I'm in a much better mood now! :)

The title says it all!



Here's a few random things of interest:



-Non-traditional finger-snapping.

Phillip started it, you can blame him. It was the constant (k) at all rehearsals for the movie. He's there, snapping his fingers. Sophie picked it up. Then Dallan. Then I decided it would be a good project for the summer. It takes dedication.

Here's what you do: make the "OK" sign with your thumb and middle finger...flip your hand away from you, and as quickly, pull it back. Your index finger should snap against the two fingers pinched together. When done correctly, it will be at least as loud as a boring, traditional finger-snap.



This is the peak of geek-dom.



-I have semi-soft chickens. There are about a dozen half-grown birds running around, that were hatched a bit ago. Their father is the same but they mostly have different mothers...all the ones which are half-Silkie, however, have feathers which are tending towards the Silkie fluff. Hence semi-soft.



-"Dogs, like yin and yang..." One morning at the farmers' market my dad and I saw two dogs on a single tether, looped around a tent-pole. The tent was in imminent danger of going down, as they were pulling mightily. Thinking swiftly, he lifted up the pole--no owner was in sight. They went off swiftly through the crowd, still linked, and scarcely got twenty feet before nearly tripping someone. The owner never did show.

The dogs were the same breed, I think, big and fluffy, but one black and the other, white--hence the comment from my dad, "like yin and yang".



-Don't play Rock Paper Scissors anymore--it's a bit passe. Bear Salmon Mosquito is the cutting edge.

[okay, I got one from "The Geek's Guide to World Domination''.]





Other stuff: I took the goats out for a run, on their leashes. Then I let them off the leashes. Whilst I was practicing showmanship with Starlight, Fiona went off to the flowerbeds. THERE went one of my mom's cosmosi [I have a passion for correct plurals--'calenduli' is particularly fun.]

Tomorrow is the Owner Appreciation Day Sale at the local natural foods co-op. The Co-op is epic!! They just finished expanding the North Store. I've been shopping at the South [original] branch for as long as I can remember. The Co-op is an institution in my town...
anyway, there's a sale tomorrow, so it's time to stock up on essentials...pasta, cheese, yogurt, etc.

I was listening to some music today, and I wondered how many people have had "At the End of the End" [Beatles] played for their funerals.

Chopped a lot of thistles this morning. And slugs--from yesterday's rain.

And I just remembered that I didn't finish my "travel tales"!

Glacier Nat'l park...up the infamous "Going to the Sun" road--infamous, that is, for scary precipices. At one point there was a lot of road construction, and we had to stop right under a nice cliff, with overhanging rocks, and my dad said, "Don't worry, the cliff looks really stable right here."
And "You notice when you look over the cliff in this spot, the next thing you see is distance..."


Saw bear-grass and snow.
At one of our stops my mom said that the trash-cans must have been designed to baffle the omnipresent bears, but that they'd baffled her too.

Then there were the muskegs. Muskegs are common in Canada and other parts of the far north. The word really means peat-y area that tends to be damp, as I just learned from Wiki, but I've always thought of them as smallish ponds in cold territory. Mosquitoes and moose are a given.
I think I first heard about muskegs in one of L. M. Montgomery's books, and tend to classify any little pond in woodsy country as a muskeg.
All through the trip it would be, "Oh look! A muskeg!"--there were lots in Yellowstone. And Glacier was filled with them--it was "muskeg!" every ten minutes. At one point my dad put me into stitches by saying, "I don't get it about a muskeg! A muskeg does not have any moving parts, and it's not going to do anything"

Then there were the mountain goats. We wanted to see a mountain goat. There was one time when we passed a lay-by with a lot of cars, and people staring upwards with binoculars, and I thought I saw two white things on the mountainside. By the time we turned the car around, the other tourists had left and we got a clear sight at the "white things". You would not believe how much a WHITE ROCK looks like a mountain goat!
My dad claimed to be jaundiced about mountain goats, but he sure dove for the camera at the first sight of white woolly critters--yes, we finally did sight some.

At our campground on Flathead Lake [also in Montana] I did a spot of early-morning swimming. We also got rained upon. There were jokes by me about a "water bed" when the rain got under the tent...


and that's that, folks!

later update:
Oh yes, I'm going to see Music Man at the local theatre next week--I'm excited, I haven't seen a play in a loong time...