Joshua Tree, Tetherball Truck, IQ Gets Eaten by a Saber Toothed Tiger

This weekend brought all sorts of wondrous happening.  IQ did some science, I did some yoga, and then we drove up to Joshua Tree to meet with KA and "climb".  I put "climb" in quotation marks, because I have probably climbed 4 pitches in the past 2 years, so what I did in Joshua Tree was far from climbing.  It was a lot closer to flailing around on the rope and skinning my knees, then telling IQ and KA to go do do some actual climbing together while I found a nice a sunny spot to do some more yoga and read a book.  It was a fantastic little 2-day trip.

This is a little baby Joshua Tree nestled near a yucca, or maybe it is a teddy-bear cactus.  Either way, it is not for hugging.  Do not hug sharp things.

IQ surveys the scene.

This is some of the rock at Josh.  It is a lovely, pretty slabby granite slope with a more vertical chunk on top.  The dark spot on the slab is not coyote poo, it is a pair of climbing shoes.  The little dark vertical thing on the top left of the vertical chunk is also not poo, it is Ian.

This is a view of some adjacent rocks.  The little dark spec on the top of the  tall rock, about a third of the way across the top from the left is a person.

On the drive back, IQ and I found some of the best roadside sculpture we have seen in a long time, arguably the best we have seen in CA.

We were really lucky it didn't break the skin.  Saber toothed tigers are FIERCE.

This was in a Veteran's Memorial traffic circle.  I know we owe a lot to our vets, but I honestly had no idea we could also thank our vets for keeping us safe from these ruthless Pleistocene threats.

Hands down, the most bizarre and striking thing on this trip was a sight we observed, stalked, and then caught on film during the drive back.  Look closely in the back of the red truck.  That is a tetherball pole, fully stocked with a tetherball.  They didn't even take the tetherball off the pole for highway transport.

For safety reasons, no one was playing tetherball at the time of transport.  Or, maybe nobody was playing because both players had already fallen out of the truck a few miles back.  Either way, nobody was winning.