Boiling Springs attempt #2

Yesterday, Friday, I was off work and decided that Matt and I needed an adventure out of the house. The weather was pleasant and we had no obligations to keep up home.

I decided it was time to look for something in Savage called Boiling Springs. I had looked for it once before, without success. The first time, I gave up after about 15 minutes of following a trail because I had flip flops on and, from wearing such idiotic footwear, I hurt my left foot so bad that it took a good three months for me to be able to go on walks. (My foot still hurts a little every so often, especially when I walk. Never wear flip flops. They are miserable excuses for footwear.) So I never found the so-called Boiling Springs.

I had looked up Savage Boiling Springs on Google, but there was little said about it, and nothing on the precise location and trail one would take to get there. The websites I consulted gave a general location and terse description, terse enough to make me want to fill it out with personal knowledge. And in order to have personal knowledge, I had to find Boiling Springs myself.

So I grabbed Matt (and some sensible tennis shoes) and we went to the part of Savage that we don't go to much: a well-heeled section nearer to Shakopee than to regular Savage. I found the place I thought would give us the best access to the creek. Sure enough, there was a hint of a parking space--in fact a temporary widening of the road long enough to admit a parked car (or two) without creating an obstacle for moving traffic--suggesting that something of interest was located closeby. There were two unmarked trails, one going off to the east of the road, and one to the west.  We tried the path going west for a little bit, and while we did wander through some dense undergrowth to get to the creek, we gave up and went searching on the east path, which we thought looked more promising.

No boiling going on here

 

Matt starts out on the path going east of the road

It looked promising for about a mile. We were in a little forest.

Matt feels no need to stay by his mother

We walked. And walked. For a long time. With no view of a stream, boiling or otherwise.

Finally, we came to a little bridge.

A little bridge WITH NO GUARDRAIL. Matt chose to tempt fate by standing on the object most likely to break off and fall into the river below and give his mother a heart attack.

Still no boiling.

We walked for a LONG time after that, finally coming to a neighborhood and with no idea where to go to find the van. Thank goodness I had the presence of mind to take my phone with me. Thank you Telenav GPS! Our van was half a mile away. By this time, after all that walking, a half mile was no trifling distance.

On our way back to the van, Matt and I decided that this "Boiling Springs" thing is a hoax cooked up by people in the Savage City Department of Trying to Get Folks to Go Outside and Look for Things That Don't Exist So Those In the Know Can Laugh At Them (also in charge of hiding the Dan Patch Commemorative Horseshoe for the Dan Patch "Find the Commemorative Horseshoe" Contest in June, which no one I know has ever found).

New record

It rained last night, so both the garden and lawn have had a good, thorough watering. Matt's homemade rain gauge registered over two inches of water just overnight. In other garden news, I have baby purple beans on some of the plants!

So the record:
With Kate, EJ, and Paul gone, Hayley away at girls' camp and Matt at a friend's house for an overnighter last night, this marks the first time EVER in the Evans household that a batch of chocolate chip cookies, make by Jim on Sunday evening, has lasted until TUESDAY evening--and there are still cookies left!

Cookies! Cookies for dinner!

Even a sprinkle would be nice

I'm waiting for it to rain. My garden is bone-dry.

Last year I didn't plant a garden because I wanted to get used to a new job. This year, I'm mostly used to it and I have been pretty good about getting up an hour or so before work (twice a week) to go out into the garden to pull weeds (I grow weeds mostly, but there are some beans and a few carrots).

I have a lot of purslane in my garden. And spurge. Purslane is apparently edible and actually quite nutritious. I am not sure I believe it. If it really is, then it wouldn't grow so freely and without high levels of maintenance on my part in my garden. Spurge, on the other hand, is said to be toxic, which accounts for its trying to take over my garden. Not only are spiders out to get me, but so are the plants.

The beans I planted are from seeds that have been sitting around the kitchen for two years. I didn't think they would sprout because they are kind of old, but I planted them anyway. I was happy to be proved wrong about them. They have come up, and most of them are big and burly, with a sprinkling of purple flowers (these will yield purple beans).

The carrots aren't so thick. Not very many came up. I don't know why, but I do have enough to hope that they will attract black swallowtail butterflies. Normally I don't like finding caterpillars in my garden, but I will gladly make an exception for the black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars. And I will gladly scoop them up into a jar and feed them hand-picked carrot fronds until the caterpillars turn into chrysalises. So there is some hope for that. (And I like the actual carrots too)

If only it would rain.

Yes, I could water it with my garden hose, but I would rather we got a gully-washer from the sky.

Rain.

Unfettered

This was Hayley 2 years and 3 months ago:

And this is Hayley today:

Lots has changed about this girl since April of 2010. For one thing, she acquired (made) toast earrings. Her hair is also styled and colored differently. Makeup has been copiously applied where none had been previously. But most importantly, BRACES HAVE BEEN REMOVED.



She still has some metal on six bottom teeth, but those will come off next week.

This was the white board at the ortho office: 

Hayley said, "My name is the biggest. But it's spelled wrong."

Also, if that were a computer font, I would not download it. It's too messy and unbalanced. And the H is weird. It almost looks like they wrote Flaley instead of Hayley. I could have done a much better job, seriously. But I do appreciate the sentiment. And the partial smiley face in the upper right corner. And the flower. I like flowers. I also like rhyming, so the board isn't entirely irritating, what with the misspelling and messy writing.

So one more kid done with metal in the mouth. That leaves just Matt.

Matt's date with braces is still about 9 months off, provided he can lose a few more baby teeth.