Hello there!

After two weeks of little down-time I spent one of my precious days off with food poisoning. It was spreadable cheese, and I'm heartbroken. Maybe with therapy I can learn to love spreadable cheese again, but it will never be the same. Anyway, I'm off the cheese and back on the horse, so here are two comics about ferns and GORP.

There are 62 species of ferns and fern allies at Glacier National Park. These plants do not reproduce with seeds/flowers, rather with spores. Ferns have vascular tissue, which gives them an advantage conducting water/sugar/etc. through their bodies that moss lack. Speaking of moss, Club Moss is not actually moss. Nor is it a fern, exactly. It falls under a 'fern ally' category, lycopods, which also produce with spores but don't flaunt true leaves like ferns do.

GORP (a.k.a. trail mix, good ol' raisins and peanuts) is lots of fun to prepare yourself, because you can improvise pretty much any bite-sized protein, sugar, or carb. Before going off on my many college outdoor program adventures, we would make a week's worth of GORP for 12-16 hungry college students. Nuts and dried fruit start to add up quickly, but we were given an excellent budget for groceries. The best way to mix up these pounds of scrumptious morsels? We would dump everything into an unused trash bag and churn it up. GO NUTS. I like storing my GORP in an extra water bottle; it makes for easy, hands-free munching.

That's all for today, but I'm working on some pun-laden valentines. Stay tuned ❤️

ER