Armed with seven hours worth of educational paleontology podcasts, we ventured forth to Apple Valley, California (stopping along the way at the Donut Man, in Glendora, the Official Donut Purveyor of Dinosaur Day), home of the now tragic, crumbling Apple Valley Dinosaurs.

What was once a magnificent . . . mini golf course, is now a tragic monument to the loss of our long-departed lizardly overlords.  I braved six inches of barbed wire to get close to one, and, apart from that time at the Cabazon Dinosaurs, and that time at the Natural History Museum, and that time at Science North when I was five, and that time at the Bruce County Museum, and all of those other times when I’ve stood next to fake and/or reconstructed dinosaur skeletons, it was the closest I’d ever been to a dinosaur.

So, I cannot over-emphasize the strangeness of this place, you know?  Wire and cement skeletons of fake dinosaurs were everywhere, a few had vestiges of their original paint jobs, and it was so hot and desolate.  I’m fascinated by the strangely melancholic desert cities in the middle of California – who are the people who choose to live there and why?Once, the area was booming, but it certainly isn’t anymore.  And, most importantly, who builds their dinosaur golf course out there?  My theory is that since Apple Valley is Route 66-adjacent, it might have been a tourist draw once, but now, there is nothing surrounding it.  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Anyhow, we stopped at the Route 66 Museum in Victorville because it was there and because it was free, and it was fascinating too.  They have a 9 foot tall hula girl statue from Hulaville, which looms large over the entire museum, and which Aaron completely failed to notice because he is an oblivious boy who was busy reading the descriptions of antique radios.  And also the Route 66 Museum is right next to a Wonder Bread/Hostess warehouse store (yes, really) so next time we go out into the middle of the desert for no good reason I am going to buy a gross of Twinkies.

And then we were off to Peggy Sue’s Diner and Diner-saur park.  If you’re going to have a giant 50′s diner with an entrance shaped like a jukebox, you need something to distinguish yourself from all of the other 50′s diners.  And apparently that thing is dinosaurs.  And to think I was already excited that there were sandwiches named after Fabian and Frankie Avalon and Richard Nixon!  I could eat a Frankie Avalon sandwich AND ALSO there were dinosaurs.

And King Kong, don’t forget King Kong.

And in case anyone needed any help with dinosaur identification, voila!  A handy guide to dinosaur taxonomy:

And then we went home and watched The Land that Time Forgot, which had WONDERFUL and TERRIBLE fake dinosaurs in it and also cave men and Really Excellent Science.  Although it did suffer from a little too much “we are on a German U-boat and not very pleased about it”-style exposition before we got to the actual dinosaurs, but they were such good actual dinosaurs that I can’t complain much.  We also made our own Special Edition Dinosaur Day Ice Cream by throwing vanilla ice cream in the stand mixer with blue food coloring, malt balls, chocolate chips, and marshmallows, which, somehow, stands for dinosaur?  Whatever, it was awesome.

I am thinking that for next Dinosaur Day we need to do something really big, and maybe actually involving real dinosaurs, like volunteering on a paleontology dig or something?  Whatever we do it will be amazing because Dinosaur Day is officially the BEST DAY OF THE YEAR.

There are more Dinosaur Day pictures on that facebook thing, if you want ‘em.

We went to Joshua Tree, which was much like Northern Ontario (rocks and trees and trees and rocks, and rocks and trees and trees and rocks, and waterrrrr), only completely different (rocks and cacti and cacti and rocks, and rocks and cacti and cacti and rocks and sannnnnnnnd).

Aaron wore his jaunty, cactus-inspectin’ hat.

And no, this is not a picture of me emerging from a giant cement vulva!

It is a picture of me emerging from a giant cement (historically inaccurate and somewhat offensive but we’ll let it slide just this once cause it was the 1950s) teepee!  My Gentleman Caller is very good at helping me fulfill my insatiable need to experience as much novelty architechture as possible.  We stayed at the Wigwam Motel in lovely, scenic Rialto!

Rialto has some very good mid-centuriness happening in it, like DJ’s Coffee Shop, which had tasty tasty breakfast.

And the next day we went on a hilarious ghost town tour, stopping in Calico, a mining town turned ghost town turned historical re-enactment site/theme park at some point in the 60s that has changed very little since and thus remains hilarious and weird,

And we went to California City, a weird planned city/social experiment that never really worked out – you should read about it.  All that’s there are the roads that were laid out for a city that was planned, but never populated because, shockingly, nobody wanted to move out to the middle of the desert.

And then there was this, the most glorious sign I’ve ever seen, on a sadly closed-down drive in, somewhere outside Barstow:

So, there is a story here:  back in the long-ago days of when I was singing in choir in Kitchener-Waterloo with Leith, the church we sang at was having a book sale, and we found an AMAZING two-volume Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking, from 1954, by one Ms. Meta Given, who seems to have been, like, the poor woman’s Betty Crocker, from Pittsburgh, and who is potentially fascinating.  Someone’s dissertation should be on atomic-age cookbooks and gender and domesticity, and there should be a chapter on Meta Given, but because I am in Musicology they want my dissertation to be about music, or something, so that won’t be my dissertation, sadly.  ANYHOW, the Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking is ridiculous and has lots of horrible gelatin-based things in it because it was the Atomic Age, and, you know, Better Eating Through Chemicals and things!

And one of the most amazing recipes was cheese carrots.  I cannot remember the actual specifics of the cheese carrots recipe because the book is at home in Canada somewhere in my parents’ basement, so I had to recreate this from vague memory, and in my vague memory the recipe for cheese carrots was this:  you take your carrots, you grate them.  You take your cheese, you grate it.  You mix them with gelatin, mold them into teensy, canape-sized carrots, and you make carrot greens with sprigs of parsley.  Um, yeah, I know right?

And then one day, for reasons far too complicated to explain to anyone who has not been in Musicology wing of the Schoenberg Music Building this past quarter, I needed to make food that was a culinary representation of the musical oeuvre of Lady Gaga (for homework, because graduate school has done nothing but equip me with useful and practical skills with real-world application), and that is when I decided that cheese carrots were the only possible thing.

My blissful unawareness of certain important facts like, say, the proportions of the ingredients, did not prevent me from boldly sallying forth on this journey of culinary blasphemy.  So when the cheese carrot batter was too runny to roll into tiny canape-sized carrots, we MacGuyvered a mold out of a loaf pan, cardboard and some tin foil, poured the mix in, and giant cheese carrots were, unfortunately, born.

They’re more art than food, really, and remarkably inoffensive in flavor.  But the texture is . . . just not the texture of something you really want to eat. Oh, 1954.  Truly, you were another planet.

As a counterpoint, I also made this blackberry/muscat jelly from a Nigella Lawson recipe, and it was legitimately delicious, although less like Lady Gaga.

Also:  in the UK gelatin is measured in leaves, and in the US gelatin is measured in packets, and neither of these units of measurement  is not even remotely related to the metric system and therefore I throw my Canadian hands up in exasperation at both of them.  For the record, 1 leaf gelatin = 1/4 packet of gelatin, or something, I think, I don’t actually remember.  So this recipe calls for five leaves of gelatin which is 1 and 1/4 packets, which is a stupid amount, because what do you do with 3/4 of a packet of gelatin?  Add it to your cheese carrot batter, I guess.  Too bad.

Is that math even right?  Who actually counts things anymore, anyhow?  Whatever.

Larger adventures: First of all, let’s let the cat out of the bag:  I won’t be coming home to Canada this summer, which I feel kind of sad and guilty about, even though my mother keeps saying “why would you bother coming home?  It doesn’t make sense for you to go out of your way to come home,” as though coming home is some kind of exceptionally taxing chore (it isn’t.)  But I have a very good reason for not coming home!  I am going to England for much longer than anticipated because I got a travel fellowship!  So what this means is that I will be travelling in and around Liverpool for the first few weeks of August, and then meeting up with Gentleman Caller for a quick trip to a yet-to-be-determined locale (he will be on the continent because he is touring with the Bulgarian folk band that he plays in) and then I’ll be in London for the month of September!  I am obviously fairly excited about all of this, and flights are booked, and an apartment in London has been secured, and I just need to piece together the rest of the trip, and move my stuff out of my apartment and into storage (sure to be a headache, but what can you do?) and get my British Library reader pass, and then I’ll be all set!  I’ve never been to the UK before, so if anyone has any travel tips, I would appreciate them!

Consumerist adventures:  I think I want these.  I have been reading the Pamela Des Barres book which makes me covet some late-60′s-style summer shoes.  Internet, what thinks you?

Also, I have pictures of Ostrich Egg Giant Breakfast!  Soon!  I promise!

I learned this word at the Wild Animal Park, which is where our adventuring took us this fine Sunday mid-morning.  Megavetebrates include rhinos, elephants, and similar.  I learned this word from our safari tour guide, who was loose and fast with the slightly inexplicable metaphors (ie:  ”the Cheetah’s fur is butterscotch and cream”) but who has provided me with a vocabulary word that will surely make an excellent name for either my heavy metal band or my pan flute quintet.

ALSO, how cute is a baby elephant???  You have no idea how cute a baby elephant is.  It is so cute.  And there where, what, five of them?  And they were so wobbly and smiley!  Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of the cuteness because at this point in the afternoon I was too lazy to get my camera out of my bag and was content to let my Gentleman Caller do the phototaking, but here is a picture of a sassy lion chilling in the back of a truck which is also pretty awesome.

BUT MOST AWESOME OF ALL:  on the outskirts of Escondido, California, we came upon a produce stand.  And at said produce stand, what did we find?  OSTRICH EGGS.  For the reasonable price of $25, which, compared to the $40 they were charging at Ostrich Land, is a bargain!

Here it is, our very own Ostrich Egg!  Shown aside some less giant but no less noble chicken eggs for comparison:

OSTRICH EGG NUTRITIONAL FACTS:  Contains 500% Daily Intake of AWESOME.

I am very excited for next weekend’s Giant Brunch, featuring Giant Egg, Giant Toast, Giant Pancake, Giant Sausage, and, most importantly GIANT MIMOSA!   Who’s in?

INSPIRATIONAL RECIPES FROM BRAVE CHEFS WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE:

Deviled Ostrich Egg

Scotch Ostrich Egg

Ostrich Egg Omelette

Ostrich Egg Frittata

Ostrich Egg with Tarragon and Pine Nut Tarator

What I really like to do, though, is to find a single, weird treasure that, ideally, costs about $2.  I usually have really good luck with this.  I have a tiny promotional calendar from 1957 that was printed for a beauty salon and every month has a different hairstyle pictured and some hilarious, 1957-style woman-to-woman advice that I got there once for, like, a dollar.  This is a prime example of the kind of treasure I go searching for.

Today, I got this old picture:

I want to be this lady when I grow up.  Who is she?  Why is so so dramatically lit?  Look at all the lines in her face – they’re amazing and beautiful.  Look at how melancholy her expression is.  Look at how expressive her eyes are.  I think, although I have no way of knowing, that this is a headshot and that she was an actor.  There’s an address on the back, and a phone number, and a name that I can’t quite make out – Marie something?  Elena?  Ellen?  Plum?  O’Something?  Who even knows – which is of course driving me, crazy because if I had that last name I would IMDB her.  But I love that the address is on Vine, which is such a famed, Old Hollywood thoroughfare, even though it’s kind of shitty and unremarkable now.  And I love that it’s so old that it was before 7 digit phone numbers – the HO at the beginning of the line of numbers at the bottom stands for Hollywood, the name of the telephone exchange.  And I love this picture in a lot of inexpressible ways.

Some day I want to have a wall in my home hung with fascinating old pictures of strangers.

And also I think you’ll be able to download and listen to my talk on iTunes University!  I’ll let you know if this actually happens.  This is pretty cool, but also slightly mortifying, because it means that my technological snafus are forever immortalized, as is the moment in my presentation when I meant to say Jay-Z but accidentally said Kanye instead.  But oh well.  Nobody’s perfect.

I accidentally managed to book us into the Shepard Fairey room at the hipster hotel.  I mean, I intentionally booked us into the hipster hotel (it was cheap and has free waffles at breakfastime!) but I did not bargain for the Shepard Fairey room, which meant having to cope with this wallpaper for four days:

Also, this icon, which clearly indicates “milk bottle, present, Hershey Kiss,” was on the little cabinet in the room, and the cabinet did not contain any of these things, so I must assume it is hipster code for “towels, condoms, coffee,” which is what the cabinet did contain.  MYSTERIOUS!  I am still disappointed that I didn’t get any Hershey’s Kisses, but I probably shouldn’t complain because there were, indeed, those waffles.

As is my wont, I dragged my gentleman caller stumbling through Seattle on a steady diet of neon and donuts:

And we went to the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company, where I bought a map of the known universe.

I am ten years behind in emails right now – Canadian friends, I will write you tomorrow, I swear it on the ghost of Annette Funicello’s girlish figure.

There are few things in the world that are better than having 34 different varieties of rootbeer in the kitchen.  However, there have been other good things going on as well.  I just got back from San Diego, where it was hazy and sleepy and I did a lot of swimming in a hotel pool in the nighttime.  We saw a baby panda at the zoo, but, alas, the slow loris was hiding somewhere in its enclosure and wouldn’t come out to shower us with cuteness.  Luckily, the internet continues to deliver.

Also, I’ve been planning my girl group class, which starts this week and is going to be wonderful fun.  We’re starting with Gidget.  I feel that it’s important for the undergraduates to see excerpts from Gidget Goes Hawaiian, the  moral of which is “don’t talk to anyone, ever, or everyone will think you’re a slut, also, try surfing,” as it provides important context regarding representations of girl identity in the early 1960s.

Discussion Questions:

Who is cuter?  Slow loris or Maru, the internet’s best greatest cat? (Category of “internet’s greatest cat” was bestowed upon Maru by a non-partisan panel of internet cat video experts, consisting of myself.)

How much rootbeer would a slow loris drink if a slow loris were larger than a bottle of rootbeer?

Why is Gidget played by a different actress in every Gidget movie, when clearly Deborah Walley is the best Gidget?  And why is It’s a Bikini World (hilarious, quasi-feminist beach party movie, involving a skateboard race, and cameo from the Animals who perform “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place” at the Haunted House, which was once a monster-themed club with giant papier mache lizard creatures, and is now a porn theatre , her Greatest Film Ever, not available on DVD?

Who wants a postcard with a panda on it?  I have three left, I’ll even sign them with a lipstick kiss so your mailman thinks you’re getting love letters from a Hollywood starlet.  Ooh, gossip and excitement could circulate about you in your very own hometown!

This basically actually happened in real life the other day.  We were at Pie ‘n’ Burger and this girl came in and she WAS Melorra and she said to the dude she was with “I love this place!  It’s so…retro!” in exactly that perky, uncynical tone of voice that I so often fail to understand.

So anyhow, that was hilarious.  And Pie ‘n’ Burger was basically a dream come true.  Look at how photogenic this cheeseburger is!  I honestly cannot stop looking at this picture.

And then I had a slice of butterscotch meringue pie (I KNOW, right?) that was so delicious that I forgot to take a picture.  You will just have to go to Pie ‘n’ Burger and see for yourself!

And then we went to the monster park in San Gabriel!  (See this post I wrote for Metblogs for further details.)  Here I am conquering a giant cement octopus in the name of all womankind:

And here is Nikki, taming having just tamed the wild pink whale:

I love giant things made of cement.  They’re the one thing I can actually be earnest about in this day and age.

Some of those adventures may or may not have included:

Chancing upon some Spudnuts in Santa Barbara;

Scenery of a jaw-dropping nature;

SOLVANG!  Solvang is like a town in Denmark, via Disneyland.  In Solvang, some people may or may not have actually seen Arnold Schwarzenegger (we totally did see Arnold Schwarzenegger in Solvang, and, ever the eloquent soul, my immediate statement was “that man’s skin is so taut his face looks like a fine saddle.”  In case you were wondering, he and his retinue of bodyguards went to the Bit O’ Denmark Restaurant);

The Madonna Inn.  Dreams really do come true, friends, and the Madonna Inn is basically the physical manifestation of all of my dreams.  For the uninitiated:  the Madonna Inn is a hotel near San Luis Obispo that was built in the 1950s, and every room is uniquely themed and decorated to be as kitschy as possible.  It is WONDERFUL.

And we stayed in this room.  The bed is ROUND.  Some people may or may not have spent all weekend jumping up and down, excitedly, in the manner of a five year old, going “Circle bed circle bed! We get to sleep in a circle bed!”

And IF THAT WASN’T ENOUGH, the next day we went to Ostrich Land.  Did you know that an ostrich egg costs $40?  This is upsetting, because my current dream is to host a dinner party at which I serve a single, giant boiled egg, which I will slice and serve to my guests like a ham.  I am currently on a quest to source cheaper ostrich eggs somewhere in Los Angeles.

And then there was pea soup, at Pea Soup Anderson’s, a restaurant that proves that the best business model is to have cartoon character mascots from the 1950s, and be famous for one thing, even if it is a thing that most people probably don’t generally want (ie: pea soup).

And then we went dancing in the 1940s and it was so, so, so wonderful, and I wore my best dress and ate flan.  THE END.