wilderness

i'm in the wilderness literally and abstractly. i have trouble getting to sleep. there's rodents in my 100-year-old cabin, and they can make weird noises. there was a bizarre moment last night where a coyote was yelping in a repetitive fashion, and an owl started hooting over it, and they combined to make a noise which i had no mental place for.
the air mattress i have is a cruel joke. it has about a 3 hour leak...long enough for me to fall asleep, after dozens of games of solitaire (oh, the symbolism is rich) but not long enough to get any kind of sleep. i wake up after a couple hours with my ass on the ground and my head jackknifed up on my pillow. its beautiful
i saw a female turkey with three babies. what's a baby turkey called? i bet you'd all imagine that i'd know that already. stupid dial-up connection makes me dumber.
i've seen deer and hawks. the pond up the draw from the cabin has many little green and brown frogs in it. we hiked up there and brought some frog-catching gear, to show the kiddos. our planning was not perfect. the fishing net i brought had mesh too large for the small frogs. my brother and i tried to double team the frogs by using a badminton racquet to fling one gently up into the sky and catch it. tip: if someone tells you this plan, be the recquet man. the catcher gets faces full of mud, algae, and anything else in the pond immediately around the frog that gets flung. add to that the difficulty in judging the force necessary to gently fling a frog that weighs an ounce or two at most, and you have a recipe for everyone around you laughing their asses off. amazingly, we did manage to catch a number of frogs, though none on the fly. my brother nailed me right on the palm with a larger model, but here's the final piece of the puzzle we hadn't considered (among many): frogs are slippery as hell. chris fired this frog over (one about three times bigger than any of the others) and it slapped right into my palm. as i tried to close on it, it SHPLOOP fires out of my hand, pulls a couple open field juke moves on me and bang, is home free in the pond.
it's really hard to not type "frongs" instead of frogs. i don't know what a frong is. charles is a frong.