There's A First Time for Everything

This week was exciting because I had a lot of firsts, and they got way more awesome as the week went on. I was starving after posting my last blog entry (on my day off in Austin), so I looked up a few good places to eat in downtown. I went to check one place out, but a lack of street parking and a sketchy entrance had me do a drive-by instead. I went a couple blocks when I passed a Turkish food truck (which I had also seen online). I’ve been told many times that food trucks have delicious food, so I figured there was no better time to eat at one. I didn’t know what to get, so the woman ordered me a falafel kebab with roasted red pepper hummus. It was BEYOND DELICIOUS. I can’t even explain how happy that food made me. It was so good that I think I’m going back sometime this week and bringing other people to enjoy the deliciousness of it. First #1: eating at a food truck.

While I was in Austin I went to South Congress Avenue, which is where they have lots of little shops to wander in (vintage clothing, candy/ice cream, cowboy boots, etc.) and the famous “Bat Bridge”, where thousands (millions?) of bats pour out from under the bridge at dusk. This street also only has back-in parking (WHAT?). I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many messed up parking jobs (including my own) in that short a stretch before. I went into a couple of vintage shops but quickly learned to avoid them like the plague when I realized that $150 for a top was cheap.

I (obviously) made a stop at the candy shop – it was absolutely filled with anything from classic candy bars to gourmet chocolates. I spent more on a few pieces of chocolate than I did on lunch. Further down the street an animal shelter put out several pens of puppies just off the sidewalk! They were adorable little roly-polies just playing with each other. I hung out with those guys for a little while before moseying back to my car (2 hour parking limit). I was going to try and stick around to watch the bats come out, but that wasn’t for another couple hours and I didn’t have anything else to do in the area. Plus I still had to go grocery shopping and get my data together for the next day of work.

 

On Tuesday we went over to the bunkhouse (where the refuge interns live) for dinner. They made chili, one of them offered up some delicious beers, Chelsea made salad, Michaela made cornbread, and I made a key lime pie. That was such a delicious dinner, and nice to get out of our place now and then. I have serious porch-envy because their porch seems way cooler than ours. I think that’s only because they have actual seating and a lot of shade, whereas we have crappy chairs and no shade depending on the time of day. We do have the pond and a really awesome view, so that’s always nice. At the end of the night, one of the interns whipped out some Midnight Moon apple pie moonshine and poured a round of shots. That was surprisingly smooth, delicious, and like some kind of liquid dessert (despite the fact that we already had both apple and key lime pies). First #2: drinking moonshine!

We had to work on the Fourth of July, but it was a “half day” (we got back around 11:30, so it was definitely a short day but not an actual half day). One of the refuge interns, Andrew, wanted to go with Chelsea and me to Cedar Park to watch fireworks, so he came over around 5:30. He and the other interns had recommended this Cajun place called Parrain’s, so I suggested we go there for dinner. I got a po’boy with Andouille which was amazing! Spicy and delicious, plus I split cornbread with Chelsea, which also had a kick to it. Definitely need to go back there before the summer is over (which I’m horrified to realize is in less than three weeks). First #3: Cajun food (I think that’s a first…?)

Fourth of July baby!

Chelsea’s boyfriend came to visit her on Friday, so she decided to cook dinner for everyone. She made chicken-fried-steak, a potato casserole, and corn, and Michaela made an apple-fig-crumble for dessert. First #4: Chicken-fried-steak. To be fair the apple-fig-crumble was a first, but I feel like chicken-fried-steak is a more standard option.

I thought that Saturday was a good day when I got an awesome, up-close picture of newly fledged BCVI, but it got a thousand time better in a very short amount of time. After finishing up all of our work, Michaela and I headed back home, but stopped at the bunkhouse along the way to give some of her apple-fig-crumble to the interns. She headed home but I stuck around, and long story short – we came into some hogs.

Each of the interns got a hog, and I helped them gut and skin them! Andrew has a lot of experience with hunting and field dressing things, so I stuck by him and he explained every step of the process. Liz had a piglet and was doing what Andrew did, and Joey had a medium-sized hog (35 lbs, same as Andrew) and was doing what Liz did. Andrew started by cutting from the breastbone all the way to the pelvis, through at least an inch of fat (these were healthy hogs). He was careful to not cut too deep too quickly, because the goal was to cut through all of the layers of skin, fat, and connective tissue without going too far and puncturing an organ. Once he cut through the last layer, the intestines just started ballooning out of the hog. It was super weird to watch! I didn’t realize how tightly-packed everything is inside a body, so you give it some extra space and it just expands outward. Neat! Then he started cutting things that were connected to other parts of the body (cut the esophagus, removed the heart (I held a warm hog’s heart in my hand… wild!), bagged the liver, etc. I got to stick my hands in a few times, but Andrew mostly handled the gutting. Then we dumped the guts out and hung the carcass from a tree. We didn’t have any proper equipment for hanging a hog carcass – just a rope – so we took turns spreading the legs apart while the other person worked on skinning it. I totally owned that hog for my first time skinning an animal! It was also kind of tricky to do because it was warm out and the fat started to sweat, so we were trying to get a grip on a greasy hunk of hog.

Andrew started bagging cuts of meat while I cut out the ribs. When everyone finished, we froze the meat, dumped the carcasses and intestines as a present for the vultures, and enjoyed some of Michaela’s apple-fig-crumble. Field dressing a hog works up an appetite! Liz and Joey offered to wash my clothes in their “pig’s blood” load of laundry, but I figured I should probably head home so I could eat dinner and do data from that day. Some people separate their whites from their darks, but we separate regular clothes from field clothes from clothes covered in hog’s blood. Unfortunately, the next morning I realized that – despite a thorough washing – my sleeves still smelled like hog fat. That’s not exactly a smell I can describe, but when I went to wipe my face on my sleeve I knew that’s what I was smelling. Delicious. First #5: GUTTING AND SKINNING A HOG!

Sunday I went to the beach with Andrew after work. It was the same beach I went to with the interns before – soft sand, warm water, and no one else around! We swam, tanned (or more accurately, fried), and listened to country music, and then headed back to the bunkhouse for quick showers before heading into Austin. Andrew had told me of this great bar called Craft Pride that also had a bacon food truck parked behind it. Beer and bacon? Yes please! However, we were horrified to discover that the guys with the truck had decided to “move on” in search of different venues. They’d been there for months and I finally make my way down after they leave?? What a bunch of hoo-hah. The beer was still delicious and totally worth it (Pearl Snap Pilsner (amazing), Austin Amber, El Hefe Weizen, and Sisyphus Barlywine Ale).

After that we walked to the food truck courtyard (hoping that the bacon truck just moved over there), but then we walked down the street to get dinner at a place called Bangers, which has beer and specialty sausages. I got a bratwurst and Andrew got a South Texas Antelope & Venison Merguez. I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot during this post, but both of them were delicious! My brat came covered in sour kraut – so good. We also got another round of beers – 512 Pale Ale for me – and some kind of Snickers Jar for dessert (roasted peanuts, caramel, ice cream, and chocolate all served up in a jar. YUM. It was an hour and a half from downtown to my house (with a stop to drop Andrew off), so I didn’t get home until 3am. An eight-day week followed by a nine-day week with one day off in between? Yeah, any day that I get off work early is automatically considered a “weekend” in my mind.

All in all this was a fantastic week! Never would’ve dreamed I’d learn to field dress a hog, but DANG was that awesome!

A Week of Creatures

Finally a day off! I just worked an eight-day week, have today off, and then nine more days of work to look forward to (yes, we’re working on the 4^th). To be fair, I did this to myself in order to get a three-day weekend to go up to Washington D.C., so it will all be worth it.

Anyways, last Saturday I FINALLY got to go swimming for real! Liz and Joey, two of the SCA interns working for the refuge, invited me to go swim in a nearby lake with them. I met them in the parking lot and then we walked a half kilometer down to the water (the water level was really low). The beach was incredibly nice – decent scenery, very soft sand, warm water with refreshingly cool current (good, because REALLY warm water brings on the brain-eating amoeba… not even kidding), and the beach was empty (there were a number of boaters, but we had the land). We swam and relaxed for a couple hours, and then Andrew (another SCA intern) showed up from setting up a hog trap. They were going to the Cedar Park Rodeo that night, so we left a little while later.

This week I encountered lots of creatures. I saw my first black widow of the season (great, more things that can kill me!) – she had trapped one of those black beetles in her web.

We also found a GIANT grasshopper on our sliding glass door. That thing was as big as my hand.

I almost ran into a huge black and yellow garden spider. He had built a web right across a little path between some shin oak bushes, and I was walking into the sun so I could barely see. Thankfully I saw him just in time, because he was big enough (size of my palm) that I would have had a major freak out trying to get him off of me. I went around the bushes to take pictures from the other side of his web. I was going to be bold and take a picture with my hand next to him (for size), but the wind kept blowing his web toward me which was NOT okay considering I was squatting down to get him level with my face. Giant spider and face do not mix.

I saw my third rattlesnake of the summer, and this one was moving! I had been looking for a male BCVI with his fledglings, and after waiting around a while I finally heard them pretty close by, so I was figuring out the best path to get to them. I was standing on a rock and couldn’t see the ground because the grass was so tall. I didn’t want to just step down because there’s always the worry of messing up your knees when you don’t know how far it is to the ground. I’m glad I paused, because I heard something moving in the grass next to me. Normally I just kind of assume it’s some kind of insect or lizard or something, but this time I turned around to investigate. I looked over and saw a meter-long rattlesnake slithering slowly into the tall grass a meter away from me in the direction that I was trying to go. Heck NO was I going to jump in that grass! And once again, he didn’t rattle.

Last interesting creature encounter was actually a BCVI. I had just checked his nest and found the female incubating four eggs, so I ran over to where the male was singing so that I could map him (they like getting an idea of territory ranges before and after the birds have a nest). A couple minutes after I found the male, a female popped up out of nowhere and they copulated! But he already had a female with a nest… so he had a second female! It was really lucky that I saw this, because it will save a lot of confusion later when we see him hanging out in several territories (kind of like that mess of birds from a couple weeks ago).

This week Chelsea, Marisa, Dianne, and Jeremy all went to PK to do veg… for two days. That sounded absolutely terrible, so I was glad that I got to stay behind and keep doing territory stuff, as nice as PK is. While they were gone I went to the Bluebonnet Café with Michaela and Tatiana (a temp field tech who was only around for a week of training, then going to join the Oklahoma crew). Western omelet, hash browns, Texas toast, and German chocolate pie. Oh my gosh, that pie was so good! Definitely better than the peanut butter pie I had the first time. We totally ate the pie before the meal, which was good because then I saved half of the omelet and hash browns to have for breakfast the next morning.

Wednesday Liz and Joey invited me to go with them to Blues on the Green in downtown Austin. It’s a free concert series every other Wednesday in the summer. We met one of Liz’s high school friends there, who had brought some of her friends. It was a really fun evening – music, free swag, shirtless guys putting way more effort into Frisbee than was probably necessary, and being in a city again! We didn’t get back to their bunkhouse until midnight, and then it was another 20 minutes for me to get back to the Flying X. Was definitely great to finally have a real night out, but man was I hurting the next day.

The others finally got back from PK on Friday, but Michaela left to help at another site for a few days. On Saturday, Marisa wanted to pick up some wine for her parents, so she, Chelsea, and I went to the Flat Creek Winery which was only 20 minutes away (and only 5 minutes from the beach I went to with Liz, Joey, and Andrew). For $10 we tried 6 wines and got a wine glass to keep. They had a couple of absolutely delicious wines, but being a poor field tech, I only bought a bottle of the second-best wine (half the cost of the best one). After that we met Jeremy and Tatiana at the Bluebonnet Café, but we needed to stop for gas along the way. Marisa knew that her tank was almost empty when we left the house, but she said she would fill up at this sketchy little gas “station” on the way to the winery. For some unknown reason, she saw the gas station on the way to the winery, said “there it is”, and kept driving… with the AC on full blast. After leaving the winery, we watched the gas warning light turn on and the needle hover dangerously close to the E. Her car gives an estimate of how many miles are left, but when you’ve got the AC running and you’re going up and down hills that number drops quicker than normal. We rolled into the station on fumes, with something like 6 miles left in the tank. I love that my dad taught me to never let the gas drop below a quarter tank. Definitely prevents those moments of panic. Plus, it was over 100 degrees outside… I was NOT pushing that car. Oh, got a slice of pecan pie warmed up – was a very close second to the German chocolate pie!

Earlier in the week we heard on the radio that a cold front would be moving in on Sunday that would drop temperatures to 100… DROP temps to 100. He was definitely right – there was a storm on Sunday morning. It sucked because 10 minutes of rain and I was soaked to my skin for the rest of the day. However, the sunrise was BEAUTIFUL, and not just right where the sun was. The whole sky looked amazing, with all the clouds and changing light. Definitely worth the storm… until I started slipping and sliding into the canyons instead of gracefully hiking my way down. There is really nothing graceful about what we do, actually.

Today, as I said, is my day off! I managed to sleep in until sunrise ( :-| ) which was fortunately another good one, so I ran outside to take some pictures and then hopped back into bed. I left for Austin a bit later to hit up REI for some gear for Peru. I think I will only ever go to REI in the hour after opening, and only on weekdays. I got help immediately after entering the store, and had three other people offer to help in the time that I was there. Compare this to a Saturday afternoon when I stood next to an employee for over 20 minutes before it was finally my turn. Since I’m in downtown Austin, I figure I’ll wander around and explore the shops and whatnot. Depending on how long I’m here, I may stick around to see the REAL bat bridge! Nine straight days of work starting tomorrow… wish me luck.