Don't Feed the Ponies

Wow, I'm so behind. I have at least 4 entries (including this one) that I've meant to write for a couple of weeks now. First the internet was down, then I was out of town, then I had family issues and finally I was catching up on schoolwork that got put off because of those family issues. Oh, and this weekend is both Halloween and the Rally to Restore Sanity, so there's likely to be another post or two over that. So the next week might be an entry every day or every other day kind of week. Enjoy!

The out of town that I just mentioned was actually a fabulous camping trip with Jeff and three of our new awesome friends here at Wesley. See, Wesley does this awesome thing called Fall Break (UT, take note!) where basically we just get a week off to catch up. It's actually called Reading Week, but I'm going to go ahead and posit that not a whole lot of reading ever gets done by anyone. It's Fall Break. So the five of us decided to take a couple of days at the beginning of the week and go to Assateague Island-- yes, like Misty of Chincoteague, for all of you little girls (and little girls at heart) who are screaming with jealousy right now. And yes, there were ponies.

Awwww! But no, we did not ride or pet the ponies. Sorry to disillusion any of you, but ponies BITE. Also, they want your food. They want it in a stick-their-head-in-your-trunk-and-steal-it, take-it-right-off-your-table-while-you-eat, lay-seige-to-your-campsite kind of way.

          (I love this picture. Andy and the pony are just staring each other down over the trunk of our car.)


They do this because silly mothers say, "Look, kiddies! A real, live pony! Go give it this apple!" And then the child gives the pony the apple and the the pony says, "Hmm, is that a carrot with that apple?" And the pony bites the child's finger. If it doesn't, it's still learned that people = food. Thus, you have ponies wandering up to your table while you eat.

In any case, they're still pretty and the little ones are adorable and it really is pretty cool that they're just wandering all over the place, wild. Just remember that wild is the key adjective here. Not pretty, not cute.  Wild.

But enough about the ponies. The other wildlife that needs to be discussed is the MOSQUITOES. Good Lord. I'm from the Gulf Coast, so I'm used to humidity and therefore puddles and therefore ridiculous amounts of mosquitoes, but never in my life have I been chased down and mauled by mosquitoes like we were that weekend. They literally swarmed us. Andy in particular. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say that Andy was the beacon that called them and then they realized that there were actually FIVE tasty humans there. So we all came home looking like we had the pox.

There were also lots of tiny crabs everywhere. Like, TINY.

Also less tiny crabs, and horseshoe crabs and a jellyfish and bioluminescent plankton. The plankton were by far the coolest things we found on the beach, but I'm not a good enough photographer to take a picture of tiny, faintly glowing green things.

Speaking of glowing things, I'm also not very good at taking pictures of fire (apparently), but that turned out alright because we weren't very good at building fires. Somehow we managed to utterly fail both nights we were there, despite both Mike and Andy's heroic Eagle Scout attempts and despite Jeff, Heather (yes, another one) and me standing around encouraging the fire to freaking light already. We did get a good enough fire to toast marshmallows for s'mores, though, so it really worked out in the end.

Oh, and by far the coolest thing that I couldn't take a picture of was the Milky Way. Yeah, I said it. The Milky Way. This may not be so big of a shock for all of you who are from places small enough that there's no light pollution, but I'm a city girl. AND I COULD SEE OUR GALAXY. One arm of it, anyway. It was incredibly awesome, and I mean that in the literal awe-inspiring sense of the word. I got to go to a presentation by my friend's dad a while back on how small we are in the universe, but man, this brought it home like nothing else. It was amazing. I really wish I could have taken a picture.

I also wish I'd taken a picture of our friend with dreads who gave us fire and a frisbee and a science lesson the first night, or of when Matt joined us and we went to Ocean City, or of making lunch (two separate pots of pasta and a third of sauce) on the one tiny little burner that Andy brought.

But I did, at least, get a pretty picture of the ocean.

And here's a pretty picture of my friends, super excited to go home and shower.

I love my new friends :) That is all.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't feed the ponies.