friends! i have some!

after waiting for WEEKS (haha) my friends jen and cale finally showed up on our doorstep. they had driven like 8 hours, and then had to wait for 3 hours to get on the 2 hour long ferry ride.

it had been a long day.

ryan made them a cute little bed by shoving the couches together, and i bought some beer, and we visited for a while and went to bed.

the next morning we hung out for a bit and then took off downtown to go for breakfast at floyds. greasy and delicious as usual. also, we got a booth, which is a score!

we wandered around, doing the "what should we do?" thing for a bit. i showed them where i work, and then we decided to go to the bug zoo.

seriously, i recommend this place to anybody with any curiosity at all in their bodies who has eight bucks to spare.
dude, you get to HOLD the bugs!
unfortunately i don't have any photos of me holding bugs (yet) as jen took them all with her camera, but i held some kind of stick insect and a tarantula.

i'm not gonna lie to you, i was afraid of the tarantula because the zoo informational guide lady was like "here are the fangs, she's venemous. now hold it in your bare hand" pretty much.

i took like 3859485034850 photos. so many, in fact, that my camera battery died while i was still in there.

here are some things that surprised me:

-there is an insect more disgusting than a millipede. more disgusting than a cockroach. more disgusting than earwigs ...and...it is ... this thing
TA DAAAH!




seriously...look at it's face.
WTF!
i'm not usually a freak-out-about-bugs kinda girl but if i actually saw one of these things i think i would actually scream in fright.
it was ENORMOUS!

-scorpions glow under black lights.



-ants have graveyards/"garbage dumps" that can be anywhere up to 2km away from their nest. all you have to do to find it is walk in concentric circles away from the ant hill. haha

-this tiny glass case had 3 or 4 giant cockroaches in it...or so it seemed until the lady was like "there are around 300 in here" and that's when i realized just how creepy cockroaches are. she also told us something about the amount of radiation a cockroach can survive and how much a human can and ewwww it's like 20 times as much.

-also, cockroaches can be hilarious if you give them tables and chairs and toilets






here are a bunch more pictures i took:

























then we did a lovely walk from downtown around to fisherman's wharf, where there are houseboats and usually hungry fat seals with one eye that you can feed, but alas, they weren't there.

we walked back and had a couple beers on a patio overlooking the ocean and then came back to the house. they set up a tent in the backyard and had a camp-out after we watched the last harry potter movie. oh, and of course we had more beers.
_______

the next day we took off to the sooke potholes.

the name isn't very glamorous but the place is really beautiful. it's like a bunch of swimming holes all connected by a river.

it was cloudy and cale didn't have a bathing suit, so we didn't go swimming, but we did walk around and look at stuff for an hour or so.










after that, we came back to the house and they packed up and left.

they were only here for a couple of days but i'd say they were quality visiting days.

thanks for visiting me, friends!! i missed you!!