I work in retail, and in my particular retail department we sell lamps. We sell a wide variety of lamps, but today I would like to talk about a particular kind of lamp that we have sold in the past.
At this point I can’t remember exactly what the name of the lamp was, but it was essentially a taxidermy lamp. The base was made out of a (rather large) glass jar, and inside was a diorama featuring a taxidermy bird.
I know there was one that had a Quail in it, and I want to say that there was one featuring a duck…
So anyway, the other day I had a customer who was looking for floor lamps that my store carried aside from the ones that I actually had in store. I pulled up our website, and as I was browsing for floor lamps I noted some of the rather… odd lamps that we currently have to offer.
Later in the workday I mentioned some of the lamps to a co-worker, who recounted a customer having recently come in seeking the taxidermy lamps that we used to carry. Since we can no longer get those, she offered to search Google for possible leads as to where they could potentially seek out a taxidermy lamp to complement those that they already have.
Have you ever Googled “Taxidermy Lamp”?
Probably not, because let’s be honest, why would you? But let me tell you, some of the results are truly bizarre. So I have told you all of this, so that I could show you this, because quite frankly now that I have seen it, how can I possibly keep the image to myself? That would be selfish of me.
Now that I’ve, in all likely-hood, horrified you completely I’ll tell you about today’s completely awesome adventure. Despite initial fears that the lovely Michigan weather would once more annihilate our plans, several friends from work and I finally got to go kayaking, and we had a blast.
I actually turned out to be a gorgeous day out on the river. Because none of us had been out on this particular river before, and two of us hadn’t ever been kayaking before, we took the shorts trip, which was about an hour and a half long.
Once we’d paid for the trip and signed the necessary paperwork, we loaded up in the of the parks vans and they drive us to the launch point. After having us strap into life vests the staff gave us a hand getting into our kayaks and we were off.
Not too long into the trip we were joined by a rather friendly duck who was content to float along-side us. She stayed close to Sarah for quite some time… We figure she probably thought that we had food for her.
We kept a pretty leisurely pace, chatting and taking pictures and just generally enjoying the scenery. At one point we noticed what was either a Crane or a Heron hanging out over by the bank, and near the end of out trip we spotted a swan.
The first swan sighting wasn’t too bad, since that one was a ways away from us. The second one was hanging out under a bridge that we had to go under to finish our course. It was a little close for comfort, I think for both us and the swan. But everyone (including the swan) kept cool and there were no swan incidents… so that’s a plus.
The tail-end of the trip was probably the toughest, because though the water was really fairly clean, the water near the landing dock really wasn’t. The water there was full of these plants that made it super hard to paddle. It was a real work out trying to navigate through them!
All in all it was a lot of fun, and next time we go we’ve got to take one of the longer trips because it was over way too quickly this time around!
I rounded the day off by entering a contest over at Claire Legrand's Blog to win “Steampunk”, an anthology that a lot of totally awesome authors contributed to. If you are so inclined you should definitely check it out!
I’ll talk to you soon.
