scheherazade

When my family took a vacation in Ireland, we rented a house that happened to come with cows. They lived out front. The owners didn’t milk the cows or anything, they just sort of HAD them.

Anyway, I really like cows, so I tried to get close enough to pet them one day. Not a good idea. The bigger cow just made this noise like “WWWWWUFF” and kind of backed up a bit.

I decided not to pet the cow.

If I find a friendlier cow, though, I’m totally going to hug it.

Whale watching is so fun and totally worth it, if you know where to go.

If you can swing it, try to go on a whale watching boat out of Canada. Canadian law allows the boats to get much, much closer to the whales than American law. Let’s compare and contrast. I’ve been on about 20 Canadian whale watching trips and one American one. On the American one, I saw a blow or two from about 500 feet off…they’re not allowed to get much closer than that. On Canadian trips, however, you can get close enough to actually, like, see a whale. If the whale is so inclined, it might swim towards your boat, and you might get close enough to actually TOUCH the whale.

Do it. Do it, do it, do it…but don’t do it in America.

So I’m biking down the sidewalk on the biggest road in my town. I cross a street when the traffic light turned green, and the woman waiting for it to change started moving. Unfortunately, I was in front of her at the time. I saw her coming, but there wasn’t too much I could do about it. She was stopped a little way back from the light, and she accelerated at quite a clip.

Wham!

Suddenly, I’m on my back 15 feet away with my bike on top of me. I flew a few feet and then skidded the rest. My bike held my knee down on the pavement the whole way…think about grating parmesan cheese for a spaghetti dinner and you’ll get a rough image of what I’m talking about here.

Other than a few scrapes, two sprained knees, two sprained ankles, one sprained wrist, and huge bruises across my stomach and thighs where my bike landed on me, I was perfectly alright…but damn, it hurt. I was in physical therapy for my knee (the cheese grater knee) for a few months afterward, and it still hurts when it gets cold or rainy.

The short end of a long story is that you probably shouldn’t get hit by a car.