It’s officially the first day of fall today and 20 days past my birthday (and the birth of my blog)! I can’t believe it’s been a whole year since I started this blog! I’m excited it’s fall…I love the fall and spring, but especially fall. I love the trees turning colors, the late blooming flowers, the smells, the crisp air… Last week felt very much like fall, with much cooler temperatures and some rain. It was nice. It warmed back up again today, but hopefully we’re in the process of more long-term cooling. It was sure hot this summer! Speaking of summer: summer went way too fast. I got to go to one of my friend’s bridal showers, went on some awesome hikes and saw som
e beaver dams and marmots, and went to Hills Alive in between working and taking some summer classes. My friend has since been married and is now back from her honeymoon, and I have another friend getting married next summer! Fall classes have started again, and I’m quite busy, as usual, with those and work. I’m considering taking up Yoga again, hesitant only because it will cut into my extremely limited amount of time to do homework and other important things I barely have time to do to begin with…but I do miss Yoga so much…
I also got to go to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons a few weeks ago, which was fun. What a wonderful place. I haven’t been there since I was about 11 or 12 years old, so it was nice to see it all again. Sure is different than I remember though. Alot of the trees are all dead (from a fire and from beetles). I remembered there being so many more trees when I was younger. Also, sadly, the Morning Glory hotspring is not as pretty as it was when I was there last. I remember it being a bright blue, with some green, yellow, and brown along the very edges. It’s now almost completely green where it used to be blue, and a larger area is yellow 
and brown. There was a plaque saying it was from people throwing objects (coins, trash, toys) into the spring, clogging it, which caused the pool’s temperature to change and the cyanobacteria that used to be in it (causing it to be mostly blue) can’t survive in it anymore, so now the green, yellow, and brown bacteria are thriving, causing it to be those colors instead. How sad. We ruin everything we touch. We can’t even keep a single hotspring healthy and clean. That aside, we didn’t get to see as many animals as I was hoping to. We saw a few elk cows, some buffalo, a trumpeter swan, some ravens, and some geese and ducks. I really would have liked to have seen some wolves, bears, and moose…
I didn’t get the greatest pictures of the ones I did see, either….
At my parents’ house there was a huge dragonfly swarm the night before we left for Yellowstone, and while they had already moved on by the time I got my camera, there were a few remaining ones as the sun set, and one even landed on me (in fact, I couldn’t get him off, he kept moving to my hand or other spots on my arm when I tried to put him on a tree) and hung around all night. I’d never seen dragonflies that large or those colors in the area before. It was pretty interesting! I found a site online here http://scienceforcitizens.net/blog/2011/07/studying-dragonfly-swarms-with-citizen-science/ where they were tracking dragonfly swarms, so that was something I didn’t realize they did!
Bitten
Bitten
Next day
And as a last note, my plant family has grown quite a bit. At my work, they were getting rid of their seasonal plants, since the growing season is pretty much over, so I was able to take home some very nice plants. One I particularly like, I found out, is a sweet potato vine. It has beautiful foliage, and had the prettiest little purple-pink flowers too.
Rebecca Maidl 