Other Worlds Right Here on Earth Part One

To say that our pretty blue and white marble of a planet has some wondrous places on it is an understatement. Sadly, I'm not as widely traveled as I'd like. This does not mean that I haven't seen some exotic and intensely beautiful places in my life so far, even while remaining close to home.

Everywhere on Earth holds beauty of some kind.

The view from the bus one morning

Last spring was a bit reluctant to fully get rolling. We had our share of nice days, and on one of them the sun was shining its warmth over the barren-looking landscape, inviting the greenery to make its appearance. I wanted to enjoy the day and a photographer friend of mine also wanted to get outside so we went together to Fort Snelling State Park to walk around and take a look at the flooding Mississippi waters. Unfortunately the park was closed, and we had a close call with a park ranger when we walked down the hill to take a closer look (there was no trespassing sign like he said, I swear!) so we decided to head to Minnehaha Falls instead.

A short drive later and we're there walking down the steps to come alongside the rushing waters. Despite my trepidation from our run-in with the park authorities earlier, my buddy convinces me that we should hop the fence once again and make our way around the side of the falls. There, we can go behind the ice flows that are frozen over the hallowed out cave behind the waterfall. I hesitated for a minute but being able to say I had walked on a waterfall was too hard a tempation to resist.

I am so glad I listened and dared to do it!


He's a fledgling photographer and he got a great pic of our trip behind the waterfall that day.

He's taken some great pics--you should check out his Facebook page if you like this one.




My friend's finishing technique allows him to really capture the depth and beauty of the colors when compared to my cell phone camera (as well it should!)

My own pathetic cell phone was all I had, yet the scene was too gorgeous to be held back too much by that and I managed to get a handful of fun shots.

It was insane and wonderful at the same time, sliding on the shelf of ice behind the falls. In warmer months there is a very narrow ledge behind the falls, but nothing as substantial as this. As we progressed further around the falls, the level of the ice shelf dropped and we had to slide down a mini hill at one point.

The whole time the thunder of the falls is all around you and at certain points you could see quite clearly though gaps in the ice.

See those people, waaaaaay down there? That's where we hopped the fence.

I even managed to slip into a cold cylindrical cell, hanging way out in the empty space above the waterfall pool. I'll admit it made me a bit nervous, but exhilirated too.

While we were horsing around a wiry, slightly nefarious-looking guy came rushing up, shrieking and woo-hooing in delight.

"Isn't this the most freakin' cool thing you've ever seen? We're on top of a waterfall for god's sake! A friggin' waterfall!"

His enthusiam was easy to understand.

Eventually we had to make our way back. I'll never forget that short but otherworldly beautiful trip in a city park.



I'd love to go again this year, but with the weather so unseasonably nice (temps have been in at or above freezing for what feels like forever now, and what little snow we have gotten is continually melted soon after it falls) I have my doubts whether conditions will be right for another expedition.

I sure hope so, though. I'd love to bring my dad and show him this.

Look What My Son Caught for Me

He was so frakkin proud.

I knew something was up when I got out of the shower and instead of being in his customary spot on the rug just outside the tub, he was laying underneath the toilet.

Luckily, I am a habitual looker-down-before-I-step kind of person, so I managed to spot the "gift" before stepping on it (let me just say "eeeeeewwwww").

You guessed right.

My furry, four-legged "son" caught a mouse sometime between my alarm going off (where he was curled up in the nook of my bent legs) and me getting out of the shower last Friday morning.

And he's declawed!

This is the 2nd animal he's caught in the house. The first time he caught a little black shrew. We think it was him but really can't be sure since we do have two hunters in the house (Alabama Mae caught a shrew outside during a Father's Day BBQ and promptly brought it to my dad as a present).

This one I could be sure was his, just because of his odd behavior. When I stepped out of the shower, he looked at me, then at the mouse, and then back at me as if to say "Momma! Aren't you going to praise me?"

Of course I couldn't deal with the dead critter just then...I was still naked for cryin' out loud!

So I used some toilet paper to move it away from immediate danger of being stepped on in our 1' square bathroom and proceeded to get to the point where I was dressed enough to toss the carcass outside.

I considered flushing it, but thought it would be a bad idea. Gizmo is an extremely smart kitten, and he would try to "rescue" his prize if he saw me put it in the toilet.

But when it came time to dispose of the corpse, IT WAS GONE!!

OMIGOD. Not good.

Now I had to find this damn thing because there's no way I'm letting a potential mini-mouse zombie reanimate within the confines of my home.

I checked the usual spots...his food & water dish, his little hidey-hole cat castle, the spare bed...

Nada.

But then I remembered one truly important fact about my son....he's a HUGE daddy's boy, so I knew that he would have to show off his hunting skills to his father upstairs.

Nevermind that the Big B is sleeping away, Gizmo is a quiet understated kind of kitty but he would wait patiently until B acknowledged his feat.

And that's right where I found him and the mouse, hanging out on the carpet upstairs, waiting patiently for the accolades that are justly due him.

 Oh he looks so very proud, doesn't he?

Okay so you can barely see the thing...but it was definitely a live mouse at one point!

I guess all that practice with the fake mousies last night really gave Gizmo an edge this morning when it came time for the real thing.

My son, the mighty fluffy hunter.


*I tried to delay-post this 3 FRAKKIN times...Blogger hates me, because it's now a week later than I meant to post it. *sigh*

Tragedy Averted!

Last week I made my usual late afternoon call to the Big B and received some bad news.

"I think Ghost Face Killah might be dead."

"What?!?"

"I saw a white squirrel in the road on my way home today, just south of our house."

"Oh no! What about Blondie? What will she do?"

"I hope it's not him but I haven't seen either of them yet today."

As crazy as it seems, we've become attached to Blondie and Ghost Face Killah. We don't feed them (unless tossing old hamburger buns in the backyard is considered feeding them), and generally our interactions are limited to us trying futilely to get a decent picture of Blondie. Nontheless, we are prideful of our mutant squirrel couple and want them to do well.

We anxiously kept an eye out for both of them over the next few days. We saw an albino squirrel but were unable to determine if it was Ghost Face or not. Typically we identify him by his proximity to Blondie but she was no where in sight.

Sunday, Father's Day, I'm snoozing away in bed when B's alarm goes off, waking him up early so he can go discgolf with his father. He gives the customary kiss goodbye and I was already on my way back to visit the Sandman when I hear him clomping up the steps in that heavy-footed way he has.

"I just saw Ghost Face in the front yard! He's alive!"

I think I mumbled something appropriately excited and happy, but I have never claimed to be a morning person and I remember thinking, "He came all the way back up here & woke me up just to tell me a squirrel's still alive?"

Later, however, I was able to appreciate just how much these squirrels mean to us, if the Big B made a special trip just to tell me he was alive.

Earlier this week he spotted them both, doing their usual squirrel-y things and the Big B's grin was wide and bursting with happiness.

Chitter away, mutant Blondie and Ghost Face Killah. We know you don't listen to us (as evidenced by Blondie's refusal to stay away from the street no matter how much B implored and begged you) but we hope you know that at least two humans care for you.

The Terrifying Power of Nature

On May 21 and 22 storms hit the Twin Cities area hard. Two days in a row the sirens went off in my city. Sunday evening we were watching a movie when the Big B told me to mute the TV. We turned to the local news as soon as we heard the wailing up-and-down notes of the warning sirens, and immediately we see a menacing red box drawn right around our neighborhood with reports of rotation, funnel clouds and tornado touchdowns.

I love big storms and he's just as curious as I am so we couldn't resist running outside to take a look. It was raining and the clouds were swirling all around just above the tops of the trees. Pea-sized hail started to come down and I decided to head in. We had already tossed the cats into the basement so I went and checked out the TV again. The sirens were still wailing. I called my mom (she lives just a few blocks away) and asked her if they were in the basement. "We are and you'd better be too!" she admonished me.

Suddenly B bursts in from the garage and his skittishness infects me too.

"Do we need to head downstairs?"

"I don't know, but I saw the neighbor guy booking it indoors so I figured I'd better get inside too!" He says this with a mixture of anxiety, wonderment and excitement. We open the door to head downstairs and our calico feline, Alabama, darts out like a multicolored bullet and runs away. Cursing her I give chase and grab her as she heads up to the second floor.


That darn cat will sit and whine at the door to the basement on any other day, but when she needs to be down there, she wants nothing to do with it. Typical cat!


The basement is actually our roommate's apartment but he's away at his job for months yet so it's just the four of us--me, the Big B and our furry feline children. To say our rommate's a minimalist is an extreme understatement, so we had no TV to watch downstairs to keep up with what was happening. The view out the windows was poor because of the rain spatter and it was maddening to be stuck downstairs with no information. I told B to keep his mom on the phone for updates, but soon enough it was over and we were able to head back upstairs.

The aftermath was significant. Large parts of North Minneapolis were hit, not very far from our house. My bus route to work was detoured because Lyndale avenue had blocks of downed trees obstructing the road.


I managed to snap some photos from the bus ride home later that week after the road had been cleared. I apologize for the horrible picture quality but that's the best you're gonna get with a cell phone camera taken from inside a moving vehicle.

The pic doesn't do justice to how big this downed tree was.

It took up the entire backyard of this home.

Clean up crews busy working

Later that week the Big B picked me up from work and I made him take Lyndale rather than the freeway so I could snap a few more photos from the car. Slightly better pics--you can really see how powerful this storm was and how much damage these trees did when they came down. A lot of the downed trees were boulevard ones with growth that was constrained by the sidewalks and infrastructure of a major city.

The fallen tree had been removed from this house

already but you can see the damage it left behind.

Hundreds of homes were damaged, some much more

severely than this one.

After all these crappy cell phone shots of the damage I was itching to get my actual camera out and take closer pics so I drove myself and B out to a park thirty or so blocks away from our house.

He snuck in this shot

It's so random how nature takes some trees while

one right next to them is spared.

The Big B provides some perspective

for the scale of the root system

The picture above and the next three below are all of the same tree.

If I had jumped down into the bottom of the hole

left by the roots, I'd have been half as tall in this picture.

These kids were playing and were eager to show us

the debris they'd found.

I wish that pictures would do more justice to how incredibly LARGE all these trees were. I would back up to where I thought I could get the sheer scale and size framed in the picture, and then would have to back up some more, and some more, before I felt I had gotten it okay. Eventually I gave up and used the us to provide some scale in a few shots (willingly and unwittingly, depending!).

As much as I love storms and would like to see a tornado up close & personal (as safely as possible), I don't like seeing how much damage they can do and how much injury they cause people.

The N. Mpls community was reeling from this. It's one of the poorer areas in Minnesota and it's just another strike of Murphy's Law that this was the area hit so heavily with damage. The people really pulled together and now less than two weeks after the storms hit, the clean up is well on it's way to being completed. It's gratifying to see how even a "bad" neighborhood can pull together and help each other out when times are rough. People are reaching out to one another and offering aid while clean up efforts continue and homes are repaired enough so that the owners can return.

I'm grateful we were spared this type of damage in our area and that I could safely see the aftermath of one of nature's temper tantrums.

It puts you in your place to see a 5-story tree knocked over like a matchstick.