Last weekend, we celebrated Father’s Day with fresh guacamole and beer margaritas. They were so good, we gave it an encore this week, and I think I’ve got my recipes perfected. So here you go, and don’t say we didn’t warn you about their addictive qualities:

The Crumpacker Family Guacamole

• 4 avocados - peeled, pitted, and mashed
• juice of 1 fresh lime
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2/3 cup diced onion
• 3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
• 2 medium tomatoes, diced
• 1 1/4 teaspoon minced garlic
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

Mix everything together thoroughly. Place it in the fridge for an hour. Eat way too much of it.

Beer Margaritas

• 1 (12 fluid ounce) can frozen limeade concentrate
• 12 fluid ounces tequila
• 12 fluid ounces water
• 12 fluid ounces beer
• ice
• 1 lime, cut into wedges

Pour limeade, tequila, water, and beer into a large pitcher. Stir until well-blended, and limeade has melted. Add plenty of ice, and garnish with lime wedges.

So we’re back home from Sequoia. In lots of ways, the trip was everything such trips are meant to be. If you haven’t been up in the redwoods, you can’t imagine what it’s like — it’s like church. My eyes crave lots of green, lots of wildlife and lots of tiny flowers — result of having grown up spending every free moment wandering in the woods. You don’t so much get that in Orange County. There is a particular charm about looking out the lodge window and seeing deer grazing 10 feet away. About seeing a black bear lumbering through the meadow. About a hundred varieties of tiny wildflowers. And of course, those incredible trees. Now here come the highlights:

Wholesome Family Activity: The most major undertaking was a tour of Crystal Cave, which was really breathtaking although in retrospect, I sort of wish we’d just bought some postcards instead. The inside of the cave is eerily beautiful, with rushing streams inside, and the park ranger was very nice although very, very verbose. The main problem I had with the Cave was the steep 3/4-mile hike on a dirt trail to get down there — and, of course, back. The altitude differential is over 300 feet and most of it is unfenced, with a drop of a few hundred feet as your reward if you lose your footing. I just don’t take well to spending every step terrified one of my kids will fall off a fucking mountain.

Is This A Felony? Probably: Both Matt and Boolie ended up having to take a whiz along the trail back from the Cave (no restrooms for hours). It’s probably a felony to take out your dick in a National Park, although if you’re a government official such as a Senator, probably not. Perhaps it’s even required.

Study In Personality Contrasts: Sam completed the requirements for a Junior Park Ranger badge, which involved a bunch of nature observation and completion of a little workbook. After he was sworn in and received his badge, I turned to Matt and asked if he would like to be a Park Ranger too. Matt’s response? Nah, I don’t want to work so much. Rock on, my hippie slacker dude. This, in a nutshell, is the difference between Sam and Matt.

Inappropriate Comedy Moment: Just after climbing back into the van outside the Visitor Center, I turned to Ben and howled God, that woman’s ass was gigantic. Not realizing that Ben had just wound down the window so that everyone in the parking lot could hear every word I said. I spent the remainder of the trip hiding behind things in case I had to face her again. But dudes: That was one big ass. I mean preposterously disproportionate.

Barf-O-Matic: The drive home was extremely vomit-intensive. Take a bow, Matt and Boolie. I now get to spend most of tomorrow devising ways to rid my cloth upholstery (WHY the hell didn’t I spring for leather?) of extremely noxious stains and odors. Bool, in fact, was sweet enough to give us an encore performance after our late lunch in Bakersfield. While I was trying to clean things up as best I could, some stupid bitch tried to panhandle me in the Arco parking lot and received my full wrath for her troubles. (In retrospect, I should have offered her five bucks if she’d clean up the yarp.)

What We’ve Learned: Probably nothing. But next trip = nice flat, shortish drive to Palm Springs.

Roxanne Hack of the Orange County Register wrote a column this week about hating mommy conversations — how just because you have a kid, everyone assumes you’re interested in everyone else’s kid, their bowel movements, their teething issues. Roxanne hit that one out of the park. Oh, I blog about my own kids, a lot — too much. I’ll mention them on Facebook. That’s the beauty of the Internet: you can close the window, ignore the post, choose not to read. But in realspace, please don’t hit me with the mommy talk.

Waiting to pick the kids up from school, I sit on the schoolyard benches with my nose buried in a history book on the Kindle. The rest of the moms are chatting in little groups. About what? Cupcakes? The PTA? Play dates? Who knows. If they would like to discuss criminology, or foreign policy during the Kennedy administration, I’m their girl. But I get the feeling they don’t. Shit, just for reading a book instead of chatting, they look at me like I’m from another planet.

I’m not totally lacking in mom friends, of course. I have my Facebook buds, and also a private online group of longtime Internet mom friends I hand-picked for their wit, intellect and lack of female cattiness. We talk about our kids, sure, but we also talk about everything else from our careers to sex to religion to our sons’ equipment to politics to our coochies. I’m not going to find that level of discourse on the playground, and besides: these girls aren’t going to ask me to pick up their kids from school or expect me to sit in their kitchens sipping coffee. I like it this way.

I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy, of course. I spent my entire early childhood catching turtles, snakes and crawdads in the woods. At parties, I don’t hang with the women in the kitchen, I hang with the guys — that’s where all the fun is, the dirty jokes and sports talk. I’m pretty damned comfortable with who I am. I just wonder if my kids would prefer a normal mom? A classroom-volunteering, cupcake-baking, SUV-driving, scrapbooking, coupon-clipping kind of mom? Does it bother them that their mom is, well, not like the other mommies?

My grownup daughter, who should know because I really haven’t changed, says it’s okay — she wouldn’t have wanted me to try to be like that, and I’d have done a bad job if I tried. I hope she’s right. I hope for my kids, hikes and tarantulas outweigh the lack of cupcakes and volunteerism.

Next Monday the family leaves on an abbreviated vacation to Sequoia National Park. This an extremely beautiful place, and I’m looking forward to going back there, because I haven’t been in, Lord, 14 years? But travel with three small kids can be extremely daunting, and I’m anticipating the trip with a mixture of pleasure and trepidation.

I did the smart thing and made reservations at the Wuksachi Lodge, even springing for the deluxe room. We were going to go with the rustic cabins, which are much more economical, but which can best be defined as mostly like a tent, but with walls and electricity. I worried, with the kids, though. We had an adventure in camping nearly three years ago which still gives me nightmares. So I’m playing it smart.

But Sequoia is, well, a national park located in the middle of scenic nowhere. It’s nearly a five-hour drive, and the kids just aren’t used to that stuff. They complained plenty about the length of the trip the last time we went to San Diego. In general, here are my fears:

• The kids will start complaining on the way up there, which will drive Ben crazy while he’s trying to drive because they complain in three-part harmony, and boy are they good at it. And where is there to stop on the way? Ha. Mostly nowhere, or places which are even worse than nowhere.
• Boolie will have to pee every five miles, and little girls just aren’t good at peeing by the side of the road.
• The kids will get to Sequoia and say, in essence, Right. Big trees. Cave. We’re bored. Can we go home and play Wii now?
• We will all be eaten by a bear, and I’m a huge fan of not being eaten by a bear.
• Although at least if we are eaten by a bear, the kids won’t be able to complain they’re bored.
• The food will be both abysmal and expensive, and there are extremely limited dining options in the park.
• I will forget to pack something extremely key, for which a replacement won’t be available in the park.
• The van will malfunction somewhere along the way.

That about covers it. It’ll probably be a good trip, but at this point, imaging how many things could go wrong, I’m pretty much shittin’ kittens. If was just Ben and me, we’d get by. But when you start traveling with kids, it’s a whole new ball game.

I somtimes have problems with late May and early June, because I spend the whole time waiting for things. Waiting for the NHL finals to be over, because every year that is a super-huge deal to me. Waiting for the school year to be over, because although the last day of school isn’t until June 19, this is the fuck-you time of year, commemorated by Open House — which is tomorrow night, and which is the annual Woodland Elementary aren’t you glad this crap is almost done? celebration. We are looking forward to lots of late nights goofing around, watching too much TV and playing Wii. Oh wait, we’re doing that shit already. We’re all about late-spring fever.

The year goes by so quickly — I don’t mean the calendar year but the school year, which starts at the first breath of Labor Day and ends approximately now (or five minutes ago, if you ask us). The summer goes by in an eyeblink. We have a trip to Sequoia planned for the Monday after school ends, followed by a trip to La Quinta [Palm Springs area] for July 6-9 to celebrate Sam’s 8th birthday. No sooner do we get back from La Quinta than the Orange County Fair starts, lasting a month, on the heels of which are Boolie’s 4th birthday, Erika’s 25th, and then — gasp — the first day of school. All this is punctuated with trips to beach and pool. Summer is always a blur.

So I guess we’re lucky to have a pause right now. The boys’ school rather wisely suspends and/or lightens homework for the kids in June, and waiting out the end of the NHL season always goes by too fast. Meanwhile, we’ll welcome home our new baby, a juvenile pink-toed tarantula, who is due home tomorrow morning. You gotta love spider babies: they don’t require expensive car seats and don’t scream in your ear all night. Which is appropriate for the time of year when we all stop to take a breath before the next round of family life begins.

Wait. Do I still have a blog here? Well, my God, of course I do. Except when I don’t. But Woodland Elementary School has gone into its usual end-of-school-year posture of standing on my neck and standing on it hard.

California has a legally mandated free school guarantee. Theoretically, my children are meant to attend school for free; due to the fact that Ben is disabled and I’m presently unemployed, they even get a free lunch. (And they say there is no such thing!) But even public schools always have their hand out. At the end of the year, for some reason, they hit us up especially hard.

Today was the Woodland Elementary Jog-A-Thon, where kids run laps for money with nothing to show for it but the free T-shirt. I pledged $25 per child — a pretty typical amount. Just this past Saturday, the Kaiser-Woodland carnival was held, whereby all the kids at both schools were exhorted to eat and drink and play, proceeds to benefit both schools. Last week I shelled out $10 each for two Woodland T-shirts for the boys. Every Friday they have Spirit Day, at which time (surprise!) everyone is expected to wear their Woodland shirts.

Next week is Open House. That will involve the Book Fair, which benefits both Scholastic and the schools, and a burgers ‘n’ chips dinner supplied for free by a local merchant and paid for generously by the parents, proceeds to the schools. Not to mention the end-of-year teacher gifts and the snacks for Jog-A-Thon and so on and on and on.

I’m not really complaining. (Or am I? I believe I’ve just kvetched at length.) We are fortunate to have a world-class school district with extraordinary teachers and maximum 20-child classes. Compare that to LAUSD which has teachers who border on illiteracy and class sizes of 30 or so. Newport-Mesa USD relies largely on local property taxes, which are hefty, meaning that we haven’t been touched by the waves of teacher layoffs that have touched other districts in the county. The fallout is a bit daunting — I had to attend a brief meeting and provide three forms of proof of residency and property ownership last month just to keep our boys in NMUSD schools — but the benefits are considerable.

Still, I’ll be glad when a month has gone by and they stop squeezing us for this year. The last day of school is June 19. For my boys and for my checkbook, it can’t come early enough.

Over the weekend we again went to San Diego for a mini-vacation — to please Sam, we chose a less Mexican part of town. We stayed at the Embassy Suites San Diego Bay, near to Seaport Village, sort of near to the Gaslamp Quarter. It was the best compromise I could find between a potential flophouse and the fucking Ivy.

I have to admit, I was gratified at how kid-friendly the place turned out to be. The desk clerk wisely put us on the 12th floor, at the very top of the hotel, and all three of them adored zooming up and down the atrium wall in the glass elevators. There is an indoor pool, which impressed them, and the hot tub was relaxingly full of parents and kids rather than yuppies sipping cognac. The evening manager’s reception (happy hour) and the morning full breakfast, both of which are complimentary, were enough of a free-for-all that no one paid much attention to my little darlings.

The biggest challenge of the weekend was helping Boolie to navigate. The hotel and Horton Plaza were full of sights that boggled her little mind, and she walked around with her head in a swivet the entire time. What she forgot was to face forward while walking, with the result that she walked smack into a number of people and things. The worst of these was a solid palm tree trunk in Horton Plaza; I narrowly steered her away from a nasty-looking metal signpost just before she made painful contact.

The main purpose of the weekend, really, was to meet up with an old undergrad friend of mine I hadn’t seen in upward of 30 years. And not just any undergrad friend, either; he was one of my classmates in the Freshman Honors Program at the University of Delaware, an experiment in what would happen if you took a bunch of propellerheads out of high school a year early, plopped them together in a rarefied university setting away from home, and fed them a diet of all-honors courses and colloquia. (The answer to this was Lots of partying, allnighters and sex, but it’s also true that many lifelong interests and friendships were formed in the process.)

(Editor’s knote: For those of you who may be wondering, the classmate in question was one Philip Stanley. Take a bow, darlin’.)

Anyway, it was a fun reunion. I don’t go to school reunions, and when you’re seeing a classmate you haven’t seen in 30 years, you’re understandably nervous, hoping they don’t think you’re too decrepit or too much of a fuck-up or that your kids are fucking obnoxious. Philip was — is — a dear friend, and therefore not prone to the sort of snark that infests most reunion situations. Either way, he seemed to like my kids and hit it off with Ben, and there was none of that long-pause awkwardness that can happen when two reuniting old friends discover they don’t really have much of anything to say. True to FHP tradition, we stayed up way too late drinking white wine, and duly felt like walking dogshit the next morning.

But the true highlight of the weekend — sorry, Embassy Suites and sorry, Philip — was the she-crab soup. I have already had on about this on Facebook, but like anyone with a new love, I’m over the moon and must speak and speak of it. There are very few foods you want to eat in a dark room with your eyes closed; much of the time, I really don’t like food all that much. It is messy and time-consuming and often not worth the trouble. This stuff, though, rocked my world. I had it at the Harbor House restaurant at Seaport Village, and I’m eternally grateful to my Southern friends for tipping me off that such a thing exists, and that it is probably the food they serve in Heaven.

I’ve spent a few hours in the ensuing days Googling and Googling until my fingers are sore to find a place in Orange County which serves the stuff. The best I’ve been able to do is a fish market on the Redondo Beach pier which sells not the soup, but actual she-crabs, according to rumor. You probably don’t want to imagine the spectacle of me struggling with any crab more complex than a king crab leg; substantial swearing and cut fingers are involved in the process, with very little actual meat as the reward. Still, it may come to that. Honest to God, if you haven’t had the stuff, go out and correct this mistake immediately. You’ll thank me.

So today it’s back to reality, the boys back to school and me to my loads of laundry and neglected housework. Our next getaway isn’t until Sequoia National Park right after summer vacation starts, and now that we’re getting the family travel thing down to a science (and have time on our hands due to our unemployed and/or disabled states), it’s hard to stay home. Plus I’m such a lazy bitch that the prospect of having people make the beds and pick up the towels is really, really appealing. Either way, it was a good weekend, and I imagine we’ll be back. If only for the she-crab soup.

Sometime after we arrived solidly in middle age, Ben and I separately became aware that we each had become invisible to the opposite sex. You know, when you’re younger, guys or girls passing on the street meet your eyes, they smile. As you get older, you don’t look to strangers like someone they’d like to meet; you look like their dentist. I’m 48 and have had four kids. Ben is 53, somewhat overweight, and prematurely grey. We look like someone’s parents. He’s invisible to girls and I’m invisible to guys. It’s been that way for so long we can’t remember any other way.

Except that recently I picked up some black capri pants. They’re really sort of an exercise tight, I suppose, which is sort of funny if you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen the inside of the gym. But they’re comfortable, and rather form-fitting. Ben opened his eyes wide the first time he saw me in them. Those pants are very flattering, he said. And I caught him staring at my ass for the first time in years. Strange.

Then today I wore those same pants to the grocery store and noticed that suddenly I was visible to men. Every guy I encountered who wasn’t actually in the company of a woman smiled and said Hi to me. Not just senior citizens, either. Guys in their 20s, even. Seven or eight of them. At first I didn’t even realize it was me they were talking to, but unless they had imaginary friends, it was me. I hardly knew how to react anymore. After a few minutes I got the hang of a faint return smile and a quiet Hi back. It was insanely freaky.

Because, of course, I didn’t suddenly turn human. I didn’t suddenly turn female. I just put on some pants that made my ass look good. Those guys weren’t saying hi to me; they were saying hi to my ass. They didn’t even care, apparently, about the clearly fortysomething woman accompanying that ass. And I don’t know which is more pathetic: that fact, or how secretly pleased I was at the attention.

Meanwhile, of course, I’m buying seven more pairs of these pants and will not take them off until someone pries them off my cold, dead ass.

Of course I didn’t mean I would stop blogging. You think I’m ever going to shut up? Think again, flyboy. I have Serious Issues to consider! Like what to do with the black eye Boolie gave me last weekend. (I leaned down to hug her just as she suddenly snapped her head up and bounced it off my browbone.)

This is a serious, serious black eye. Immediately there was a bruise visible on the browbone, and by the next morning it had burst forth in blue and purple from my eyebrow to an inch below my eye. That thing is — was, as it’s finally starting to fade — fucking spectacular. Watching a black eye evolve is like watching a sunset. The shifting patterns, the changing hues. From blue and purple to yellow and green and then to a sort of maroon as it prepares to fade. Lovely.

But here’s the problem. I figure that anyone who doesn’t know us will take one look at me and assume either that I pulled an Amy Winehouse and staggered into something (fist? door? could be anything with that broad), or that Ben popped me one. Which reminds me of a joke. What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? — Nothing. You already told her twice. (And yes, yes, I know domestic violence is not funny, and hereby issue this disclaimer blah blah blah.)

Anyway. So if we are for example having lunch somewhere, should I explain my eye to the waitress when she comes to our table? It seems I shouldn’t, but you have to figure she’ll be wondering about it all through lunch. Possibly the entire wait staff will be wondering: Hmm, she doesn’t look like a loadie. Nor like Nicole Brown Simpson, for that matter. Perhaps she’s part raccoon?

Rather than explain, I’ve taken to keeping my Ray-Bans on indoors when anywhere besides home. This sometimes makes it hard to navigate, and also, it must make me look like some tourist trying to be all California cool. So should I explain that? No, I’m not an asshole, I just have a black eye. But I don’t want you to see it. That’s why the sunglasses. Or something. Ordinarily I don’t give a damn what anyone thinks, but a black eye is one of those things that just screams Think something!

And the eye makeup problem is a real bitch, too. I have to wear eye makeup — trust me, I do. So do I put makeup on both eyes? The bruised one seems to have quite enough colorful pizzazz already, but I don’t want to be asymmetrical. Perhaps I should have blacked the left eye as well, to match? Well, too late.

I told you I had serious issues on my mind.

My good friend Mark of Going Like Sixty, who is mostly absent from Facebook although a member, warned me about this. Facebook and Twitter are going to result in the death of blogging. It’s just way too convenient to post a 20-second tweet or Facebook update rather than actually sit down and think out a chunk of something well-organized and meaningful. If you look at my blogroll, which I have not updated since approximately the dawn of time, you may notice that a lot of my reads have left off blogging altogether in the past year or two.

Part of the reason for this is probably that a lot of people I know write for a living at least to some extent. Oh, I only can claim to know one novelist on a personal level, and that largely because we nursed babies simultaneously. But a lot of my friends write for at least some portion of their gainful employment, and there is the endless legal writing that consumes us legal types, even though we’re not writers as such. Many of us are eager to take a break from writing, not to escape into it, for God’s sake.

Either way, people don’t much want to take the time for words, or an attention span, anymore. We’re all about Twitter and Susan Boyle and 15 minutes of fame, little dribs and drabs of this and that. No time, no commitment. Even as I write this, I’m losing interest in writing it (although this may be in large part for the reason that all three of my young kids are simultaneously running around screaming like loons). Even when they’re not distracting me, there are the glugs of arriving e-mails and the pops of arriving chat messages. And that’s for someone like me — a total misanthropic bitch! I can’t imagine the distraction level for people of normal socialization.

I don’t want to make the point I’m trying to make for fear of lapsing into a reverie about the good old days of snail mail and network television and morning and evening newspapers. But I think it’s pretty obvious. The Internet is a two-edged sword, and people have the attention span of gnats. A bunch of years ago I was on the cutting edge of blogging. Now I’m on the cutting edge of being too lazy to blog anymore. And I’m not at all sure this is a good thing.

See y’all on Facebook.