this is how people have fun in minnesota

i had a fabulous time with kelly this weekend. she ended up needing to leave early for a summer internship interview in denver this evening, but we made the most of the days we had. especially yesterday. first we met up with jason and went to mazzah for super-delicious egyptian food. i’d never been there before--so many vegan tasties! we all gorged ourselves. then after lunch the three of us went for a walk around “the ponds,” this special place near jason’s house.

the ponds were frozen solid. not quite thick enough to walk on, though. a few minutes into our walk we started hearing this crazy noise that no one could figure out until finally we saw rocks sliding across the ice, making an unearthly sound. then it was time to find as many large rocks as we could and hurl them onto the ponds. i uploaded a video (at the bottom of this post)--you can hear the noise, but it sounds way more impressive in person.

it’s hard to express how entertaining and satisfying this was for us. for kelly in particular because she’d never interacted with a frozen pond--she said there are pretty much no ponds or lakes in colorado springs where she grew up, somehow she never saw any when she was at school in iowa, and now she’s in berkeley where it basically doesn’t freeze. we threw rocks, sticks, ice, and anything else we could find for what seemed like hours, wandering the perimeter of the ponds, testing the acoustics at different locations.

shards of ice make a very different but equally cool sound--they shatter when they hit the surface, then they radiate and skitter, making a high-pitched, tinkling noise and sparkling in the sunlight.

we all found hiking sticks. staffs, actually. mine is almost as tall as i am, with beaver tooth marks on both ends.

we crossed some mighty sketchy bridges. this one isn’t as bad as it looks. and it features a perfect little troll habitat on the other side.

there were ghostly hemlock skeletons all over the place.

after we left jason’s we had a big family dinner and visited with our grandma. nana showed us a picture of our dads dressed up in blackface (!!!!!) when they were little kids, literally putting on a minstrel show with my uncle's boy scout group...it was simultaneously hilarious and horrifying. after dinner we came home and watched shortbus. kelly had never seen it before. her mind was blown. i think it gets better every time i watch it.

kelly’s in grad school to be a minister in the first united church of christ, but lately she’s thinking about doing something sex-related in the ministry. that sounds weird, right? i don’t exactly know how to write what she described. i guess it would be cool to say “i work in the sex ministry.” she’s taking some feminist, LGBTQIA and sex-related classes that sound really fascinating. i hope she does go that route. and i hope i can go visit her in berkeley soon...it sounds so awesome there.

rock chuckin' video: