fell off, and when my partner was trying to put that back in place he realized that actually the entire mower deck was rusted through so badly that one of the mowing blades was literally just falling off of it, and we messed around on Facebook Marketplace for a while trying to find another 42" mower deck but everyone else's is also rusted to hell and back, so now we've found a local shop that claims it'll weld a repair for us so wish us luck that maybe next week we'll get to mow our lawn for the second time this summer!), and doing all my regular work and leisure, I have been sewing puffs.

When I saw people showing off their puff quilts online, I thought it looked like an easy make, and it was pretty easy: cut 616 4" backing squares, cut 616 4.5" front squares, sew them together on three sides with a scant 1/4" seam, piece them row by row with a proper 1/4" seam, stuffing them as you go, back the quilt top and tie it with 566 knots, then double-fold the backing around the edges to make a binding and edge stitch that all the way around. 

But DUDE. It is TEDIOUS! You definitely need yourself a good show with lots of seasons that you can burn through while you work!

Even only partially complete, though, it always looked so pretty, and I loved laying it out every day to see my progress:

I also accidentally discovered a terrific trick to keep wrinkles out of my backing: after pinning across the center of the quilt+backing, I draped it across our big family room table so I could tie it, and the weight of the quilt hanging down from each side kept that backing the smoothest that I've ever gotten it!

Or maybe it's just because there was constantly a cat holding it down...

It turns out that all the pets go CRAZY for a puff quilt!

It took another nearly full week to get the quilt tied, and that's with me teaching the technique to everyone in the family and forcing them to spend part of every evening helping me. We'd play a podcast or set up a movie, and then we'd just sit around the table and tie our puffs!

At one point, with all of us sitting around the table with our embroidery floss and needles, working away, one of the kids grinned at me and said, "Look at us all sitting around the table doing something together. This is your dream come true!"

And of course she's right, lol. I spend half our time together martialing everyone into some kind of family activity or other, like one of those Australian cattle dogs incorporated into a family, not a farm, who keeps trying to herd the kids and follow the parents to the bathroom. I'm constantly the one saying, "Let's have a movie night," "Let's all pick a theme and cook a themed dinner together," "Let's go see how many ice cream places there are in town," "Let's go hike down the creek and fill Dad's backpack with geodes," etc. I know it must get old, especially during these between-college summers when I'm always thinking about how my time with them is so precious, but I will never be sorry that my children are so confident about my desire to spend time with them that they can turn it into a family joke. 

I will also never be sorry that my children know that I will happily spend most of the summer sewing them the on-trend novelty quilt that they expressed a desire for, and that when it's done we'll all laugh that it accidentally turned out WAY larger and WAY heavier than I thought it would and what on earth is the kid actually going to do with it, but also it's about a thousand times comfier than we thought it would be and currently it lives on the couch and everyone is obsessed with it.

I still think the pets love it the most, though!

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!

I Got Taken Out To The Ball Game

We maximized everyone's must-do list on this trip to San Diego! We went to the zoo. We ate Somali food. We toured Palomar Observatory. We had authentic Mexican food. We saw the desert and boated around the bay. 

And on this day, we finished off that list with sea lions and the San Diego Padres!

We'd only packed carry-ons and so I'd dithered, as always, about bring my telephoto lens. I don't know why I dither every time, though, because every time I leave it at home I end up regretting it, and every time I bring it I end up being grateful that I did.

Such as on this trip. I would have been SO sad to see the sea lions without my telephoto lens!

Check out the wound on that guy's neck! It looks like something was cut away from it, like maybe fishing line or a plastic bag handle.

You can tell that they're sea lions because they have little ears. Seals just have ear holes.

There were so many adorable babies! 

We were honestly there for hours, like not even talking, just watching sea lions go about their sea lion business. 

Just before we knew we absolutely had to leave to get to the San Diego Padres game on time (SOOOOOOO much traffic!), we did tear ourselves away from the sea lions to go for a tiny walk on a sea lion-free beach:

It was worth it.

We'd genuinely thought that this San Diego Padres game, the third game in as many days against the same team, mid-day on a weekday, to boot, would be lightly attended. OMG we were WRONG. It was an absolute wall of people wherever we looked! There were more people in attendance than the entire population of our town!

It was nevertheless pretty fun, though, even up there in the nosebleeds with the other plebeians: 

Actually, the nosebleed seats were AWESOME. We had our own block of bathrooms up there on the top deck, and nobody was going to climb UP more ramp to go to the bathroom of all places, so every time I went it was super clean and hardly anyone was in there. There were also a bunch of food stalls, and although it wasn't the crazy fancy stuff they had in the trendier parts of the stadium, again, the lines were short and they had all the staples: beer, nachos, pretzels, and hot dogs. We had some of everything:

It was such ample deliciousness that I couldn't even finish my hot dog, and so after the game I trekked with it the billion miles back down the ramp to the ground, and then the billion miles down the sidewalk to our parking garage, and I stuck it in the trunk of our rental car while we spent the billion hours in traffic getting out of downtown and out of the city and back to our AirBnb.

And then I asked the AirBnb cat if he wanted it:

He did!

Tomorrow, we leave San Diego and head to LA... and La Brea Tar Pits!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo
• Day 4: Maritime Museum and Somali food
• Day 5: Sea lions and San Diego Padres
• Day 6: La Brea Tar Pits and Beverly Hills
• Day 7: Aquarium of the Pacific and a DIY food tour

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!