Montrose Malarkey

Greetings from the Montrose clan! We kind of forgot this blog existed. Oops. It was a treat to catch

up on the doings of all the other Quacks! Thanks, Gemma, for your lovely posts! Here's an update of our latest doings.

You never know what you will find at Art City...

We've had a small spate of birthdays lately, with Uncle John in the beginning of Feb, Thomas and Joseph at the end of Feb and Becca at the beginning of March. I got to spend the day in Ventura with John the day before his birthday, which was a real treat! He took me to the Ventura Museum, regaled me with fascinating tales of our family history, then took me to the growing Ventura Botanical Gardens behind the city hall (with an epic view of the ocean!), and we finished up by visiting Art City, a fascinating labyrinth of stoneworking studios behind Vons in Ventura (for those of you who don't know). It was a lovely jumble of fun corners and nooks with whimsical surprises around every corner. Our day ended with a DELICIOUS dinner at the new, revamped Fresh Grill in Ojai.

Thomas and Becca went on a death-defying Lake Tahoe adventure over President's Day weekend, where there were snowball fights, accidental lake-dunkings (Thomas fell in during the snowball fight), naked dancing (courtesy of Gianna), one near-miss with a snowplow, and sundry other shenanigans, all culminating in a grueling 16-hr drive through two snowstorms which got them back to Montrose a scant two hours before Thomas had to present to the school board on the AP Chemistry program. (How's that for a run-on sentence?)

Uncle John, who spent a week or so with us over Christmas, came up again last weekend for a combined birthday party (Joseph couldn't make it though). We spent Saturday at the Science Center, where we took in an IMAX film (footage from the International Space Station), which Gianna sat through very calmly (only she refused to wear the 3D glasses). Then we went to see the space shuttle Endeavour, which is housed in a hangar next to the permanent exhibits. 

It was a quite a trip to stand underneath that thing and look up at the black tiles coating its belly, which are still marked with streaks from its last re-entry into our atmosphere. We all had a great time -- I especially enjoyed watching footage of astronauts playing with their food, and marveling at the ridiculously complex machinery required just to go pee in zero gravity. (Fun fact: it involves a funnel and a vacuum tube and sometimes you need to turn on the camera inside the toilet to help you make sure your alignment is correct). After all the space-stuff, we came back to Montrose for a delicious Chinese dinner. It was very tasty, although John almost missed it because he was telling us about the history of Taiwan. 

The next day was the Pasadena Pro Musica, so Thomas, Becca, John, Dan, and Dre (who was visiting over the weekend) all went to that. I stayed home because I was feeling weird. While I was home, I heard a lot of loud mechanical noises and some kind of aircraft went hurtling over our house in the direction of downtown LA, so I kind of hid in my room for the latter part of the evening. When everybody got back I screwed up my courage and we all went outside to see if there was any damage. The yard was littered with strange, phosphorescent debris that looked kind of like glow-sticks. There turned out to be messages clipped to them, which sounded like damage reports from some space craft. I don't think it was from earth. It was kind of funny that this would happen while John was visiting, since he was the one who introduced us to Zeno Claus all those years ago...

Anyway, long story short, this space craft was having malfunctions and trying to figure out what was wrong, jettisoning different things in the attempt to isolate the problem. It turned out to be their fuel cells, which contained an experimental fuel that wasn't really designed to power spacecraft. They had to jettison it (AND the extraction apparatus, which was contaminated), and somehow it landed in our outdoor storage bin with a lot of flashing warning lights on it. Fortunately it wasn't harmful to humans, so we ingested it (of course).

Testing out the fuel extraction apparatus. John is skeptical.

There were also some unstable back-up energy packs, which we fired at Madeleine when she got home from her clinical. It was a pretty fun night.

John stayed with us for about a week, and we had a great time, watching the occasional Twilight Zone, having good dinners and TJs wine, and John's signature vanilla ice cream covered in unsweetened dark chocolate powder (which he keeps in a wildflower seed container, of course). Also his own, home-brewed apricot brandy -- yum! He also generously chauffeured Madeleine to school one day and she got some much-needed sleep in the car. Toward the end of the week there were a couple of SMA baseball games (Thomas assistant-coaches). Becca, John and Gianna went to the first one, and then Becca, Gianna and I went to the one on Friday (which was 12 innings and lasted four hours -- pretty intense! We didn't win but we hung on pretty long.) Meanwhile, John made us a yummy dinner of TJ's cioppino, rice (with huge delicious TJs raisins), veggies and garlic bread, and when we got back, we had a little celebration for Becca's birthday.

John left yesterday for the Quack ranch, but we're planning to have more visits soon -- and maybe go to the Science Center again!

Yesterday I went out to TAC for Much Ado About Nothing, in which Joseph played the part of Don Pedro. It was hilarious! All of the actors were incredible, and Joseph's performance was excellent. He and his co-stars (and the directors, of course) did an amazing job bringing the humor out of the scenes which can be potentially rather boring (you know, the ones that are mostly a bunch of dudes clapping each other on the back and pretending to laugh at their dreadful Elizabethan puns). I've never laughed so hard at a production of Much Ado, nor have I so often spontaneously burst into applause in the middle of a scene of Shakespeare simply because the way the actor said his last speech was just awesome.  I didn't get any pictures, unfortunately, but I'm sure there will be a slideshow on the TAC website (thomasaquinas.edu) at some point. 

We are doing very well as you can see -- Gianna's getting cuter every day and her vocabulary is expanded rapidly. I discovered the other day that she can finish most of the sentences of her favorite books, including the Bible (it's pretty funny to hear her try to say "Pharaoh"). She loves to "hup" (help) us adults with a wide variety of activities, from stirring things (her favorite) to going to the bathroom (not my favorite). She still refers to Madeleine as "Eeny", but my name has morphed from "Bleh-Bleh" to "Bia-Bia", which she sometimes likes to chant to herself in quiet corners (???). Her favorite things are still dancing around naked in the living room, stirring things ("shoy"), pouring things ("pooy"), reading ("wee"), having Thomas and Becca sing Silent Night to her at bedtime ("shy"). She can say her alphabet ("aboo", I think) with about 85% accuracy and recognizes and correctly names all the letters (in fact, when the IMAX movie title came on, she started announcing the names of various letters that she had spotted in it).

And that's the news from Montrose, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the babies are above average.