Playing with My Software

So, I thought I would play around with my photo editing software and see what other things I can do. Click on th top picture to see what it looks like bigger, I changed the picture to be more of a watercolor. I love whe she lkes to hold my hand. Some day she might not want to do that anymore or it's too uncool to. :(

We spent 2 1/2 hours here today, by far the longest time we have spent at the nature center. We packed a lunch (half of which she ate before we got there.) We saw some pretty amazing things. We saw three different kinds of snakes. The first was a garter snake just like we have in our garden. The second was a 3.5-4 foot fox snake. I had never seen a snake like that out in the wild before. Yes, you see longer snakes in pet stores or at zoos, but never in the forest like that. What caught our attention was that it sounded like a rattlesnake (not that I have ever heard one firsthand). Anyways, we took a picture & video and when we were done we talked to people inside the interpretation center about what it was. There is no rattle on the end, it just flicks it's tale against the leaves to sound like a rattler. The third snake was a very thin, long, yellowish/golden snake. It was fast underneath the leaves so I didn't take a picture and didn't ask what kind it was, and after trying to find it online I can't. Who knows, I may have seen something rare to MN.

We didn't hike too much around the nature center because there was too much to look at: leaves rocks, flowers, sticks, & orienteering markers. For the first time she noticed the orienteering tags on trees and was facinated by them. I am not sure how many paths they have, but there were a lot of names (a different name for each path with coordinates listed). She had me read every one we found to her. We'll have to see if she pays attention to these on other trips there, if so we may have to go borrow a compass and get started on teaching her how to use it and find those markers thoughout the nature center.

It was a nice day. Accuweather says it s 86 degrees in our town. I suppose it doesn't feel that warm because of the wind, but it does feel nice. As you can see from the pictures we started out wearing light coats and by time we left we shed the coats because it had warmed from 64 to 74.