• Blueberry Picking (or "What To Do If You See A Bear") -- I get some co-creator credits here for procuring some sound effects and bear footage. I'm also credited for my appearance as "That one white girl."
• The Brad and Cole Show -- Brad and Cole go fishing and don't catch anything.

Saturday, before the alarm clock went off, I woke up at 5 am. As an extended aside, knowing the Olympics had started and that it was 5 pm in Beijng, I flipped on the TV and observed that while NBC was re-airing the opening ceremonies for a second time, the CBC (Canada) was airing live coverage of the first day of swimming prelims, including Michael Phelps first Olympic race. Guess which channel I watched... NBC take note.

After I had my Olympic fix, I got on the road. Before reaching the park, I took a detour to check out the Chippewa Falls. After stopping to get a park pass, I went straight to Agawa Rock where I found much calmer water than during my previous trip. (The two linked photos were taken at almost exactly the same spot.) As a result of the nicer weather, I saw both things I had seen before and was able to make it further down the rock and see pictographs that were new to me.

But that wasn't the exciting part.

Disappointed, I went back and sat on the larger rock face for a few minutes and ate some wild blueberries while I tried to figure out where the last panel of pictographs might be if this wasn't it. Deciding that in fact, this must be it, I went down around the corner again and noticed a second corner. The waves were lapping a little to close to the edge of that corner, but I decided it was worth checking out.

As a first test, I reached my arm around with the camera and, much to my delight, pulled back a picture of pictographs! I can't even begin to describe the thrill I got when I saw the image in my little two inch preview screen. Knowing what was around the corner, I sidled my way over and examined a second Misshepezhieu and a very faint turtle with a long tail.

At this point, I noticed some clouds rolling in and decided to head back up the cliff. Sure enough, no sooner than when I put my shoes back on at the top of the cliff, it started to rain. And then pour. And then hail. I dashed off down the trail to my car to dry off and found a change of clothes in the back seat -- now I know where that putz shirt went!

Once the rain stopped, I decided to take the coastal trail north and see the sights, take a brief dip, eat some more wild berries, and saw a bear.

Oh yeah, the bear.

It was a small black bear, about 5 meters away from me, and by the time I noticed him, he was already running away from me. Still, I promptly started booking it back to the trailhead and didn't stop to take anymore pictures. Don't go hiking alone, kids -- I am a bad example.

But the pictures I did take, including those of a sunset walk along the Pancake Bay beach, are here.

And because, yes, I am mostly posting en masse mostly to dump photos, here are the blueberry images.

I brought my camera and discovered just how difficult it is to take pictures on a moving train. Because the train doesn't slow down just because you're passing something pretty, taking a photograph pretty much consists of putting the lens against the window, snapping the picture, and hoping it's not terrible. But nevertheless, I took pictures and, a week later, they are here.

1) Manny is no longer a Red Sox, as reports have a trade sending him to LA coming in just under the wire. But the real question is... do they have a bathroom in Dodger Stadium's left field?

I jest, but the Red Sox sure are going to miss a guy who can make plays like this one.

2) Yesterday I went to a flint mine with four of my students. I'm not supposed to tell you where it is, but given the directions I had, they probably wouldn't help you anyway. One step was "Take this unmarked dirt road that's across the way from a blue house, except that I think they might have painted recently, so the house isn't blue anymore."

But, using a steel striker one of the students brought along, we did manage to build a fire without the aid of matches. Having rained the night before, finding dry birch bark was non-trivial and what we did find was struggling to light. As things were looking bleak, one of my students reached into his pocket, said, "I know a trick that indians have been using for days," and pulled out a lighter. But he didn't have to use it -- another student finally managed to get a spark to catch on.

Upon my return to the US, Brad and Russ arrived for a weekend visit and after a late night showing of The Dark Knight on Saturday night, we spent most of Sunday at Tahquamenon Falls. Russ (who is neither my father nor the Good Doctor) summed up our adventures with his farewell rhyme: "We watched Batman, went to the falls, and saw old people with tennis balls." I'll miss those guys.

Pictures:
• Lake Superior Provincial Park, including the Agawa Rock pictographs, the Awausee Trail (a 10 km hike up Agawa Mountain), and a few roadside lookouts off the Trans-Canada highway.
• Tahquamenon Falls with Brad, Russ and a beetle. Oh, and of course, I was there with them.

Then, knowing there was a big bunch of them flying around outside the window, I went up to the fire escape where I found a hole and at this hole were about 50 or more bees. So, I aimed my bee spray (with a 27 foot range, says the bottle) and fired at them from the other side of the fire escape and they started dropping like... well, flies is the idiom but dead yellow jackets is more correct. Furthermore, any bee who flew over and tried to enter the hole seemed stopped by an invisible force field of poison and every so often a drunken looking bee would climb out of the hole and drop to the ground. (Current dead bee count: 9 + many)

Victory!

Or so I thought.

Upon returning to my room (after a treacherous fall down the fire escape stairs -- watch out, it's slippery when wet!), I observed *at least* 7 bees on the window or flying around inside. Clearly I hit their hive, freaked them out and they escaped inwards.

I called the landlord, got our less than useful house manager to come over and do nothing but confirm that there were many more than 7 bees in the room while I went to see Wall-E. (Good movie, by the way.) After the movie, I stopped and got some fly paper and a "Yellow Jacket and Wasp Trap" (says the box). As I was setting them up in my room, I noticed that the bees were flying into the light fixture and frying to death. After plugging up the hole on the outside of the house, my housemate and I determined that the best thing to do was leave the light on and sleep downstairs.

This morning, I found upwards of 40 yellow jacket carcasses in the light fixture -- and at least 15 dead bees on the floor while I cleaned my room. And yet, every so often a new one would appear seemingly out of nowhere and occasionally there would be a buzz coming from inside the wall. Eventually, I saw one fly out of the bottom of the window sill, where I found a hole. After plugging it up with aluminum foil (I don't have anything better at this moment), I could hear a few bees poking at the foil from inside the window frame.

I've tasked a housemate to spray the nest again and flip on the lights for a few hours tonight after I head back up north. With any luck, that will take care of them.

Total estimated dead bee count: 100s.

Wanda, one of the historians at the Bay Mills History center, canoed out to the clay deposits as the students, other instructors and I walked there along the beach. "You'll know you've hit the clay when you start to sink," she told us.

One of our students found a hole at the water's edge and stepped in up to his calf, so we figured we were there. "No, no, keep going," she said, "There's more clay up ahead." Eventually we reached the spot and started scouring the waters to find places where we might start to sink and thus would take the shovels and dig. The water was only about two feet deep, so we waded and scoped out the area with our feet. We could tell it was softer than regular sand, but no one was sinking...

... then one of our students let out a yell and we turned and saw him knee deep in sand and clay. His cousin and brother soon joined him in the sinkhole of clay that at one point had them chest deep in the water. We started digging and pulled up handfuls of clay and put them in plastic bags. Eventually I found another hole when I stepped thigh deep into it. Wanda apparently snapped a picture of me struggling to pull myself out, so if I get my hands on it, I'll post it.

After we finished collecting clay (and I took a brisk swim in Lake Superior to wash off the clay covering my legs and arms), we sat on the beach and kneaded sand into our clay as a binder. Once the clay had the sand worked into it and had dried out a little, we proceeded to make pots and beads and figurines and whatever else people felt like making. When they dry (possibly tonight or tomorrow), Wanda and her family will fire them in the firepit they dug on the beach.

Shortly before we had to take off, I took my second swim (to wash off the clay I had smeared on my arms in a futile attempt to fend off bugs) and dove head first into the cold waters of Lake Superior. I was a little disappointed that we couldn't stay longer -- I could get used to a life like this.

It's pronounced "Mor-neau" (stress on the second syllable). Your "Morn-eau" mispronunciation is driving me crazy.

Dear All-Stars,

It's 1:32 in the AM. I have to get up early tomorrow. Please end this game soon (preferably with the AL winning) -- 15 innings is more than plenty.

Dear Bud Selig,

Don't be a punk and call a tie. That was lame in 2002 and would still be lame today.

Edit: Yayyyyy!!!!! And my future husband scored the winning run!!!! Of course this means Joe Buck is (still) mispronouncing his name all over the place. 4 hours, 50 minutes... wow.

Of course, I find CNN's description of it highly amusing. For starters, who is in that picture? I have never in my life (which includes 12+ years of living in Plymouth) seen anyone that preppy fishing with waders on in Plymouth. Also, "more than half a dozen sizable bodies of water" by my count includes Medicine Lake (a real lake), Parkers Lake (check), Gleason Lake (okay), Schmidt Lake (hmmm....), and then it starts to get sketchy. If they're counting Turtle Lake, which I talked about long ago as being a swamp, I'm crying foul.

But I'll give them credit for mentioning Fire & Ice. Mini-golf-on-ice is pretty fun. And it's not like the place is all bad... I'm just pretty sure I've lived more in more interesting cities.

But most importantly? I edited Morneau's wikipedia page within seconds of Hamilton's final out. Within a few minutes, someone else had already edited my edit. Such is the way with wikipedia... maybe I should edit it to add the fact that we are engaged. Or maybe not -- I should probably tell him first.

And boo on the announcers... "The winner's not going to be remembered with Hamilton's performance overshadowing it." Not so -- I'll always remember you, Morneau!

Today, I turned on the TV and found the local Tigers affiliate when Detroit was up 6-2. But the Twins dribbled back to tie the game up in the 9th. My future husband went 5-5 and hit what should have been called a homerun in the 8th, but had to settle for a double. It turned out to be okay though -- Morneau scored on a sacrifice and then hit a homerun (that counted) to win the game in the 11th.

Interestingly enough, I was on the phone with my dad at the end of the game and discovered that, even through whatever delay the phone has, WCCO radio in Minneapolis has about a 3 second jump on FSN Detroit broadcasting in Sault Ste Marie, MI.

It sounds like I'll be up here for the duration of the weekend -- at least there will be baseball to watch!

Edit: Dear Jim Leyland, regarding your Tigers Post Game Interview: It was a four run lead you couldn't hold on to, not just three.

But enough about the game itself... sitting here at the northern tip of Michigan, I was lucky enough to watch my two favorite teams because it happened to be ESPN's Monday Night Game. And boy, did their New England bias come through. In the top of the fifth, the announcers managed to spend the entire half inning prattling on about whether Schilling, Pedro, or Mussina belongs in the Hall of Fame without once commenting on the play going on on the field. Here I was watching the Twins with a runner on first and one out in a very tight game with a limited amount of base runners and the play-by-play guys decided that it was more important to talk about three players (two with Red Sox affiliations, one Yankee) who aren't playing in the game that's going on right in front of them. And in the bottom of the inning when the Sox came to bat, suddenly it was all about whether or not Boston could score... despite the fact that they went down 1-2-3.

If anyone wants to know why I occasionally talk about how the Red Sox and Yankees aren't liked in the middle of the country, this kind of implicit bias is exactly why!

Edit: On Baseball Tonight, the daily webgems have an absurd number of Boston plays. (And I missed the first few, but I didn't see Denard Span's catch at the wall in any of those, which was at least as impressive, if not more so, than some of those Boston plays.) But John Kruk is calling them out on the "east coast bias", so at least someone over there notices.

Being a holiday weekend, tickets were hard to come by, so Maggie and I had to settle for two seats in the same section, but different rows. Knowing that we would probably be wandering a little looking for adjacent seating we might be able to snare elsewhere, I did an amazing thing.

I did not keep score.

This was the first baseball game I've been to since 2004 in which I didn't record every pitch. I felt like I was doing something wrong when the line-up was called and I didn't record it. (I did crack eventually and wrote the line-up and the box score on a random receipt from my purse.) It was remarkably freeing to be able to get up and walk around and get food and meet the Mudonna the Mudhen.

Plus, remarkably, a very nice usher asked if we had standing room only seats. When Maggie (wrongly) said yes, we did, he offered us seats right behind homeplate. In the middle of our first inning in our new seats, he offered to bump us up to six rows behind homeplate. As off as I felt, if I had been keeping score, that never would have happened.

The game itself was an exciting one... the Mudhens were never ahead, but down two in the 9th, they managed to score a run. With a runner on second, Mike Hessman, who had been the hero in the 5th inning with a three run homer (his 28th of the season!), came up to the plate. But in true "Casey at the Bat" style, there was no joy in Mudhensville -- the Mighty Hessman did strike out.

The box score is below and the full set of pictures are here.