On the Character of Reptiles

    Hello ladies and gentlemen. Or, based on the traffic source stats, hello adult web sites. I hope my blog entertains you.

    According to the press there has been a discovery that crocodilians like alligators use sticks as bait to attract nest building birds to eat. I'm not completely convinced that all these sticks aren't just suctioning themselves to the alligators by accident, but I won't ever argue that reptiles don't think. I want to believe that all animals think and are individuals, but I will admit that there isn't a lot of evidence for reptile personality. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist though, let's look at some examples.
    First off, the most famous of these examples is probably the story of the zoo snake that befriended his hamster meal. Aochan the rat snake was given a live hamster named Gohan to eat after the snake refused to eat dead mice for two weeks. The snake did not eat Gohan, the hamster took a nap on the snake's coils, zoo keepers finally convinced him to eat dead mice, and apparently the snake and hamster have been cohabiting ever since. There is a video showing the snake and hamster living together. The hamster's movements certainly attract the snake's attention, but the snake simply turns away instead of striking and shows none of the expected annoyance when the very obese hamster climbs on top of him. This story began circulating in 2005, and there has been no information available on it since. It is possible that the snake finally snapped and ate the hamster, but I don't think so, such a sad end to a heartwarming story would have been publicized immediately. I might argue that this proves nothing because hamsters are not standard fare for rat snakes, but I honestly don't think that a hungry snake would turn down a furry warm rodent for any natural reason, even an unfamiliar beast such as a hamster. Ball pythons don't have a normal diet of squirrels, but my python Geralt displays great interest in eating Tony, the mentally ill squirrel next to him. I don't know how convinced I am about the snake and hamster being friends, but I can't think of a natural reason for the snake to keep little Gohan alive.
    Now I want to direct you to the tragic but beautiful story of Grace Olive Wiley. She was what would be called a reptile whisperer today. She kept and handled enormous alligators, rattlesnakes, cobras, mambas, and every other venomous and dangerous reptiles you can think of. She believed that every animal responded to kindness, and she would handle all her reptiles gently and without safety equipment. Fellow herpetologists were astonished at the way rattlesnakes responded to her, they were calm and never wanted to bite. There are pictures of her lazing about draped with one of her King cobras, and wearing rattlesnakes around her neck like ball pythons. She died at the age of 64 from a snake bite. The interesting thing however, was that the snake, who bit Wiley while she was trying to make it do a threat display, was a newly imported snake that had never met Wiley before. She was unable to use one of her own snakes, because they were too tame to do a threat display. She died from a snake bite, this means she wasn't special because something about her made her unthreatening, I think she was special because reptiles liked her. After she worked with them they didn't want to bite her and they were more gentle than they were before, that doesn't come across as an instinctual response.
    Finally I have my own experiences. Ginji the box turtle has already been described by me in an earlier blog post, but she is a wonderful example of a unique and unabashed personality. I kept a Bearded Dragon named Bertie for years, and he was one of the sweetest fellows I've ever met. He lived up to the reputation of Bearded Dragons as gentle giants, I think he liked to snuggle with me.
I will leave you with a terrible picture of my python Geralt. He has never had a heat lamp before, and when we recently moved Neo the turtle into my room, Neo's heat lamp caught his attention.

    This is a very small piece of evidence I know, but it's quite sweet to me. He stretched from all the way on the other side of the cage when he saw the light and he spent several minutes just staring up at it. He couldn't feel the heat, he has light from the room in his cage, but he came all the way over just to look up and see what was causing all that glow. I'm getting him a lamp as a present after Christmas.

The Dusty Corridors of Home

            Everyone has been rearranging furniture and dust these past two days. My father decided a few months ago that he wanted a standing desk.
 I always imagined a standing desk would look something like this,
and therefore it would be expensive and we would never actually get one.
      One day however, I came home and my dad's new standing desk was lying on my parents bed. This little desk actually resembled a black and depressing children's play table. It was meant to balance on top of a normal desk, moving your workstation to a place so high you could only work while balanced on your tiptoes.
     Having ascertained that the standing desk would balance ONLY on the clunky wooden desk in the kitchen, my father decided we would have to swap the desks in the kitchen and the bedroom. Simple enough for an ordinary house.
     Unfortunately my family lives in a 'starter home' (slang for eenie weeny house), and both my parents have the souls of old English scholars and the books to prove it.
     First we had to unpack the desks, (some of the shelves went on the squirrel cage and others with the dinner pans), and then we had to unpack and move a kitchen bookshelf. Next went the four hall bookshelves, which I helped move even though I could not actually pick up any of them. My father did not know how useless I was being, and so he moved them all essentially, himself. As of yet he still does not require medical attention.
     By this time we had moved half the items in the house to the floor, and both ways into the house were blocked off. My mother began to feel strange and I had a moment of panic trying to imagine how the EMTs were going to make it inside, before she informed me it was just her diabetes being difficult.
     The dogs decided around then that they needed to go outside, and when I simply shrugged and said 'too bad' they took it upon themselves to eat everything resting on the ground.
     We ate lunch balanced on our knees, my father standing up because there were only two chairs available and he had to get used to a standing desk anyway. After lunch Dad growled out something about the state of the dishes and I made a sound like a goblin to avoid an argument (I am the resident dish cleaner). It worked well.
     Dad and I managed to drag the desks into place while the dogs weaved back in forth under the heavy things we carried, and then we moved all the shelves back. Replacing the books was a raucous affair, my mother wanted to get rid of a few books, my father wanted to get rid of the whole bookshelf, and I kept finding stacks of books secreted around the house that made them argue over which books were worth keeping and whether Dad was hard to get along with.
     Now the room rearrangements are somewhat pleasing to the eye, though I am slightly concerned that my mother's desk will collapse under the weight of some of her things.
      I am looking forward to moving the turtle cage into my room tomorrow. This is a much better idea than my father's desk moving plan, because it requires the moving of no bookshelves at all.
     I do think that all this moving stuff has given me plenty of exercise, so that's good. I've now exercised three days out of four? Where are my ripped abs? Oh I know, hiding under the fat. Sigh.
 

Bad Dreams

I read something once about how there is nothing more boring then hearing about someone else's dream. I love telling people about my dreams, so that came as a nasty shock, and I hope it isn't the case with me. I feel I am quite blessed with my dreams, they make no sense, like all dreams, but they are hilarious. I am fortunate in my family as well, they never have any objections to hearing about my dreams, my father often tells me I should write them down.
Now, here's something I find interesting about the topic of dreams. It is really common in fiction for someone to have bad dreams, full on recurring nightmares that make the prospect of sleep terrifying. These dreams are often about something legitimately bad, or scary to the person having them: watching a loved one die, being chased by monsters, something creepy and disfiguring happening, whatever. The point is that this literally scary thing haunts this person in dreams, and they don't want to sleep because they don't want to live this nightmare over and over at night. Well, I used to wonder if dreams were really like that, and when I saw something scary on TV I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to forget it and that I would dream about it that night. If that happened then it was all over, just a couple of steps until I refused to sleep and spent my last days in a mental institution refusing all food but peanut butter covered celery. That was the logical progression in my mind at least. Now, I am scared by a lot, and two things that I'm absolutely terrified of are tornadoes and zombies. Zombies are a little illogical (right now at least! Always be prepared), but any time I try to actually imagine myself inside a zombie movie being chased by decomposing corpses I start hyperventilating. I mean ugh. And tornadoes are just wicked horrid forces of nature that kill people and make lots of noise.
I am scared of both of these things, and I dream about both of them a LOT. Like, several times a week. There are zombies creeping around outside our house or in old hospitals my family is inexplicably inside of. The zombies always end up finding us, and we have to run, and we do run, or drive, or fight, but it is SO scary, because my mind knows it's one of my worst fears and it makes me feel every second of it.
And somehow, in the midst of this zombie pockmarked wasteland in my head, a storm will stir up and tornadoes will come down. Multiple tornadoes, while we're in the car, and they come straight towards us, and they're making that train sound that they're famous for, and I'm curled up in a tight little ball in the car watching the horrid funnel thing come after us as we try to find a sturdy spot free of zombies. This is all horrid.
But you know what? It's awfully fun to remember when I wake up. It's fun to tell people, and it doesn't bother me when I wake up. The idea of dreaming about tornado zombie worlds doesn't make me afraid to fall asleep. I'm pretty okay with it.
The dreams that do bother me are hard to explain. It's not the contents, it's the feelings they invoke. They make me feel sad, or helpless, or ugly in some way. When I wake up, I feel BAD, and I can't stop thinking about them unless I pray to God that they stop bothering me. I remember one dream, kind of disgusting, but mainly weird. There was something killing deer in my dream, always in the woods. I would look at the bodies and try to find out what had attacked them. To go to the woods I had to cross a bridge covered in fire ants, and they would attack me. The actual woods weren't woods at all, everything was beige and orange, and soft, like we were in something's insides. The surroundings reminded me powerfully of vomit. When I woke up I felt horrible, and seriously disturbed. Now the dream was weird and kind of gross, but I don't know why it felt so creepy. It was just the atmosphere.
I take a certain kind of antidepressants, and I forget to refill the prescription quite often. It's kind of idiotic of me, because I have a terrible reaction to going cold turkey off my medication, it's called SRI discontinuation syndrome. One of the symptoms is bad dreams, and they are very much the kind that make you feel wrong and ruin your day. I had one night of these dreams, I kept waking up and going back to sleep, and I had bad dreams every time. By the time day rolled around I felt kind of hysterical and the thought of having another night like that made me cry. I was off my antidepressants darn it, I cry easily. In any case, the only thing I actually remember about these dreams is a lot of vivid color. That's it, that's all I've ever been able to remember, but the feel of them was bad, like my brain was assuring me, "yes, this is really bad, this is awfullll, this green color reminds you of boogers, now scream in despair!"
So all in all, zombies and tornadoes and other things you're scared of, they aren't half bad to dream about, but fire ants or the vivid color of avocado? That's terrifying.

Cannibalism and Rescues of the Rodent Variety

      I was at my friend's house today. Her place is the sort of house where every time you're there you end up in a situation so ludicrous you never imagined it happening. Today's strange event was definitely exciting, but mostly sad. 

     It had reached the point in the day when my friend began to feed her animals. Though she lives in the suburbs, she has many, many more animals than the average person. Primarily, she has rats. She loves rats more than any other living thing, and she makes a bit of money breeding them. She has more than thirty rats, and they are scattered in cages all over the house. Most are in one of two cages, the boy cage or the girl cage (color themed, because it’s stylish), but others are housed elsewhere because they are new, they are moms with babies, they are sick, or they are too vulnerable, like her completely hairless rat, Ruguru.

     We had just started the feed the rats, and my friend was checking up on the newest mother and her three week old babies, when she found that the mother was gone. After a few seconds of searching, we found the mother in a dirty laundry basket along with a baby. This made us a bit nervous, as neither of us had considered that any of the babies would be out, and after doing a headcount we found that we were missing two of the eleven babies. Me, my friend, and my friend’s mother searched the entire room. The cats had been in the room overnight, and we thought that one of them would definitely eat baby rats if given the chance. The only thing we couldn’t understand was the complete lack of blood or hair.

     After roughly half an hour, my friend’s mom saw something red in the bedding of another rat cage. I opened the cage and pulled it out and found that I was holding a leg. I gingerly put it down amidst horrified cries, and searched through the rest of the bedding. I found the rest of the poor little guy a few seconds later. He had been practically skeletonized, only some fur and a little bit of flesh remained.

     My friend took his remains away, and I checked out the two rats who were inside the cage. They were the picture of innocence, running about and pressing against the bars, all excited to see me. I had trouble believing that they would have done something so horrible, but I don’t think rats think of things like eating babies in the same way that humans do. I looked closely at the two happy rats, and I found blood on their paws and whiskers. Case closed I suppose.

     There was still one more baby rat missing, and we looked around for another twenty minutes. No sign. My friend started cleaning other cages while we searched, and I looked around for any other place we hadn’t checked yet. My friend went outside to clean something and I walked to one corner of the room to see what she was doing. I looked down at a roll of chicken wire that was standing up in front of me.

     Lo and behold, the other baby rat was squeezed into it, her eyes were HUGE, and she was absolutely frozen. I reached into the chicken wire on either side of her, put my hands together under her so she couldn’t run further down, and drew her up. She didn’t struggle at all, and I could cup her furry cotton ball sized body in one hand. I lifted her up over my head and made excited squeaking sounds at my friend. She looked up and came running inside, where she took the baby from me and kissed and snuggled her.

     We delivered her carefully back to her mom, and moved them all to a smaller cage so they couldn’t get out again. For the rest of the day I told everyone about finding the living baby rat, I felt like a hero. Well, I still do actually, and now I’m writing this on the Internet so MORE people can read about it. So I suppose I feel the same, it makes me happy when I can save an animal, I wish we could have found them both before the Cannibal Twins had gotten the other one, but at least one survived. She’s back with her family now, hopefully not too traumatized, and she should go on to live a good and happy life.

British Television

My family have enjoyed watching shows from the UK for years, such as The Office, Jeeves and Wooster, and Pride and Prejudice (it was a miniseries so it counts as both a movie and a show in my book). I was introduced to Monty Python at an early age, and I knew the entire Holy Hand Grenade speech by heart at the age of 8. We love Doctor Who (everyone loves the Doctor, don't even pretend you don't), and now that we have the exciting online sections of Amazon and Netflix available to us, we try out a lot of shows. My father generally finds something important to do instead of television, which he regards as a pointless waste of time that could be used compiling bird information or reading Flannery O' Connor, so Mom and I get to pick what to watch, and we like to watch mysteries. British television has quite a selection of mystery shows, and because we think the accents are wonderful and we are totally well versed in Britishness we are generally drawn to them. Now that I have seen many UK adventure and mystery shows I have noticed something odd. British shows are much more soul crushingly depressing then any other shows I watch. I am used to the occasional sad episode in the American crime solving shows I see. Sometimes the bad guy gets away, sometimes the good guys don't save everyone, and once in a great while, a character you love will die (although generally the important character death that has been forshadowed by the media is that guy in background who is always eating cheese). Most of the time though, our heroes catch the evil people, save the last victim, and are entirely protected from danger via the Main Character Bubble of Invulnerability. It's only when a show is on HBO or described as 'gritty' that all bets are off. In the British shows, sad and hopeless endings are the usual, and happy endings are exceptionally rare. The murderer is going to go free because of lack of evidence even if the police walked in on him stabbing someone, any living victims or extra characters in a show will die messily, and every season or so they kill off a main character. My mother and I watched a British show called Touching Evil, starring the delightful Robson Green, Nicola Walker who is lovely but reminds me of an unpleasant person I know, and Rose's Tyler's father. We could never remember the name of this show so we preferred to call it Poking Evil and we had fun watching it. At first. I think each of the show's three seasons should have its own name, corresponding to how fun it is to watch. Therefore the first season is christened Poking Evil With a Stick (fun), the second is Evil Pokes You Back (not fun), and the third is Evil Goes to the Bathroom on You and Steals Your Clothes (don't watch it if you like being happy).
One of the more upsetting things that I find in these shows in something that I call the Purge. This is when every single character in a show is killed off and the entire cast is replaced by new folks. I never even knew a network could DO that. I stopped watching a particular show when I learned I only had one season left before everyone was murdered, including the baby. I stopped watching another one when I looked ahead and found out that the main character was going to be replaced no less then four times. Your main character should be a precious gem! You should take care of them and treat them well, going through FOUR main characters is simply negligent! If you did that with a dog you would be placed on a LIST and not allowed to have pets anymore.
Even Doctor Who, a remarkably fun show that is often considered to be for children is absolutely horrible about this. There are multiple deaths every episode, and very few non recurring characters make it through a visit by the Doctor (not his fault, just bad timing). My mother and I get sad every time the Doctor promises that he will save someone. I can't even think of a time when he promised to save someone and managed to pull it off.
I have watched British shows that were quite nice, and it's taken me several years to actually watch enough television to notice this, but it makes me unhappy. I understand when a show is trying to be realistic, but most real people have both good and bad things in their lives, and the characters in these shows basically have no good things at all. I often wonder how they keep going and don't lie comatose in bed all day. Oh well, I will continue to watch Doctor Who and that new mystery series that doesn't seem quite so bent on tearing viewer's hearts to smithereens. It's called Wire in the Blood (Robson Green kick, I have to see him happy somewhere), and you must believe me when I say that these characters seem to have reasonably good lives. Yes, they live by themselves and only have work and cops and crazy people for company, but they love each other, they occasionally smile and eat together, and one of them has a cat that hasn't been killed by anyone yet. It's a charmed life.

Fickle Weather and Fearless Ferrets

Today dawned bright and cheery. The sky was white of course, it's ALWAYS white, but the birds were out and it didn't look like it was going to rain anytime soon. I made plans with a friend for the evening, and spent most of the day going through boxes and other boxes. I made good headway and roughly twenty minutes before me and my mother had to leave thunder started rumbling. I have mentioned before that storms scare the daylights out of me, so I pattered into the kitchen to check the weather and make sure it didn't say anything nasty was coming. Nothing very bad, a significant weather advisory, which, from my past experience means a bad storm without tornadoes or death. A severe thunderstorm warning is a cause for concern about death, and anything that combines the word tornado and watch or warning means I will start crying.
We drove first to a house where I am looking after a dog. The dog has my trouble with thunderstorms, and as soon as I opened the door he was there, pressing against my legs and whining pitifully. I fed and comforted him (I feel your pain buddy) and then I went to get the mail. As soon as I stepped outside there was a crack of thunder so loud it nearly split my eardrums and the immediate surroundings turned white. I stood still for a few seconds and ran through the signs of an approaching lightning strike in my head. There were no tingling sensations and no hair prickling so I decided that it hadn't got me yet and ran to the mailbox in a half fetal position. Anyone looking out their windows at that moment would have been greeted by the sight of a badly dressed loping fiend, curled in upon itself as if in agony and stealing from a nearby mailbox. After I deposited the mail I locked the door and sprinted for the car, waiting a precious few seconds outside in the death zone as my mother fumbled to unlock my door. I made it into the car (whew) and we began the drive to my friend's house. About halfway there the heavens opened and rain started pouring down like a waterfall. My Mom turned the windshield wipers on to their fullest extent, but it was really just a formality because we still couldn't see anything. We resorted to slow driving and guesswork. "Is that the turn?" "Dunno. I'm going to say no... oh! I think that's a car! Don't drive yet!" "No, that's a traffic light, calm down." After a few interesting minutes of driving, during which we were almost hit by a Black Van of Evil with no lights on, we got to my friend's house. I was feeling quite nervous about leaving my Mom to drive home alone. She has bad vision- only marginally helped by the cyborg implants that fixed her cataracts and gave her pupils an eerie flickering shine- and the horrible storm made me worried she would crash. I lightly suggested that she come inside to hang out with my friend's parents. No, she said, she didn't like disturbing families in the evening. But mother, I said, I am disturbing a family in the evening, and you were all right with that! Kids are allowed to do that, she said, and that was the end of it. As soon as we pulled into the driveway, hail started pouring down, little garbanzo bean sized balls of ice. I didn't want to be murdered by small ice balls, so this gave me a good excuse to stay in the car until the rain slowed and I felt my mother was safe again. We sat chatting loudly over the clattering of hailstones for five or ten minutes, and I left the car when the rain had slowed to pouring buckets rather then bathtubs. I huddled inside the house with my friend who suggested I needed coffee but never produced any (coffee hoarding dragon that she is) and happily mentioned that the weather was perfect for a horror movie. We curled up in her room and she showed me her various creepy crawlies (tarantula, eek) and angry Leopard Gecko, and we flipped through horror movie options, settling with a kind of family horror movie (my idea, not her, she likes full on liquefying eyeballs horror) called The Hole. I enjoyed it, though my friend and I both agreed that one of the monsters, a clown doll, would have been ridiculous if we weren't completely FREAKED OUT by clowns, and I was happy with the ending (I hate sad endings and 85% of horror movies have terrible endings as anyone can tell you). We were interrupted several times by my friend's mother on the subject of a rogue ferret, and we ended the evening with the deaf crazy albino beast running amuck in my friend's room and bothering the cat. Something I have noticed about ferrets, they have no sense of self preservation at all. I'm used to rats, with rats you can plop them on your shoulder and they will either stay there being cute or start climbing down if they don't find you interesting. I picked up this ferret and put her on my shoulder, she promptly walked off it and fell downwards until I caught her with a free hand. Then she preceded to hang limply from my hand like a pair of pants on a coat hanger before she gathered herself and vacated my hand too, her body cascading downwards like a furry strand of spaghetti. In other words, be careful with your ferrets boys and girls, because they are all about the Leap of Faith but there are no tiny hay carts! I'm sorry, I just put a poorly worded reference to Assassins Creed in my blog post. It wasn't even very good. I like people to know I'm geeky, I'm strangely proud of it, so I reference video games all the time in the hope someone will find it cool. I've never even played Assassins Creed! I'm a failure! I wish I had Revan's powers so I could force persuade you all you never read this! Oops, I did it again. Nathan Drake. Necromorphs. Okay, I'll stop now. We finally put the ferret on the bed (she walked off it) and kept her away from the cat until it was time for me to go. The rain had stopped, and my mother had survived the trip home, so all in all, a pretty good day. At least there weren't Myrkridia. Ooh obscure! Do I get points for that at least?

Death March

A few weeks ago one of my friends invited me on a one night camping trip to Cumberland Island in Georgia. We would be going with one of her friends and roughing it out in the wild for a whole day and a half. Of course I was assured it wouldn't be too dangerous, there was a security guard, rangers, a lot of fellow vacationers, and it was highly unlikely that murderers were to be found in bulk there.

I said yes, packed lightly (I thought, I am a girl after all, but I really tried), and we arrived early afternoon on Sunday. It was then that I learned that we were going to be camping at Stafford, not at the nearest campground, Sea Camp. Stafford was 3 and 1/2 miles away, but my friends assured me that it wouldn't be very bad, and the park ranger told us it would take us an hour and a half to walk.

We started off in high spirits, but we ran into trouble because we had packed too many bags. We had four backpacks, a cooler, a small purselike object, a bookbag, and the huge duffel bag containing the tent. We could only go five to ten minutes at a stretch before we had to stop, rest, and eat something to lighten the load. I fell behind at first, at least three or four minutes behind my friends. As the day wore on the friend carrying the tent grew more and more fatigued until she fell behind and when me and my other friend stopped to rest it could be ten to twenty minutes before she found us again. I took over the tent after a while, and we lost each other so often that my friends and I began to communicate through wolf howls (as close to accurate as we could manage) and whistles to make sure we hadn't gotten too separated. It wasn't all bad of course, once when I was separated I got to see an armadillo bumble about in front of me and rip up a log, and another time I terrified the living daylights out of a baby bird (a cardinal I think). The island itself was very beautiful, with strange crooked trees growing everywhere.

We arrived at our 3 and 1/2 mile away campsite five hours after we started, rigged up the tent and hung up the food before fleeing to the showers to tear off the ticks in a frenzied panic. How long does it take for lyme disease to set in again? Cumberland Island is legendary for its tick problem, and I can see why, I have never seen so many ticks in my life. I threw them every which way, because I don't like to kill stuff, and pulled them out of my socks and brushed them off the camping gear. I am still covered in tick bite bumps several days later.

After the showers we struck out for the beach, which was the part of this trip I was most looking forward to. We got lost for half an hour first by following what turned out to be a wild horse trail. The actual trail was flooded and murky, and we took our shoes off and waded through very gingerly, Cottonmouths are apparently found on the island (we didn't find any, I didn't find any snakes, something that disappointed my Dad to no end). The beach itself was wonderful, it went off in each direction as far as the eye could see, and it was simply littered with shells that you only find in shops.

 I was entranced by a whelk egg case dangly thing and carried it around with me until I decided to just take a picture of it.

 We found a large ghost crab, the first one I'd ever seen, and I terrified the poor fellow half to death.

We also found the holes to crab dens with adorable tiny crab tracks going in every direction.

 

The beach sky was stormy, and occasionally we would hear rumbles of thunder, so I avoided going into the water. We stayed out on the beach until the sun began to set, and the storm clouds moved inland, looking angrier all the while. Something you should know about me: I'm am terrified beyond belief by tornadoes. It barely has to rain, it can be just be cloudy, and I'm worried about them. This probably stems from an episode at a friend's house when I was small when we all THOUGHT a tornado was coming and we huddled in a bathtub crying. The clouds at the beach looked very much as though they could produce a few tornadoes if they wished, and I insisted that we fairly run back to our campsite. Running through woods and water is a very strange and somewhat cool sensation, and we made it back with no trouble.

A ranger had arrived to check on all of us, and we decided to ask her about getting home. All three of us were worried that we would be incapable of getting back to the ranger station. Was there anything she could do, because otherwise they would be collecting our bodies the next day. No, she said, that was really too bad, but we had been warned, besides, the animals needed a few hikers to eat (that last bit was implied). We limped back to our tent, cursing rangers in the dead of night like a bunch of witches, and started up a fire to eat stuff.

We ate as much as we could manage, if we could consume a lot of food we wouldn't have to carry it. Our peaceful nighttime dinner thing was interrupted a few minutes after it started by the presence of an enormous swaggering raccoon, who kept creeping close to the fire with his eyes on our hot dogs. This is obviously why you shouldn't eat at night. We waved things at him and snarled hindu grace and managed to keep him at bay long enough to eat. Then we fell asleep around 11, or tried to, and stayed in our tent till morning. The scary inland storm that had been so visible on the beach never came through, and the night was quite peaceful except for a few running deer that freaked me the heck out and a longhorned beetle that squeaked improbably like a mouse.

The next morning we were up early, packing up stuff, eating more food we didn't want to carry, and breaking down the tent. We made a stop at the shower to splash water about, and tied the tent duffel to makeshift harnesses. Then, laden with bags and backpacks, strapped to the duffel bag like Clydesdale horses with our faces set in grim lines, we began to make our way back. We got about a half mile before we stopped because one of my friends legitimately looked like she was going to die. We stopped and she began sobbing convulsively from the pain in her shoulders, and scared us badly. We tied more backpacks to the duffel bag harness and worked out a way she could carry things without rubbing her shoulders more, and she recovered extremely well.

 The way back took roughly as long as it did before. We took the main road because it was easier to drag the duffel bag along it, and we took breaks to lay full length along the road. We scared several people, either by pulling the husky harness or by resembling dead people. The ranger from the other night drove by and waved happily. While I was lying on the road I found several shark teeth which was nice. Finally, a car stopped and a lovely lady asked us if we were all right. One of my friends said yes, and I shot her a killing glare and said I didn't know if we were all right. She told us to wait there while she dropped people off at the beach, and she came back 20 minutes later and gave us a ride to the ranger station. She was beautiful. I told her that I would hug her if I wasn't so disgusting, and she immediately said oh that was alright please don't bother.

 Our last few hours at Cumberland Island were spent relaxing, drinking water, and making a final unburdened expedition to the ruined Dungeness mansion so my goth loving friend could take pictures. The mansion was cool, it looked like an attraction made by Disney, I wanted to wander inside, but it was blocked off. There was a whole herd of wild horses with babies, and I spent time watching them and dozing on a park bench. We all piled onto the boat when it was time, and Dad met us at the opposite dock. I really quite adore my family, and the dogs were happy to see me. No place like home right?

Healthy Vivaciousness Followed by Naps

It has been a VERY long time since I've posted anything. So much school! Troubling self-esteem issues! First Batman shirt! I have returned however, and we'll see if I can conquer the Laziness Problem and keep this thing going.
My family has recently begun to eat healthy. When I say healthy I mean hardcore stuff, I haven't eaten meat in three weeks, and everything is vegan except, ahem, for the creamer in the coffee and the butter that makes bread rolls enjoyable. We are eating like this for the noblest of reasons, the Trying to Get Healthy While Not Eating Anything Cute and Keeping Mom From Dying reason.
Now I am a very impatient person, and I generally think something isn't working if nothing's changed in one week. With that said, in my opinion this diet has yet to do anything amazing, but I am feeling better than I usually do, and I swear that my Mom has more energy.
The most important thing I'd like to fix has not changed yet unfortunately. I am tired all the time, I'm never ready to get up in the morning, and I basically spend the whole day thinking about how great it would be if I could nap. When I was little I HATED going to bed, and I'm not sure when this changed. If the diet eventually helps me with this sleepiness problem, I'll be very pleased.
My family is getting two bikes soon, and taking them out of paved roads and sidewalks. I'm nervous and excited at the same time. I fall off bikes with reckless abandon, and I can barely get on one without falling over and having a panic attack. In fact, the only thing I am worse at then riding a bike is using roller blades. I hope to eventually master both of these things, but I am concerned about the roller blades. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I was born a roller blade antiprodigy.