Wednesday, August 31, 2011

More than a month!

A record-breaking period of silence. I have not, of course, been keeping my mouth shut in real life, with consequences both good and bad.

In the past month, there's been, hmmm....a lot of rain. Some swimming in pools. Ooooh, a trip to a waterfall, complete with near-death experience. (I didn't have the first-degree experience, but a second-degree near death experience, so I got both direct and vicarious thrills out of it. This is probably something that requires its own paragraph as an explanation, rather than a parenthetical aside.)

Ahem. Yes, at the waterfall. The river was really, really high. We'd already had to hurl ourselves bravely across the strong center stream of it to get to the other, calmer water we could splash around in and walk through. This wasn't terribly scary, as it just meant about 10 seconds of pell-mell (pel-mel?) swimming and then safety. Fast-moving water is sneaky, however. Along one ridge overlooking a waterfall, Intern wandered into a path of really fast-moving, deep water, and was sliding on her back over the edge of the fifteen foot, scary waterfall, when 16-year-old jungle boy grabbed her by the leg and dragged her back to safety. I would have helped, but as I leapt into action, I realized that the water really was too strong for me, and I had to paddle back before I ended up crashing into both of them and taking them over. Great excitement!

So we all lived. Then we found a natural mudslide and slide down it over and over. (I'm still picking debris out of my ass.) We covered ourselves in mud (there was a minor question over whether it was, in fact, quicksand, as Intern and I both got stuck in it for an uncomfortably long time), then rinsed it off, slid along some slippery rocks, found some cool bugs, vroomed home on bikes. I'd missed driving. And the jungle. So hurray.

Other highlights of the past month:

The purchase of a new, pink, flowery cowboy hat that I now wear constantly.

A healed knee, meaning I can run again.

Bright blue kingfishers in the pond.

Feeding butter to kittens.

"Game of Thrones".