Coffee, Swimming, and Skunks

This past weekend, Jackie, my mom, and I drove out to Spearfish to hang with the fam. We spent the weekend in coffee shops and one particular visit we happened to walk into Common Grounds during a folk band's practice session. They sang about not eating hot soup with your hands- to give you an idea of their musicality.

Jackie, Brytten and I hung out at the water park and I had one of the most adorable grown-up sister moments with Brytten. She and I went down a double-tube slide and she insisted on sitting backwards so we faced each other on our tube and giggled during the entire trip down. Its an odd realization when you and your only sister are both grownups. In the last year Brytten and I have only seen each other about half a dozen times which is completely different from living in the same house. She and I appreciate each other that much more because of how infrequently we see each other and when we say goodbye after a weekend we aren't always positive when we will see each other again.

On Friday night when we first got there we were all sitting on my grandparent's deck and my grandma started explaining how during a recent ending-of-a-skunk's-life on my grandpa's part, my grandma wanted the skunk's death to be used as a life lesson for my 7 and 5-year-old cousins because as she said, "Bad things get shot." This phrase became quite the thing particularly with my mom and my grandpa naming off the "bad things to be shot" in recent history. Everyone from Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde was named. The next morning in the newspaper my grandpa read an article about Bonnie and Clyde's entire gun collection being sold and my grandpa joked that he was going to mortgage the house to buy the coveted collection.

Sunday morning brought another skunk's death. My grandpa had trapped it in his garden by placing a duck egg in a trap and the skunk ate the entire egg, shell and all. So because no one else was awake at the time he asked my mom to go help him. As she started to say something he thought she was going to complain about having to shoot a gun and kill the skunk when in actuality she was about to complain about her being the last thing the skunk saw before it died. Then to enhance matters as only my mother could, when my grandpa fired his gun (which keep in mind- they live in a very peaceful residential neighborhood) all my mom could think was, "He popped a cap in his ass!" Then she got the hell out.

We didn't see my grandpa for a long time and when he finally emerged and thank god, smelled normal, I got in trouble for not being willing to rescue him if he had indeed needed rescuing. He said he would never rescue me. I don't really believe him.

Spearfish Creek 

It should not surprise anyone that I didn't get a picture of the skunk...