hope grows

we have a very small garden in our backyard. i am getting a little bit of teasing from my friends about how "hopeful" i am. what i hear when they say this is actually how crazy they think i am. grow vegetables in wyoming, at 7500 ft., where the growing season is approximately 90 days? well now that i think about, it does sound crazy. but i am nothing if not crazy, right? 

i must confess, i am proud of the hope i have for my postage stamp garden. i really believe we are going to grow things outside & eventually eat them. i have had an indoor herb garden many times, but an outside garden seems so much more ambitious. & also a lot more likely to fail, i admit. but i am going to keep on hoping that some good soil, a little water, & sunshine will work magic!

 

i am so hopeful in fact, that i just joined veggietrader. i am preparing for a plethora of squash & kale, which i hope to trade for other things we didn't plant, like cucumbers or green beans. even though it is unlikely, i am holding out hope that by september i have had-it-up-to-here with recipes involving straighneck squash and zucchini. 

in the meantime, it is eggs in a nest for dinner tonight.

play-boating pelicans

last week the whitewater play park in casper came in pretty big time. brandon was thrilled to have an opportunity to kayak big water that rarely occurs. {apparently they are working on a dam upriver so all the water is free-flowing, music to his ears!} 

we headed north in the afternoon & since play-boating is not appealing to me i decided to go for a big long run while he boated. i ran hard & fast because a big storm was coming in. when i came back brandon was just putting on the water. {why is that going for a run always feels like a long exercise session until you compare running-time to real-time? twenty minutes of running feels like so much, but 20 minutes of anything else is no big deal.}

anyhow, when i came back from my run i noticed what i thought was a white garbage bag recirculating in the surf. then i noticed this strange movement and briefly thought a child was in a plastic bag trying to extend their arm to swim. hmmm, the mind makes strange sense of what it doesn't understand. ultimately i realized it was a pelican, stuck on the wave. i sprinted to the car to get my camera & snapped a few shots.

the bird doesn't look so good and clearly couldn't get off the wave on his own. brandon is adamant that he saved the bird's life, so don't get too offended by him using his paddle to pry the pelican off the wave. i think brandon was just fed up with not being able to surf the wave due to the bird hogging it up. 

pretty crazy, huh? there was another kayaker there who is an animal biologist & he said he has never seen anything like it.