Vacation rocks

I love marshmallows

And this is how I love them.

What is it? No. 33

Here's something I saw in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago. The two photos together constitute a pretty good hint, I think. Can you guess what it is? Click on either photo to see if you're right!

(As always, no spoilers in the comments, please.)

I can see the future

When I was a kid, everyone called me "Sally" because I was so very much like my mother's younger sister in speech and mannerisms. She didn't even live nearby, so the connection was clearly genetic. For a while I even speculated that I was the result of a youthful indiscretion on Sally's part and given to her sister to raise.

As I grew, though, it became obvious that I am my mother's daughter. Those who saw us together would remark at our resemblance. When we traveled together in China, Mom was tickled that people thought she was my sister. She has always looked young for her age.

As I grow older myself, I am gratified to see what the future holds for me when I look at my mom. If the resemblance continues to hold true, people will look twice when I claim my senior citizen discount.

And I'll still be chasing seagulls on the beach.

Sandhill cranes

Click on this picture to see it larger.
When I was in Wisconsin in August, someone mentioned they'd seen some sandhill cranes in a particular area, so Mom and I had our eyes peeled. We spotted a few flying one evening, and the next saw more. I have photos of little specks in the sky. They looked bigger in person, and prehistoric, with their huge, slow flapping wings.

We were so focused on looking up that we almost drove right past this group. The sun was setting behind them, so my pictures didn't turn out great. But it was pretty awesome to see these big birds in their natural habitat.

Boatload of Snoopies

My hard drive is filling up and I needed to go through and delete some photos. I forgot about the Snoopy Boat! Someone who lives on the road to Cave Point Park in Door County, Wis., had a little time on his or her hands, a creative spark and a sense of humor.

The Snoopies are made of plastic jugs, both bodies and heads. I snapped just a couple of close-ups because the uncles were patiently waiting for me.
Aren't they awesome? Kitschy but clever.

Outside the cabin

More scenes from the cabin. The driveway is open and welcoming. It used to be much more wooded, until a tornado marched right down the middle. Thankfully the storm hopped right over the cabin.
The back of the cabin faces the driveway, so it doesn't look like much as you enter.
But I love the stairs leading to it. I could run up these stairs in my sleep. In the winter they make a great sled run.
On the way up the stairs there's a welcoming committee of turtle and toad:
The front of the cabin faces the lake.
Perhaps most important are the stairs to the beach.
If you're lucky, thimbleberry season isn't over yet. The berries grow wild on the slopes near the beach, and also along sunny verges. I haven't seen them anywhere else. If you find a lot you could make jam, but usually there's only enough to eat them one by one. They're more tart than raspberries, but of the same family. The leaves are much bigger, and they have no thorns.

If the water is calm, you can take a kayak out. But I usually prefer to stay on the beach, wading in the shallows and looking for pretty rocks.

Chipmunk whisperer

I posted a photo of me at 12 taking photos of chipmunks at the cabin. I found one of the actual snaps I took then, but I know I have a better one in an album I can't find (in a box, I'm sure). Meantime, I found this one of me at 19, when I'd just come back from working in France (I can tell by the jacket I bought in Paris.)

In the spring, the chippies emerge from semi-hibernation and are ravenously hungry. If you have peanuts, you can tame them easily just by sitting still. They carefully stuff three whole peanuts in their fat cheeks then run off to hide them.

The chippies we tamed were always very gentle. Sometimes they would mistake your finger for a peanut, testing it with their teeth, but they never bit down, just backed off and kept looking. I don't recall ever being bitten for real, and I handled a lot of chipmunks.

OK, it was bugging me that I didn't know where that album was, so I went in search. It was in the next logical place. Kudos to me for being organized! (I haven't always been.)
Sometimes we would put peanuts in a milk bottle. A chipmunk would go in, stuff his cheeks, and then be too fat-faced to get out again. You can only do this once with each chippie, though, because he'll figure out pretty quickly how to push the peanuts out one at a time and then carry them off.

Have you ever tamed any wild critters? How did you do it?

Some things I love inside the cabin

Bear with while I try to stretch out my vacation with a pictures I didn't get to post earlier. Here are some of the things that make the cabin special.

My brother and I used to bicker over who got to sleep in the window bed, until he got too tall to be comfortable in it. Small wonder that the window seat in my house was a big selling point when I first saw it.
The fireplace kept us warm on winter visits and on cool nights the rest of the year. (No one winters there now. When I was a kid we would haul our stuff in on skis and sleds; there was no running water and we had to use the outhouse.) I hardly remember what picture used to be over the fireplace. Mom's seagulls fit there perfectly now. On the mantel there's always a collection of interesting odds and ends. Candles, pictures, driftwood ...
The built-in shelves still hold an assortment of books from my grandparents' days. Including some Reader's Digest condensed books. Are those even printed anymore? And rocks with kids' names painted on them.
The door to the cabin is a Dutch door. You can open the top when you want a little air in the kitchen.
And the door handles throughout the cabin are of a style I've never seen anywhere else. If you need to "lock" the bathroom door, you can just stick a toothbrush on top of the bar to keep it from lifting up.
Have you ever seen door handles like these?

Aw, shucks

Wish I were back there! We ate some mighty fine sweet corn in Wisconsin. Peak of the season.

I took this picture with Photobooth from my laptop. One uncle said, "You are a foodie, aren't you?"

As if that was a bad thing. Or at least suspect.

Rockin'

Rock hunting on the beach in Door County is endlessly fascinating because no two rocks are alike. They are as varied as the people on this Earth, and just as numerous.

I've gotten pretty good at spotting the particular kinds that interest me most. In this picture there are a couple (click any of these photos to see them larger):
There's a nice little piece of rosy quartz partly hidden in the upper center, a little to the left, and a piece of milky quartz in the lower center.I look for quartz in particular because it's so pretty when it's polished. The piece on the left was wrapped in silver for me by bead-seller and jewelry-maker Szarka after I sent her some stones a couple of years ago.

Polishing requires patience, though. It takes about three weeks to polish a batch of Lake Michigan stones, and that's speedy. Most of the rough tumbling has already been done by the lake itself.

A big bowl of polished rocks is fun to run your hands through.
But many rocks can be candidates for my tumbler, not just quartz. I just have to see them when they're wet to know what they will look like with a permanent sheen. I like rocks that are plain or stripey, perfectly smooth and round or oddly shaped.
And I love finding rocks with holes all the way through them. They're rarer than you might think.
I keep an eye out for fossils, too. Here are a couple more pieces of honeycomb coral. I didn't keep them, though.
Finally, I always have my eyes open for the kind of rock that Mom collects.
Can you guess which one it is?

Once a shutterbug ...

There have been long periods in my life where I didn't take many photos, but I did get my first camera pretty young. At least by 10, when I filled an album with pictures from Disney World. And here's a gawky me at age 12, trying to get snaps of the chipmunks we tamed with peanuts.
My uncle pulled out an album of pictures from the cabin, so I photographed a few of them. This one looks to be just a windy day through the front window. And then you notice my grandfather down on the deck, shooting the waves.
So maybe my interest is genetic.

Cheeseheads unite

Plenty of cheesy goodness at the Green Bay airport. They're not really sure what to do with all the Brett Favre stuff.

Gone before the sun got up

Hard to say goodbye

The week flew by and I'm not ready to leave. But I've got an early, early flight today and then it's back to work.

Bye, Door County. See you next year.

What is it? No. 19

You might think you know what this is. But I'll bet you don't.

Click on the picture to see the answer.