May 2025: Wandering in Watterson Territory

The leaves were fully green by May in suburban Cleveland, Ohio.

But it would still be a few days before I beheld them.

The beginning of the month found me in Northern Kentucky, where there’s this little hole-in-the-wall Korean restaurant called Sake Bomb Sushi that serves a great bulgogi.

Needless to say, I was very happy.

There’s nothing quite like a giant plate of meat.

Whoever said you can’t buy happiness clearly never had a bulgogi lunch special at a good Korean restaurant. 🤤

A few days later I was back in Northeastern Ohio.

My friend Sarah invited me over for lunch with her family.

Lunch turned into a several-hours-long Lego-building session because she had a Friends set that hadn’t yet been assembled.

And how do you turn down a request to help put Legos together?

I mean, that would just be rude.

Needless to say, we had a blast.

Legos may give bulgogi a run for its money when it comes to what constitutes an awesome lunch.

The weather this month was lovely.

Warm enough to feel not chilly.

Cool enough that you could still have a nice cup of hot tea in the mornings.

Ideal conditions for giving my car a much-needed cleaning out.

I had been travelling since early January, and when one is primarily storing one’s stuff in the car between January and May, a good cleaning is very much in order.

But back to my car.

For a brief period (before I packed everything back into it), it was back to being pretty spotless again:

Clean cars rank up there with Legos and bulgogi on the happiness scale, I think.

So does archery.

I got a little shooting in while back in Cleveland.

This was the closest I got to hitting my target (the helicopter to the lower left):

Then I spent a couple weeks in Chagrin Falls.

Legend has it that this is the home of Bill Watterson, but I didn’t see him or any anthropomorphic tigers around to confirm.

What I did see, however, was very good food.

I was watching two dogs and a cat, and the people at the house where I was staying made really good steak the day I got in.

And then gave me a recipe for cedar-plank salmon that I made on their grill a little later.

I thought the pond out the back was a nice touch for some more food photos:

I don’t Instagram my food photos, but if I did they’d look something like this.

Speaking of the pond…

There was a little dock from which one could sit and take pictures of the sunshine and water.

It was also a dock from which one could accidentally chuck one’s phone into said water.

And so…

Into the water went my phone.

I had some music playing.

This was instantly muted as it plunged into the shallow-but-somewhat-murky water.

I hesitated for a second, wondering if I should plunge my hand in after it.

After all, there were water snakes in there.

I’d seen one just a bit ago.

But I kind of needed my phone, so I pulled it out.

It had a warning on the screen that it detected water and I shouldn’t plug it in for a while.

I was very grateful that this last phone I’d gotten was new enough to be water resistant.

Fun Fact: When you have water in your phone, it makes a natural haze-like filter on your camera:

Me, Shortly after the Phone-in-Pond Debacle, with a Nature’s Suction Cup (Left)

Chagrin Falls is also home to the original Dave’s Cosmic Subs.

They have famous musical dead guys on their ceiling:

Note to Self: Panorama photos with ceiling fans are funny.

Also, I wonder why it’s called Chagrin Falls.

Like, were the people who settled there put out because the water features there were not merely flat rivers?

Or does it have nothing to do with the water at all and is actually a punny homage to when Jed tripped and his friends decided to let that incident of particularly-uncool go down in history and geography unbeknownst to future generations?

But, anyway…

Some Nature Shots from Chagrin Falls

Chagrin Falls was really nice until very late one night when I rubbed a spot on my back and felt The Skin Tag from Hell.

In other words, a deer tick.

Thankfully, I did not get Lyme disease.

But there were some pretty funny moments of me trying to get the thing out with tweezers, not being able to reach it with tweezers, deciding to just use the ol’ pinch-and-yank method that you’re not supposed to (because when one finds a deer tick on one’s being at 1 AM one resorts to methods not sanctioned by Google and common sense, you see), and then being somewhat paranoid about whether or not I was going to get early-onset arthritis until enough time had passed that that seemed an unlikely outcome.

So far so good. 🤞

In a completely unrelated event, I found this gem at a local veterinarian’s office:

Going back to the money-can’t-by-happiness motif that’s barely holding this post together, whoever said that also never bought a random magazine subscription for an unsuspecting friend.

(Speaking of, if you’re reading this and are the person who subscribed me to The Red Bulletin circa 2017, thank you. The parkour articles were awesome, and it made me laugh every month it showed up.)

At the end of May, as is wont to happen in the United States, it was Memorial Day.

So, naturally, there were sthmoke bombs and other little firecrackers happening where I was.

(Some other great things money can by, by the way. If one is disciplined enough not to use them all at once, I believe it’s possible to get at least 6 months’ worth of happiness from $10 of firecrackers.)

I managed to get a little more archery in, too.

And, finally, as the month came to a close, I enjoyed a cool evening with the sun doing that really pretty thing where it filters through the May-green leaves and your phone, while it can get good enough pictures most of the time, can never quite capture just how lovely it is.

There’s still nothing like a bonfire on one side of you with the sun poking through the trees on the other, a cup of tea and books at hand, and the feeling that for at least that one little breath it seems all’s right with the world.

May Stats

Animals Pet

2 dogs, 1 cat

Books Finished

None

Library Cards Collected

3

Distance Travelled (Miles)

1,720

Miles Walked

63.71

Song of the Month