More Wandering in the Woods

I am exhausted. I ate coffee beans for a bedtime snack last night and didn't fall asleep until 3AM. I blame the New York Times. Their iced coffee recipe [registration required] takes 12 hours -- effort-free, thankfully -- which means that you are making coffee in the evening. This requires coffee beans. And I like the taste of coffee beans... a lot. To the point where I don't care (at least at the moment that I am eating the coffee beans) that my beloved "caffeine with a crunch" will prevent me from sleeping. Luckily, I didn't really like the iced coffee, so I won't have to face this temptation regularly. However, writing this post is making me want to eat more coffee beans. Right. So I went to bed at 3, then woke up at 7:45 to go hiking. We did about 5.5 miles, then I rushed home, showered, and went to volunteer at the soup kitchen, then helped deliver the food. I didn't get many good pictures of the hike unfortunately. Kinda like with Jackie and the birthday balloons, I took pictures of beautiful landscapes, and when I looked at them later, all that I got was a bunch of trees. Hmf. So here's one tree pic. The rest look pretty similar.

The Missouri River, aka "Old Muddy".

Me, taking a picture of my own shadow, and apparently some random person's feet as well.

And a frog. Not the only trail wildlife, oh no, not at all. One of the people in the group actually stepped on a copperhead because he didn't see it on the trail. I didn't get a picture of it unfortunately -- no one wanted to pose with a poisonous snake. :)

And in minor weirdness, I found "my" tomato salad recipe on someone else's blog, posted a year before mine. (If you must look, it's here.) Mine's better of course, but it's still a weird feeling. I bet there are a lot of things that I've thought up, that other people have thought up first.