Nature, Friends, and Being Lazy

Chad and I had a lovely weekend.  Usually, I feel like I need to give Chad lots of time to himself so he can read books or play video games, since he's worked so hard throughout the week.  The funny thing is, the weekends where he does spend most of his time playing video games or goofing off on the internet are the weekends where he's the least happy, and the ones I feel most lonely. 

But this weekend, spurred on by the desire to make advantage of every beautiful day we have this summer, I decided we were going out and doing stuff.  So I went over to geocaching.com and downloaded a set of geocaches onto the new handheld gps Chad's dad bought for us.  Then we headed out to Walmart to pick up some bug spray, because the mosquitoes have been terrible this summer.

While at Walmart, we ran into one of Chad's old school friends, who invited us over to his wife's birthday party that evening.  After saying goodbye, we headed to the camping section with high hopes that we could find a deet-free bug spray.  Luckily, I never leave home without first checking the Amazon reviews of a product I'm thinking of buying, so when I saw this on the shelf, I knew we were in luck.

So we grabbed our bug spray and our gps, and headed out to some local trails we hike on all the time.  It was very fun out there.  We'd never gone geocaching before, so it was a learning experience for us.  I'd chosen a Ranger Rick geocaching trail meant for kids so we wouldn't have too hard of a time of it. 

I was pretty glad we'd brought the bug spray with us, because as soon as we got under the trees, there were swarms of bugs after both of us.  But the instant I sprayed the Repel on, they totally left!  This stuff is ridiculously strong smelling, though.  It's 30% lemon eucalyptus oil.  It left a bit of a cooling effect on my skin, which I didn't mind because it was so hot out there.  But don't touch your eyes when you have this stuff on your hands!

We saw lots of wonderful things out there on the trail.  Like a bunny.

A pretty red flower growing in a marshy area.  It looked a lot like a trout lily, only much bigger and also not yellow. 

 

And some yellow lotuses (not to be confused with water lilies, which have leaves that float on the surface of the water, and are usually the beautiful pointed petaled pink flowers people think are lotuses).

After spending an hour and a half out in the hot forest, we came home and showered, and then headed over to Chad's friend's wife's birthday party.  It was fun.  We only knew a few of the people, but it was laid back and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  I got to hold onto one of their 7-month old babies.  I took a picture of Chad, too, so he could see how cute he'd be as a dad.

Both baby and Chad are shy, private people.

Then we came home and spent a good long time on our front porch, just relaxing, chatting, eating low carb ice cream, and watching the sunset.  It was a wonderful weekend.