Stirring Kool Aid

Kool Aid should be stirred with a wooden spoon. Not plastic, but definitely wooden. I'm a firm believer in that. Somewhere along the line I saw Mom stir Kool Aid with a wooden spoon, and that's just how it should be done.

Yes, yes I know that's completely random. But these dark and wet fall days make me want to putter around in the kitchen and I made Kool Aid a few minutes ago and had to dig around to find my wooden spoon and thought I'd share that little truism with my readers. Here in a bit we're going to roast some chicken...

But enough about food (at least for now) and let's talk about these photos. The one at the top is another from yesterday's adventures. It's actually at the very bottom of the falls. For those of you who haven't Roaring Run, the main falls are a slide-type of falls that cascade down a large, rounded boulder and slide down other large stones. The water falls into bigger pools that flatten out and then drop into other cascades for six or seven hundred feet along the stream. The neat thing, to me, about this bottom cascade is that it's the first time I've seen the swirl of the current show up in a photograph I've made. It happens a great deal at waterfalls, but it's the first I've ever captured the phenomena.

The second photo is taken above the main falls. It's a bit of a climb and the trail turns into a narrow path over some extremely rocky ground. I've heard rumors of more cascades farther up and since it is National Forest land I hope to hike up there one afternoon before the winter weather really sets in.

You may have read in the last blog about the challenge that Roaring Run presents in finding something new with every visit. I've yet to make a trip out there and not find something new I haven't shot before. I'm starting to wonder how much I miss in my everyday world because I'm not looking for it.

At Roaring Run I take the time to look for something different. At work, I'm paying close attention to the land around me in search for markers to indicated property corners and lines. But how much am I missing with the rest of my time? In school they teach us about all the great explorers, Columbus, Magellan, Erickson...and with today's mapping technology it seems at first glance that there's nothing left to discover here on Earth.

I think I've come around to a different view. Instead of looking for things on the grand scale, I've decided to look smaller. I'm looking for the trees that are pretty that I haven't seen before, the new author I've never heard of, a road never taken before, that sort of thing. I love a good story and I think I'll find quite a few new ones along those overlooked trails.