RWBY and Hatching Time

Hello!

Just wanted to share a few pics from the past week. (**You can click on any of these photos and they'll be BIGGER.)

COMIC CON. I'll start with David's cool costume he made. Yes, that he made! Ha. Last month he mentioned needing to go to the fabric store, and he wanted to transform one of his old missionary white shirts, into this costume.

"For what?" I ask.
"Comic Con, in Salt Lake." (As if I'm familiar with something called Comic Con. Ha!)

SLC Comic Con; David has his scythe

Actually, last year, he and some friends went to something like it in Boston. It's kind of a big, regional event that cities have, that celebrates movies or book series, and now they also do shows that are just on the Internet. People dress up like their favorite characters, and some people go all out crazy with these costumes.

They may invite the celebrities who star in the shows, and have panel discussions. It's kind of geeky when you consider the mind-boggling volumes of trivia that some of these people know (think Star Trek, Dr. Who...there are fan websites, video games and fan-written books based on these characters and their worlds.)

David went as Qrow (pronounced "crow") Cosplay, from the show "RWBY" (pronounced "Ruby.")  RWBY is "an American 3D Original Net Animation," which means it came out originally only on the Internet.

So. There's your background. David pulled out the sewing machine and actually made his costume! Started with a white shirt, added the black pieces for collar/cuffs/pockets, then the gray on the front. Cut a cape and Voila! :) :)

Not "over-the-top," like he said SOME of the costumes were, but it was pretty impressive. Here are pics of the animated character, and David. And I'll pull a photo from facebook of the 4-some who went on Saturday.

NATURE HIGHLIGHT.
OK -- now for the Nature Highlight from Saturday, here on our street, just 3 houses down. I was taking my morning walk, and saw some movement on the ground by the neighbor's mailbox. OH COOL, it's a BABY TURTLE! So I run home 3 houses, grab the camera, and tell Frank: come see a cool piece of nature, guess what I found!

walking (suprisingly fast) across the street

compared to a basketball

checking out Frank's finger when he
 put it down there for size comparison

I got back there and he was gone. We look around. Oh, there he is! Then Frank sees another one. And another one. We count 6. "Look," says Frank. "One is poking his head out of this hole." What??

It turns out, it was a nest, and we caught it at the very few minutes when the turtles had just hatched and were coming out of the nest!

We watched for 20 minutes, and Frank counted TWENTY-ONE baby turtles come out of the nest hole and walk across the street to the conservation land/kind of swampy marsh over there.

Here are some pics, because of course I took a ridiculous number of pictures.

Fun facts: Snapping Turtles look prehistoric, because, well, they kind of are. They have not needed to evolve or change at all, over the last hundreds of thousands of years, because they are already "perfect." Of course the eggs might be eaten by racoons or skunks or other animals, and birds might also eat these little baby turtles. But by the time they grow up into adolescents and adults, snapping turtles have very few, if any predators! Their spine grows into their rock-hard shell, and besides that they are known to be aggressive. Animals leave them alone. They are home free.

Have a great week!
Kari