Highlights...

...from my weekend in Rotter-Damn!

1. Tasty treats, part I: JoyceFrances, OSB and I ate a pile of the best g-d french fries I have ever eaten, ever, and I will be 32 in less than a month and I'm half-Irish so I've eaten a lot of potatoes. We ate them at this farm called Indian Ladder. They do berry picking, apple picking, they sell tchotkes, and they have a teeny restaurant in a cordoned-off section of the store. The fries were local potatoes. They were thick-cut, deep-fried, perfectly cooked, and covered with melted local cheddar cheese. And also possibly some melted lumps of crack cocaine.
2. Millipedes: These are interesting, prehistoric-looking, creepy bugs, and we saw a big one crawling along a limestone path at the Helderberg Escarpment, a great place to find fossils.
3. Crazy bird guy: He's in his early sixties. He's on the small side. He's got a short white beard. He's wearing a bird shirt. We're looking at a view when all of a sudden he's at our side and talking: "It was supposed to be the annual hawk migration and they were supposed to fly by the hundreds right through the Escarpment but there weren't any save 2 this year because there weren't any thermals and the band of roving turkey vultures wasn't even around and hey does one of you have a cat does any of you have a cat what you have a cat well you'd better keep her inside or she might get eaten by this bird right hear, that's right, the great horned, well we had a lot of missing cats awhile back and hey you can keep those pamphlets they're the best we've got." Aaaaaaaaaand breathe. Once we had moved on he pressed play on his internal tape recorder and gave the same speech to someone else.
4. Tasty treats, part II: Sugar-coated gummy pumpkins. I love pumpkin-shaped candy items. The mellowcreme version are my favorite and I think I might have to write a tribute to them. These were tender and sweet, with a hint of orange flavor. They especially did it for the pregnant member of our trio. She kept offering them to the group to try and assuage her guilt over the fact that she was scarfing down an entire bag all on her own. Good try, OSB.
5. Shopping: I found a fab antique (or you could also describe it as old and smelly) needlepoint pillow with a fat raccoon on it, for five bucks, in a fun store run by a wackadoo lady with a giant baby in Bennington, VT. Further down the road in Brattleboro were similar needlepoint pillows, only these were new and they were 85 dollars.