Tongue Flicker

Adventure Location: Decatur, Alabama
Click a picture to enlarge it.

9 more days

It was just a nice walk this morning and the afternoon bike ride did not happen due to heat and humidity being too high.

So on down the road we went and swung a right at the soccer fields. Up ahead two robins were making trouble for something in the grass. They flew off as the Teams arrived at the area. There it was in the grass, a tongue flicker of the benevolent type.

 

It apparently was tired from fighting the birds as it just rested with heavy breathing going on. As the OFM shifted locations for another picture the snake suddenly took off at high speed for the trees. The OFM sent a “BEST WISHES” with it. And we were on our way again.

The day was nice and just warm enough to make the OFM muscles work well. The three mile walk went very well and yielded a few pictures. But the shoe rocks were very active today.  We fought with them several times.

Here is some OFM history. His gait seems to attract lots of shoe rocks for some reason. In case you did not know about Shoe Rocks, here is the story. They lay around on trails with other loose rocks and gravel waiting for a target to come past. When an appropriate target like an OFM comes past, at least one of them will jump into the targets shoe. 

Here is a shoe rock in its out of shoe appearance.

What is really bad  about them is they immediately upon entering a shoe gain size to that of a golf ball. The other thing is they have sharp spikes and ridges that pop forth to assault your foot. The longer you take to stop and remove the shoe rock the bigger and meaner they get. They are incredibly quick at shrinking down an instant from when the shoe is removed. Then they look like in the picture above.

 When removed and chunked out onto the trail or grass, they have an instant communication ability to prepare the shoe rocks on down the way that a worthy target is coming. If the OFM had kept all the shoe rocks that assaulted him, he could have had a gravel road from Decatur all the way to Miami Florida by now.

OK. Painting update time.  The painting with regular water colors is a 80% flop. However the OFM did bring in the storm trooper water color pencils to try to save the painting and the rescue effort seems to be working. We are still a few days away from the finish. However now that the regular water colors are put away the Teams are back to trying to have tooooo much fun.