Restin' in Hesston

Today (Friday Aug 11) I'm resting at Lois and Ray Zehr's house in Hesston Kansas. They are old friends of my parents and have generously agreed to let me stay here two nights.

About a block away from their house is a lovely arboretum, and I walked around there for a few hours this morning. Their pond has a lot of fish and swimming turtles. Some kids came and were feeding the turtles, and there were easily twelve or more turtles swimming around us. Then after a long while, the great big granddaddy turtle showed its head. The head of this turtle was about 3 inches wide. I didn't get to see the whole body of the big one because he was kind of shy, but I'm guessing it was 2 feet across or more. Wow.

I also saw a tail of an animal that I never saw the body of. It was crawling off through some tall grass, and I just saw this thick black fleshy tail sliding away. Weird. Not furry, kind of bald. Too stubby to be a snake tail... looked first like must have been a great big lizard, but what lizard living there would have a tail where the base was 2 inches fat? Maybe an armadillo?

Lois cooked lunches for me, and the first dinner. This was very nice of her, especially because I'm vegetarian and she wasn't really familiar with vegetarian cooking. She asked what I ate, and one thing I mentioned was beans and rice. So she cooked up a big thing of that, and it was delicious. Then the first night I was there they (and by association I) were invited to a neighbor's place for some fresh fish specially brought from Virginia and cooked by a visitor of theirs. It's a good thing we brought the leftover beans and rice, because the side dishes with the fish consisted of rice cooked in chicken broth, plus fresh avocado and tomato. It did look delicious, and the fish-bringer (actually named Dan) seemed to be quite a skilled cook. Ah well.

For the next night I made a vegetarian lasagne-like casserole for Ray and Lois, which they seemed to like. That was a lot of fun - it seemed like forever since I had actually cooked real food. It sure will be nice to get home someday.