Bear with Me

I got a tablet to help me with my Beatrice-type drawings. Up until now, I have been drawing them in pencil and scanning them.  This works relatively well, but there are times that the pencil doesn't scan well, and I/you end up with drawings that are a little fuzzy and/or terrible. But with a tablet, I can do colorful, sophisticated drawings unlike anything you have ever seen.

Yeah, well. All sarcasm aside, I've never used one of these tablet thingies, and it's going to take some practice.

I appreciate your patience while I work out the kinks of tablet-i-ness.

I didn't begin this post intending to discuss bears. I really didn't. But now that it's clearly about bears, and I want to practice drawing with a tablet, allow me to tell a (now) relevant story about bears.

This past summer, I went camping--you know, with the mountains, trees, tents, hiking socks, etc. As is customary, we built a fire when it got dark and sat around it and inhaled smoke. This is what you do when you're camping. 

Everyone's favorite part of camping is s'more-making, so we commenced this camping tradition, and set out the s'more paraphernalia on the picnic table, just a few feet away from the fire. (You see where this is going, right?) After we made a round of s'mores, 2 people from our party took a walk to bathroom land. Notice there are missing circles in the diagram below.

So these two bathroom-goers had been gone for about 10 minutes when we heard someone making themselves another s'more: rustling with the graham cracker packaging, getting some marshmallows, etc. Now, the light from the camp fire didn't illuminate the picnic table much. We could see that there was a table, but not much of what was on it or who was behind it. We assumed that our bathroom-using friends had returned and were hungry from the bathroomy journey.

Yes, the bear took all our graham crackers and made a run for it. After the bear-instigated anarchy subsided, we noticed he also took the marshmallows. For this, I will never forgive him.

I made a video for you of the other wildlife we saw on the trip. Behold, the wilderness!

For the record, when you are camping in a place with bears, you should never have food out unless it's within reach. When you see a black bear, you are supposed to make lots of noise to scare them away. This is NOT, however, the protocol when dealing with brown bears. If you see a brown bear, play dead face down, protect your neck, and try not to die.