It's been awhile, dahling! (original post 6/21/12)

I'm surprised, actually, that this blog is still here.  It seems it should have been swallowed whole by the internets long ago for lack of activity.  I miss writing, and now that The Summer of Nothing has commenced, I have all the time in the world to let it work its therapeutic magic on me.

The Summer of Nothing, the low-budget sequel to The Summer of Erin.  I filled last summer with glamorous trips to foreign tropical paradises and stunning national parks; this summer will be filled with yoga, and cooking/eating ALL of my vegetable share dammit, and botany benders, and housecleaning.  A small trip to a nearby national park, tops.  The impending strike, which could carve out a hole in my savings, and my general sense of disenchantment have conspired to keep me local this year.

The first botany bender of the summer took me and Elizabeth to Kendall County, to see the much-heralded Millhurst Fen and its sexy resident-of-note, the yellow monkey flower:

Well, maybe not as sexy as its larger purple cousin, but rare nonetheless.  It was hanging out with a bunch of watercress in a cold, clear spring, surrounded by duckweed and low calamint:

Elizabeth's pal David gave the leaves of this one a chomp, mistakenly thinking it was watercress:

Berula erecta, low water parsnip.  Parsley family, ouch.  He spit it out immediately at the taste of carrot, and as I have not yet heard of his slow death by poisoning, I think danger was averted. 

Elizabeth found the source of the spring, hidden cleverly under a big nasty multiflora rose that overhung the stream.  It bubbled up and made a whirling cloud of sandy gravel...I was able to stick my arm down the hole up to my elbow.  It was painfully cold.  I wonder how far I could have gotten it down; as it was, I had a creepy feeling something was going to grab me and gnaw the skin off my hand. Like a glacial fen Balrog.

We then headed over to Silver Springs State Park, a place I associate with berry-picking as a kid, and the largest mosquito bite I've ever received, courtesy of a little bastard(ette) who nestled cozily behind my earlobe and sucked blood for what must have been hours.  I swear there was no space left behind my earlobe when she got done with me.  Anyway, were were looking for the "silver springs", but found nothing but some crappy oldfields dwarfed by huge powerlines, and some semi-degraded floodplain forest along the Fox River which, to its credit, had some blue ash.  There must have been some good quality stuff hiding somewhere, good enough to host some turtlehead anyway, because check out who fluttered across our path:

I'll be damned, a Baltimore checkerspot!  And he was very obliging to my clumsy photographic efforts.  Maybe if it hadn't been one of the hottest days of the summer, we might have hunted down the patch of Chelone that hosts these handsome guys, but alas.