I am back from my cross-country road trip!
I promised that I would update my blog along the way, and even brought my computer with me to do so, but never had the time at the end of our long days to post. Now that the trip is over, I feel overwhelmed by the task of summarizing the trip. I have hundreds of pictures, and fifteen days of experiences, and six different National Parks, to cover, and I’m not sure how I’ll do that. But rest assured, I am working on it!
This weekend, Mike and I took a trip up to Hiawassee to spend a few days together before I head out of town for two weeks without him. (My parents and brother and I are going on a road trip through some of the national parks out west, starting tomorrow!) An additional purpose for the trip was to go to a little Fourth of July reunion of my Van Nus relatives (my Mema’s family– my paternal grandmother’s side of the family), organized by my cousin Katie and her husband, Eddie.
The party was held in Katie and Eddie’s front yard, possibly the greatest front yard in the history of yards.
We all grilled up some good food and hung out together, and Mike was not scared off by yet another day of hanging out with my relatives.
And we played Washers! Here is our dazzling hostess, Katie, taking her turn, and to her left is the only one of us who exhibited any real skill at the game, Donna, who got the only two ringers of the whole day.
The party wound down later in the afternoon and just a few of us remained to sit around in the sunset and grill some more food for dinner.
I have the best family EVER. And this is only one part of it!
At one point during the day, I told the story of the fateful Fourth of July of 2008, where my father and my Uncle Jeff almost killed me. It is a pretty good story, so I shall retell it here, with visual aids!
We are, I would say, a bigger than average fireworks family. 2010 has been a rare exception for me. What happened two years ago was, Dad and Jeff had developed the genius plan of duct taping fireworks to a frisbee, lighting the fuse, and then throwing the frisbee.
This turned out to be pretty cool, as it made what would ordinarily just have been a vertical explosion into a much faster-moving vertical AND horizontal explosion. They did this many times, changing their taping and positioning strategy each time to achieve maximum impressiveness.
Dad and Jeff were already in Big Trouble with my mother, because they allowed my cousin’s boyfriend Logan, who possibly had never thrown a frisbee before in his life, to throw one of these dangerous projectiles, and it sailed directly under my grandfather (Dzia-Dzia)’s lawn chair and exploded. Dzia-Dzia at the time was recovering from cancer and major surgery and was not able to dash away shrieking from the explosion beneath him, which is what any other person would have done. So, my mother was slightly displeased, shall we say, and there had already been some yelling, as I recall, but somehow, the antics were allowed to continue.
Now, with the exception of the fateful Dzia-Dzia Chair incident, all of these frisbee-rigged fireworks had taken a quite similar trajectory down the length of our street and exploded harmlessly somewhere near the end of our driveway. I had been taking plenty of photos and videos all evening, which is why my father–my own father!–suggested that I go stand way down at the end of the road so that I could get a video of the frisbee fireworks coming towards me.
I was skeptical, but they assured me– “No, go stand WAY at the end of the road. There is no way it’s going to go that far, have any of the OTHER ones gone that far?” I admitted that they had not, and proceeded to the end of the road.
You can probably see where this is going; luckily, I did capture the whole experience on camera.
Nothing quite says fatherly love and patriotism quite like hurling explosives at your own child and then having a good laugh about it!
Anyway, a good time was had by all this weekend, and I have spent today relaxing in the comfort of my own home, which I will shortly be leaving–to go on our long-awaited national parks trip! I will be bringing my computer along to update you all on the events as they unfold, so check back here throughout the next two weeks for updates, and if you would like a postcard, send me your address and I’ll send you one!
Well, the month of June ends in 36 minutes, so I’d better give at least some blog attention to the positive occurrences of this month, before it’s too late!
Kevin, Kelly, and John, watching the show
First of all, early this month my friends Skull and Bone Band had a CD release party at one of Tampa’s best music venues, Skipper’s Smokehouse. It was their first time playing there, and they had a huge turnout– I think that almost every person in Tampa that I know walked past the bench where my recently-injured self was parked that night. It was a great show, too! My attendance at band performances was once a weekly occurrence, but in the past year I had gone to not one of their shows. I regret that, now, because I learned at the CD release party that supporting your friends’ band is more than just showing you care, listening to their music and contributing to their earnings by paying the entry fee. There is also participating in the vast fellowship of friends that such events create, and feeling connected to a large group of both friends and otherwise strangers who are all–somehow!– a part of the same great web of personal and creative associations that you are, and who have all come to participate in this one happening. When I listen to a big famous band like Led Zeppelin, I am just listening to great music, but when I listen to a band that friends of mine have created, like the Skull and Bone Band, I am also listening to the sounds of a happy community. It is pretty great!
Shortly after the Skull and Bone show, Mike and I had a party for a long-lost friend, also named Mike, who moved to Japan about three years ago and came back for his first visit in all that time. I managed to not get any decent pictures of him.
But here is a picture of a happy Chelsey!
And someone got this shot of Anthony and I discussing a lawn mushroom.
My friend Jeff recently purchased a fixer-upper type of house, afflicted mainly by the interior design efforts of the previous owners, who had absurdly poor taste and did things like paint over pretty stone walls and doors and bathtubs and other things that are best left unpainted. Jeff decided to use the house as an opportunity to teach himself how to do things like build walls, lay tile, install kitchen cabinets, etc. Having spent several months hard at work, he had some friends over to watch the World Cup, and to check out the progress. (Many of those friends had actually been helping with the progress, though I was not one of them.)
Jeff, describing the tile backsplash that will one day adorn that wall.
Jessica, Anthony, and Schuman (of Skull and Bone Band fame)
A man and his dog, fast asleep
Father’s Day also happened this month, and I had an especially good Father’s Day weekend. I traveled across the state to Vero, where I went to the doctor and was given a much smaller foot brace and encouraged to ride my bike as part of my recovery exercise routine, much to my great joy! Next, my dad and I spent the day in Ft. Lauderdale, where we celebrated my grandpa’s 85th birthday and spent time with all of my aunts and uncles, and 67% of my cousins. (First cousins, that is.) This was topped off by a visit to Chez Porky’s, a restaurant that has reached legendary status in my life and deserves a post all it’s own: anything less than pages of carefully crafted, glowing accolades is simply not doing it justice. I mean, raspberry hot wings? Come. On. It’s incredible.
Anyway, the day after that, my parents and I celebrated Father’s Day by watching old westerns on TV and then having Dzia-Dzia over for a feast.
A feast that included sweet potato fries.
That night, we set up my tent inside the house, as part of our preparations for our long-awaited family camping/road trip this summer, a trip that is now a mere six days away, and I can hardly stand the excitement!
Last Sunday, Mike and I spent all day with Kevin and Kelly, who acquired a new barbecue grill. (Actually, Kevin and Mike acquired a new barbecue grill; Kelly and I went shopping for shoes. But do not let that give you the impression that I am not just as serious about barbecue as any man.) In honor of this purchase, we and Jeff and Anne Marie and all of the canine friends that collectively live among us had a big cookout/dinner gathering.
It was wonderful! I am never quite as happy as I am when I am eating food with friends.
Lastly, my diploma arrived in the mail.
I am very proud of this document, which I worked so hard for. The fact that it specifies “American History” makes me feel a rush of excitement. For so long I have wanted to know everything there is to know about American History, and while I certainly don’t know even one percent of everything there is to know, I often become convinced that I do not know ANYTHING, at least not anything worthwhile. But look, there it is, printed on that paper: I do know something! A lot of something! This is assurance that I ought to be able to have without looking at a diploma, but it’s a different kind of feeling, I guess, to have it on paper.
It also puts a smile on my face to see that it is dated May 7. My graduation was May 8, but May 7 would have been my Mema’s 83rd birthday. She died two years ago now, but if she is out there looking down upon me, she is proud of me, I know. She didn’t get to go to college when she was young, so she went as an adult, receiving her PhD in Literature from the University of Miami when she was 47 years old.
She didn’t expect her grandchildren to follow in her footsteps, or anything, but she and I were always close, and I know that this particular accomplishment of mine would really have put a smile on her face.
Anyway, June has been a somewhat torturous month what with the injuries, accidents, and sicknesses, but as you can see, plenty of great things happened as well. And July promises to be fantastic!
It specifically says in my apartment lease that I am not allowed to hang a clothesline on my back porch. No, if I want clothes dried, I can take them to one of the complex’s two laundry rooms, or I can hang them to dry inside my apartment, but I may not hang a clothesline outside.
I am of the belief that if you own your own business, you can have whatever silly rules you want, and by choosing to patronize that business, I agree to follow your silly rules. But last weekend, I was getting ready to go away for a few days, and time had gotten away from me a bit. I had wanted to pack an outfit that included some clothes of the air-dry-only variety, but they needed to be washed first. Hung inside my house, they’d take all day to dry (and I didn’t have all day), but hung out in the blazing hot Florida sun, they’d dry in about twenty minutes. So, I hung a clothes line, and those clothes were dry in about twenty minutes.
It’s so silly, I realized, to pay good money to dry clothes in a clothes dryer that is hard on the clothing and makes it wear out quicker, that is also contributing to our dependence on oil and wrecking the environment, when I live in a state that is basically a giant clothes dryer 12 months a year (as long as you watch out for those summer afternoon thunderstorms). The idea that I needed to run to the bank to cash in another $10 for a roll of laundry room quarters to dry my laundry seemed extremely ridiculous to me at that moment. So I set aside my belief in the right of businesspeople to make their own ridiculous rules, and I left up my clothesline, where I dried some more things.
A notice quickly appeared, stuck on my front door: Please remove the clothesline on your porch, it said. There are two laundry rooms available for you within the apartment complex. The only things you may have on your porch are patio furniture and decorative plants. You may not hang a clothesline.
At first I had many visions of myself making some sort of valiant stand for clotheslines in my community, but I’ll probably just go back to hanging clothes to dry inside the house. Because private business owners are free to make whatever silly rules they want, and I did sign the lease knowing full well that clotheslines were forbidden. Still, this incident has left me pondering the curious way in which activities that are good for our environment and are often LESS work than the more environmentally damaging practices we’ve become accustomed to have been depicted these days.
Why doesn’t my apartment complex want me to hang a clothesline? I believe that it is because clothes hung outside makes the complex look unkempt and visually unpleasant. It’s understandable that they–and their residents–would want to live in a visually pleasing community, but why has the sight of line-dried clothes become something deemed trashy-looking? Is it because it makes people think that poor people live here, people who cannot afford to go to the laundromat, and our society is so profoundly classist that we think appearing to lack the money to blow on conveniences is somehow negative, unworthy, and to be avoided at all costs?
In a related issue, a good friend of mine also lives in this apartment complex, and he has recieved repeated warnings of a similar nature to my clothesline notice, instructing him to clean up his garden, which has become overgrown with unsightly weeds. Except, his garden isn’t overgrown with unsightly weeds. It is a much-cared-for collection of plants that are native to this area. The plants attract butterflies and hummingbirds, and thrive in this, their natural climate. Inspired by this friend, I have planted some native Florida plants in my own garden, and they have grown heartily ever since, even when I completely neglected them–whereas the many non-native plants I planted simply because I liked the way they looked have mostly just died after a few months.
What do these two incidents– the anti-clothesline and the anti-native plants incidents– say about the place I live and the place we all live in?
Does it say that living a TRULY “green” lifestyle (not the pretend green lifestyle advertised by new SunChips packaging and recycled paper towels) is associated with being poor and dirty, and is therefore unacceptable?
Does it say that people have absolutely no idea how unnecessarily wasteful their lives are, to the point that simple, effortless activities that happen to benefit the environment with no obvious negatives (except possibly waiting a bit longer for dry clothes) are seen as strange and inappropriate?
Does it say that we’ve become trained to turn automatically to wasteful “conveniences” like expensive clothes dryers when in reality, hanging a shirt out in the backyard is quicker, easier, cheaper, and just as effective? Or that we’ve learned subconsciously that anything that appears without human help, like plants that have not been arranged into a carefully landscaped bank, is somehow in need of our improvements, and if these improvements are neglected, we will seem –god forbid– “poor”?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. I’m just thinking about them, these days.
You can tell that I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately, because I have been watching lots of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and I have also been thinking of ways that I can rearrange all of my furniture.
The Dick Van Dyke Show is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. Though its representations of husband/wife relationships would be unacceptable in today’s post-Feminist Movement world, Laura Petrie’s life seems, to me, a wonderful ideal. Probably, the realities of her life would be far more complicated, but when I watch the show, I can escape my own stresses, uncertainties, and concerns by becoming absorbed in a pleasant vision of myself as a contented housewife and mother.
Plus, I can dance.
Furniture rearranging is another way I deal with feeling blue, because if I feel unsure about life and at a loss to control its trajectory, I can at least control the placement of my couch, altering its position on a whim to meet my immediate furniture location-related desires. At least, that’s what I did when I lived alone–or even with roommates, limited to my own bedroom in that case. But now, I can’t use this technique as a stress reliever anymore, because of a certain person I have decided to share all of my space and possessions with.
Certain people prefer to have all of their things in the same place when they come home from work as when they left the house that morning, and are not willing to acknowledge the therapeutic value of total home redecoration, noticing only the stress-inducing qualities of suddenly having to go to a different side of the room to find your underwear drawer. I have decided that these feelings are reasonable, and I will not move all of our furniture around. And not just because all of the furniture that Mike contributed to our apartment is extremely heavy and not conducive to my pushing about the room whenever I want (my furniture, by contrast, is very light and also probably scuffed on the bottom from dozens of quick relocations). No, I’ve decided that Mike is right, and as roommates I must respect his desire to have things in one spot for months at a time. Instead, I have taken to downloading cool iPod applications that let me enter the precise measurements of all of our rooms and furniture, and then move the digital models of my things all around the digital apartment floor plan. It is not quite the same, but in the interest of being respectful of the man I love, I suppose it will have to do.
The question remains, though– why am I feeling depressed? Here, I will show you.
On Memorial Day, I was rushing around trying to get ready for the barbecue we had, when I fell into the following drainage ditch:
Now, this is a drainage ditch that I step over every single time I am walking to or from the laundry room or the pool. I could avoid it by taking the actual road, but the back way is much shorter, and the only possible obstacle is this one drainage ditch, which would not be much of an obstacle, really, to anyone who had much walking experience. Walking experience that I wrongly believed myself to have.
Gravity and clumsiness came together on Memorial Day. While dashing out to pick up the load of clothes I had over at the laundry room, I stumbled into the aforementioned ditch. My first thought was, “I hope that I am within shouting distance of my apartment, because I don’t have my cell phone, but I definitely cannot walk.”
My second thought was, “Guests are about to arrive, and my house is still a mess.” Hostessing urges took over, and I proceeded to get my laundry, return home, clean up my house, shower, dress, and then, once guests arrived, play a game of horseshoes, go for a swim, and then–in excruciating pain by this time–hobble slowly back home.
And now I have to wear this boot.
It is pretty depressing, because it is the middle of summer and temperatures are soaring up into the nineties every afternoon, but no matter what I wear, the boot is uncomfortably hot and sweaty, so instead I stay inside. The gulf is filling up with oil, but I cannot swim in the last of the clear waters, because I would find it difficult to walk across the soft sand in this boot, and then I’d have to remove it and crawl from my beach towel to the water, which sounds embarrassing and unpleasant. Also, I am mostly unemployed and my days stretch out before me, no task requiring haste or a nice outfit, and yet I cannot ride my bike anywhere. Early morning bike rides through Wilderness Park while listening to hours of NPR podcasts and basking in the dappled shade of the trees are becoming a distant memory to poor old me. Plus, my family’s camping-road trip of the national parks out west is rapidly approaching, and I cannot help but wonder if I will miss out on the stunning vistas of Yellowstone because my injury makes hiking up a trail impossible. It is, to be frank, a total bummer.
Of course, I can still get around fine, and do almost every other activity I want to do. And my foot isn’t broken, it’s only sprained, so recovery should be coming along here in the fairly near future. There is really no reason for me to feel overly encumbered or upset about the injury. Plus, it has helped break the ice at job interviews.
As long as no one gets hurt and the only thing at stake is property damage (small potatoes when you look at the big picture), I think that in the world of car wrecks, it is far better to be the Crashed Into than the One Doing The Crashing. Luckily, that was the situation yesterday when a neighbor of mine inadvertently mauled my car as I was leaving my neighborhood.
I had not previously met this neighbor of mine before fate/poor judgment/having “one of those mornings” brought us together, but she was very apologetic and friendly and nice, so I think that I will have to say hi to her if I run into her (hah!) around the apartment complex.
You know, as long as the insurance payment comes through.
On one hand, it doesn’t really feel like anything has changed. On the other hand, my lifestyle these days basically involves four components: babysitting, reading books for fun, applying for jobs, and calculating how long it will take before my student loan money runs out. It is the paradise I imagined while I was studying for comps! So, I guess that it DOES feel like things have changed.
My brother and I graduated from two different schools on the same exact day. My parents decided to go to Boston for Greg’s graduation, since he wouldn’t have any family there otherwise, and my uncle Jeff and my cousins Erik and Andrew came to my graduation.
It was pretty great. After my parents and Greg got finished with the Berklee graduation ceremony (which was in the morning, whereas mine was in the evening), they flew down to Tampa real quick so that they could make it to Greg’s and my graduation party, which was very fun! Lots of people came, and the food was good, and my family and Mike’s family got to hang out all together for the first time, and there was that general mingling of normally-disparate groups of people from all different parts of my life, which I love.
All in all, a good day.
And then I went to Vero, to hang out with Greg before he went back to the freezing North.
We played golf with Dzia-Dzia (my maternal grandfather), and I got one of my all-time best scores (58 on nine holes… don’t judge me!).
I love living in a state where the standard urban wildlife can eat you.
Here’s my parents’ impressive new vegetable garden. It’s the first year (as far as I know) that they’ve done this, and it has already ruined me for store-bought lettuce.
Also, my dad gave me one of their many, many tomato plants, and now it is on my patio, producing fruit at a rapid pace.
Here are some photos where Greg and I pretend that we graduated together when in reality we just put our outfits back on for five minutes a couple days later, after a long argument about tassel placement:
And then Greg had to go home. And I had to go back to Tampa. But I did return a week later, to hang out with my all-time best pal on earth, Adrienne, who just graduated from law school at William and Mary.
I always miss her, and we never get to spend enough time together these days. But we did do some fun stuff: we went to the beach and then drank some rum runners at a table overlooking the river, we hung out and caught up on our lives and all the gossip, and best of all, we went to karaoke in Sebastian with my parents, Uncle Jeff, some of my dad’s work friends, and Mike, who came to town a few days after Adrienne did.
Here are my dad and his brother pretending to be the Blues Brothers:
Definitely this is something that we should do again!
Mike came to town to go fishing with my dad and myself. I do not really fish, I just lounge on the boat and read books and take pictures of the fish that are caught, which I like a lot better than fishing.
The men caught a bunch of fish, but nothing we could keep.
I also got to see a puffer fish puff up for the first time ever! I have seen lots of puffer fish, but never one involved in this kind of sweet puffing action:
I also went swimming for a while, which was awesome. I am trying to swim in the ocean as much as possible before the oil slick arrives (heavy sigh…)
And then Adrienne went back to Virginia, and Mike and I went back to Tampa. And now I am back to my regular schedule of babysitting, reading books for fun, applying for jobs, and calculating how long it will take before my student loan money runs out.
My parents’ house is infested with flying squirrels.
I guess “infested” is probably too strong a word. More like, a couple of them have decided to start living there.
It turns out that you could have flying squirrels living in your house right now and not even know it. They are very tiny, and nocturnal, and find their way in through small spaces (or big ones, like the dog door). They are smart enough to know that they can get in your house and eat your food while you’re asleep. They can even sleep in your house all day long and you’ll probably never find them, until they poop on the floor or chew up the cords of your electronics or your cat tries to eat them.
My parents have two dogs and a cat, so my mother in particular is looking to get rid of the squirrels before they have to mercy-kill one of them that one of the pets gnawed on for a while. It is much more pleasant to find them alive, like this guy (or gal) who we found a couple days ago.
If you have to have an annoying and hard-to-eliminate vermin infestation, it may as well be a cute one!
Most of the family vacations we went on in my youth were camping trips. My parents, my brother, my dad’s parents, and I traveled all around the Southeast together during my first decade of life. I was so little that my memories are not specific stories, but more indistinct collections of sights and feelings and smells, and because I was so little, these are the things that were ingrained in my developing brain as equaling total contentment and bliss, utter happiness and universal right-ness: campfires, sitting and listening to wind blow through the trees, the way the inside of a tent smells, being cold at night and hot in the daytime, being very quiet in hopes that some deer will emerge, swimming in a mountain lake trying to float very flat so as to only touch the sun-warmed surface of the water, watching bugs crawl across the leaves and sticks on the ground while you eat your dinner, and sitting in a whole entire world of darkness with just a little fire to illuminate your immediate surroundings. These are things I will never be able to disassociate from ultimate happiness (and why would I want to?).
Camping is the best.
I also spent my earliest years listening to a lot of the music of my parents’ generation. My parents were always really into music and I absorbed and internalized a love of the music of the 1960s and 1970s in the same way that I did for camping– due to near-constant exposure during my developmental years.
I have never known a world without music and camping.
I remember standing in the family room of the house in Ft. Lauderdale where I grew up. We were listening to the Allman Brothers Band.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“This is the Allman Brothers,” said my dad.
“THE ALMOND BROTHERS!” I said incredulously, envisioning that this band was pretty much the California Raisins, except with Almonds. “Why are they called that?”
“AllMAN,” dad said. “There are two guys in the band, and their last name is Allman.”
“Oh,” I said. And that is my earliest memory of the Allman Brothers Band.
For the past couple of years, the Allman Brothers Band have hosted a music festival called Wanee Fest at the Spirit of the Suwanee Music Park in Live Oak, Florida. I have wanted to go for a long time, but it happens in mid-April, exactly when exams happen and papers are due, and I was never able to go before. But this year, I knew I’d finish my work for the semester a lot earlier than normal, so I decided that it would be the year for Wanee.
Given my long familial history with music and camping, it seemed only right that my parents should come, too.
And so we went!
We found ourselves a sweet campsite way back in the woods.
It took about twenty minutes to walk back and forth between our campsite and the concert area.
And once we got there, we watched many excellent concerts. (Including!: Stephen Stills, Dr. John, Mofro, The Black Keys, Gov’t Mule, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, and of course the Allman Brothers Band–and many others, but those were the best!)
It is so wonderful to hang out amongst the trees, communing with hundreds of friendly strangers, who maybe are different from you on a normal day–but today, you are all dirty and smelly, and you all love trees and music, and it feels good to be there all together.
Fried pickles!
We also got to hang out with some of my excellent Tampa friends, who had come separately.
Including, but not limited to: Schuman!
…and Alex!
…and Anthony!
Perhaps it is strange of me, but there is nothing I like better than when my family and my friends all get to hang out together.
At night, we would go back to the campsite and make dinner.
And sometimes in the interest of good spots, I would have to take a nap in front of the stage between concerts.
It was, I must say, a completely fantastic weekend. I feel quite blessed to have parents who taught me about camping and music, and who are as much fun to hang out with as my friends are.
For about a week after comps were over, I took a break from work and indulged in all of the awesome things I wanted to do, but could not, during the months of studying. I sat on my patio and read a book for FUN. (It was Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen, by the way, and like most of his books, it was excellent!) I went for long bike rides. I went to the nail salon. But best of all, I got to go to the swamp with my friend Anna!
Anna is a grad student in biology at USF, and she studies salamander DNA. Every day, she gets to travel to Green Swamp, about an hour from campus, where she has set up salamander traps in the water. If the traps have caught any salamanders, she will cut a bit of their tails off to use as DNA samples. She usually takes along an assistant, and lucky for me, this assistant does not necessarily need to have any knowledge of science at all, nor do they have to be willing to touch any actual salamanders–they just have to be willing to put on some waders and slog around in the swamp! I have wanted to serve as swamp assistant ever since I found out that I met these stringent qualifications.
As my serious love of Carl Hiaasen books might indicate, I am a native Floridian and I totally love my state. Florida on the surface appears to be mostly a land of Disney World, gated subdivisions, people from New York, and corrupt politicians, and that aspect of it is growing bigger and bigger all the time. But we also have one of the most unique and diverse histories of any state, and there’s tons of sweet nature that hasn’t yet been filled with tract houses and strip malls. It’s not especially easy to find these days, but hunting down “Real Florida” is one of my hobbies. Swamp exploration is, I think, the ultimate Real Florida activity, and I will admit that I was completely unreasonably excited about it.
So, I met up with Anna on campus and we made the long drive to the swamp. Along the way, Anna, who I learned has eagle-like eyes when it comes to spotting creatures, saw a little snake in the road, so we stopped to look at it.
We (note: in this post, when I say “we” I mean “Anna”) put it in a bucket so that we could figure out what kind of snake it was.
It turned out he was a garter snake, thanks to many faint characteristics that I, unaccustomed to looking for snake characteristics, would never have seen even with the aid of a book. Having identified him, we set him free and proceeded on to the swamp!
This is one of the areas where Anna has set up salamander traps. The white posts you can see in the picture above are where the traps are–you can sort of see the black things at the top of the water: those are the traps.
Anna checked each trap to see if there were any salamanders inside. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any on this day, so I didn’t get to observe the tail-snipping sample-taking process, which was a bummer. But inside the traps, we did find water beetles, a small water snake, a couple spiders, and tons and tons of crayfish.
We also saw the biggest tadpole I have ever seen, but Anna tells me that this is actually a pretty small tadpole, as tadpoles go:
Sometimes I helped move some traps around, but mainly, my job was to walk around and look at stuff, which I did quite happily.
I think that my alternate purpose was to make it so that if a large alligator came and ate Anna, her body would not be lost forever in the swamp. Or at least, she would have someone to gruesomely die with. But those services were not needed, so mostly I just walked around. I also provided valuable assistance in bucket-holding and questions-asking.
So, all in all, it was a pretty great day! I’m really glad I went!
I am 25, but I probably have most of the same hobbies as your grandma. Nonetheless, I am content!