Saturday, June 4, 2011

6-4-2011



Every weekend requires eating breakfast somewhere. Today, we ate at Jim's Open Kitchen which is called that for a pretty obvious reason. Now yesterday I said that the main picture was for a reason. The reason wasn't that I ate the crayfish though. The reason is because today we're going creek hiking and crayfish hunting with friends. So expect lots of pictures of crayfish. Some have interesting markings. All of them like to give one claw crayfish high fives though. Actually, they seem to lose their claws kind of a lot. I think it's pretty forgetful of them to accidentally misplace an appendage, but you don't have to feel bad for them; they can grow little replacement ones. Look how quickly it grew back!. We found huge ones like this one and tiny stuff like this clear shell from an insect molting and this baby butterfly. We also found tons of gross leeches but made sure that they didn't find us. I wore my new nerd shoes, which I'm well aware make me look ridiculous, but I think they're the best thing ever for walking on wet rocks. So this post is going to get a little "Discover Channel when the pack of lions eat the poor cute zebra baby" now, so sorry in advance if you're squeamish. I think it's cool. So as we were walking, I saw a weird fish pointed diagonally coming straight at me over a rock. I'm not an expert on fish propulsion, but I didn't think that they're able to move this way. As I got closer, I saw that it was a water snake dragging a catfish out of the water. The catfish was almost as big as the snake, but it didn't care and really wanted to eat it even though it couldn't figure out how to fit the fish into its mouth. I think we watched it try for about an hour while we built a corral for the biggest crayfish we caught. Then we let them go home. Here' are some pretty waterfall pictures to make up for the snake and catfish. Pretty. I made the waterfall less pretty. On the way back though the woods, I used this waterfall as inspiration and peed on the rocks. Oh yeah, we saw a giant carp (in the creek not my pee), but I could only get a picture of its scales.

Hiking and creek walking are some of my favorite summer time activities...almost as much as drinking gin and tonics on a patio. Another activity that we're continuing into summer is Cheeseburger Tour. This one was made out of buffalo and I promise it tasted better than it looks. The ultimate activity for this summer is Jeni's Ice cream though (yeah, it's an activity now not a place). I think I have a picture of Nicole eating ice cream from every weekend for the past month. To keep things interesting, they're getting bigger and bigger.