The other night I watched this show on Discovery HD called Bugs! (official site) and it was just amazing. It reminded me of how much I loved bugs when I was a kid and how I spent hours and hours running around with my butterfly net collecting any sort of bug that I could find. I also saved up several weeks of my allowance to buy a big book on bugs, I still have that book today.

My third grade teacher, Mrs. Downey, brought in a monarch caterpillar, something that I had caught a few of at the time. Now when I caught bugs I would bring them home, keep them in a jar or box for a few days and watch them and then let them go. Mrs. Downey kept her monarch caterpillar (this is what they look like) in a jar in her room but she didn’t let it go. Eventually her caterpillar formed itself a chrysalis and then we waited for the third stage of life, a butterfly.

I had never seen this happen and we lucked out that it happened during a class about a week later. Here is a picture of me watching the butterfly emerge.

Mrs. Downey, who is still to this day one of my all time favorite teachers, gave me that picture at the end of the year and she wrote this on the back “To Chris, Whose excitement and curiosity about the world was a wonderful thing”. Anyway, as you can probably tell in the picture (I’m the one up front) I was absolutely enthralled. It wasn’t long before I caught myself some monarch caterpillars to repeat the process.

I actually did it twice. On two separate occasions I caught a monarch caterpillar, brought it home, made sure I had some milkweed plants for it to eat and watched the caterpillar go through it’s different stages of life. I can still remember the excitement when I saw that they had created their chrysalis because I pretty much knew then that they were going to become butterflies. I remember checking about 132 times a day on the chrysalis looking for signs of change. When the butterfly did finally emerge nothing could drag me away from watching, even if the Smurfs made a special appearance on Thundercats. The coolest part was once the butterflies emerged I could walk around with them on my finger, I could even go outside with them and they wouldn’t fly away. This all happened when I lived in Illinois and on weekends our front yard was sort of a meeting place for the neighbor hood (we had a big corner lot) and I remember being outside with everyone with my pet butterfly on my finger, it was really cool. At the time I thought that the butterfly was tame and just loved me because I was the first thing it saw when it emerged and that is why it didn’t fly away. I later learned that it takes a while for their wings to dry and they are just incapable of flight.

Anyway, here are couple pictures of my butterflies.

I am still very fascinated with bugs. I no longer run around fields with a butterfly net but I am still known to pick up big bugs and let them crawl around my hand for a bit. I am also not one to freak out when I see a spider or anything like that. Bugs are cool.

My neighbor who lived across the street from me was named Brendan, he was a few years older than me but we still hung out a lot. I am not sure how it started exactly but at some point we started making fires out in the forest. We were safe (or so we thought) and often would just hang out in the forest with a fire going burning weird random things. We found a mattress out in the forest one time and it was filled with foam. What we would do is break off a piece of foam a bit smaller than a tennis ball, attach it on the end of a stick, place the foam in the fire until it was burning good and then fling the foam off the stick watching this awesome fireball go screaming through the air. I can still remember clearly the sound that these balls of foam made as they went soaring through the air, it was a kind of floooop sound and it was really cool. We spent many afternoons flinging fireballs through the air. One day my older brother caught us doing it and I thought I was toast, I was sure he was going to tell our parents and get me in trouble. Luckily for me, he didn’t. He started flinging with us and a good time was had by all.

Eventually we burned all the foam from the mattress so we had to find other things to burn. We burned golf balls, that is how I learned that some golf balls have different stuff inside than others. My memory may be playing tricks on me here so I wouldn’t swear to it but I remember two things usually being inside the balls. The balls were either filled with a solid plastic like substance and they were kind of boring to burn. The cool golf balls were filled with what looked like really tightly wrapped rubber bands. Actually no that I think about it, I think some of them may have had a foamy liquid like substance. The rubber band ones were the cool ones to burn though, they made lots of cool noises when they burned and hitting them with a stick and sending them flying while they were burning made for a good light show.

Tennis balls were also a favorite thing to burn and then hit with a stick to go flying through the air. We obviously liked watching fireballs go flying through the sky.

We also used to stick glass bottles that we found out in the forest into the fire. I remember being totally shocked when we took a bottle out of the fire and through it in the creek near the fire and the bottle exploded. I learned that little physics lesson that day. After that first bottle exploded we repeated that experiment many times, waiting expectantly while the bottle got nice and hot and then watching in total fascination as we tossed the bottle in the water and it just shattering.

Like all stupid childhood games our fire playing did come to end. When we almost burned down the entire forest we decided it may be a good idea to stop playing with fire. What happened was this. We had found a tree that had fell over and it was old and rotting on the inside so it had a big hollow at the end of the fallen tree. We thought this would be a great place to start the fire so we did exactly that. Luckily for us we had also dragged over a big sheet of wood that happened to have a metal liner all the way around it. We played with our fire for awhile, the tree hollow making a great fireplace of sorts. When it was time to go home we poured water on our fire and covered it with dirt to put the fire out and went home. Unbeknownst to us the fire had worked its way up the fallen tree so when we thought we had put it all out the fire was actually still smoldering inside the tree.

We came back the next day to find a good chunk of the tree reduced to ash and the fire burning quite well. We about shit our pants. Thankfully, that metal lined piece of wood had done a surprisingly good job containing the fire. The wood was completely burned away but somehow the fire didn’t make it past the metal border. We hurried to try and contain the fire by trying to kick dirt on it and pour water onto it but we just couldn’t get it out. We ran back to Brendan’s house and got a couple buckets and doubled our efforts. We did eventually get the fire out but we had learned our lesson.

Looking back at what had happened it’s hard for me to believe that we didn’t start a major fire, we got incredibly lucky. I do sometimes miss the sound of the foam fireballs flying through the air though, they looked totally cool and sounded even better.

It amazes me more kids don’t die in childhood, myself included.

On a different note I shaved my head with a razor last night for the first time. Doesn’t look to different from how I usually cut it but it sure feels weird. Here is a picture of my bald noggin for your enjoyment.

Now leave me some comments and wish me a happy birthday even if you are total stranger

I am home from Japan safe and sound. I have been writing up on my trip over at moesrealm.com The links are up yet so if you want to see it go to here. Days 1 through 13 are up right now and I plan on finishing up the rest over the next couple of days. Please note that the pages linked to above are pretty rough, they haven’t been proofread and some of them still need pictures and details filled in. I am just giving my readers here a bit of a sneak peak. I will make another post when things are up for real.

The trip was really amazing and I can’t wait to go back. I actually got home yesterday but I was stupidly tired. I took off from Japan at 7:00PM on Monday and landed in San Francisco at 10:30AM Monday. I wasn’t really able to sleep on the plane so by the time I had landed I had been up for about 19 hours, I really wanted to get back on CA time ASAP so I stayed up till ten last night when I crashed hard. I slept till 12:30 this afternoon, hopefully it won’t take me long to get back on CA time, it took me nearly a week to get on Japan time.

Anyway, I am glad to be home but I had an incredible time and drank a boat load of beer.

My passport came in the mail today which is a bit of relief seeing how I leave on Wednesday. I also went to the bank today and changed my ATM pin to a four digit code. I made my code 1234, I don’t think anyone will ever guess that (it’s also the code on my luggage and my air shield). Does anyone else find it really odd that in at least Japan and in many places in Europe you need a four digit ATM code? I mean, the longer the code the more secure it is, what’s the point of making it only 4 digits long? While I was at the bank I also picked up some Yen so I would have something to bribe the cops with when I got there. I got 23,000 yen, sounds awesome doesn’t it, makes me sound rich. Unfortunately, it’s only two hundred bucks. I do have to give the Japanese some credit though, the 5,000 yen bill has a woman on it, I wonder if the US will ever get a woman on paper money, they have made appearances on two of our coins so maybe there is a hope.

I am 95% excited for the trip and 5% scared. I will feel much better once I meet up with my friend up in northern Japan. This is my first trip to foreign lands other than Mexico and Canada and I am a bit freaked out about the whole thing. I am sure I will be fine but I am still freaking a bit.

To make this post worthwhile to anyone but me. I leave you with a bit of Japanese oddity that I hope to witness myself. Allow me to hopefully introduce you to the wonderful game Kancho