grape-o-melons

Crank was taking us on a bike ride through the hills in a part of town I didn't know. There were great views down into the city, and amazing trees in all the front yards. Hoffman reached up with a lacross stick while balancing Crank's laptop on the other hand, and knocked down a HUGE grape off one of the neighbors' trees. There were only a few ripe, and they clustered all over the tree like cherries. The grapes were the size of large honeydew, but pale red like seedless grapes. We eventually sat down in the front yard to start into our grapes, but Caroline and I had no idea how to start.

We decided to bite into the tiny hole where the stem started from, but when I did, I found a small group of long translucent millipede like animals. They seemed to live just in the core of the grape, and we hypothesized that they were the reason that these huge fruits were able to self-pollinate. We ate around the core, like a giant apple, and the grape flesh was delicious and sugary and perfect!

Later at the nature center we were prompted to check into the origin of the critters. So we approached a giant wall of tiny wooden drawers. The card catalog of all the plants in the area. It took us a while to navigate through all the tiny drawers stacked floor to ceiling, but we found our way to "grapes" and found stacks of cards as well as drawers full of tiny grape plants. The information on symbiotic organisms wasn't as detailed as we would have liked, but we found all sorts of other interesting facts out, and tasted some grape samples that were savory like olives.

The nature center also featured a time lapse video art piece of various animals eating their way through different things. One was humans walking past a wall of cheese and breaking off tiny parts till it was gone, superimposed over a video (scaled to fit) of ferrets eating their way through a wall of food. Chris and I watched others including ants and other insects eating their way through certain objects in super fast motion. The layering of scales was fascinating.

bike party

We threw our yearly party of excess, and the cleaning up had begun. My grandparent's house was pretty trashed, so we were trying to put everything back together. Reed ordered us around, and i had stacks of pans that needed to go somewhere even though i kept leaving them around while i pick up some other task in the melee that was the aftermath.

Eventually we needed to go into town, so Todd and I grabbed some bikes and headed down the lane through the fields and the curving paths to the old timey town center. We stuck our hands in the candy jars at the corner store and filled our pockets with colorful sweets for the rest of our ride. We crossed the trolly tracks and kept going on to the bank, swerving through crowds of people lazily enjoying the sunshine in the square.