Excessive Orchid De Jour

"Excuse me, what is the soup de jour?"
-"It's the soup of the day"
"Mmm...that sound good. I'll have that."

Dumb and Dumber. Man, what a great freaking movie. Anyways, here's the orchid de jour. It's not really de jour cause you know as well as I do I will not post anything tomorrow, so don't get excited. This one's a pink lady slipper. I was driving back the DIII Track and Field National Championships (where I saw some old SLU/NYSCTC throwing buddies which was awesome) in Oshkosh, MN. I left Oshkosh at 7am, cause the SLU team had to catch a plane early that day, so I left at the same time. At 7:15am I got a warning for doing 65 in a 55 outside of Oshkosh. I guess there's nothing better to do at 7:15am on a Sunday in Oshkosh. Oh well, at least it was just a warning. So then I decided I had to do something cool, so I set out on my trip home on a course that would take me through Chequamegon (pronounced Che-wom-e-gon, I later found out) National Forest in north central Wisconsin. I stopped at a nice little recreation area/campsite that I thought would be a good place to meander through the woods and look for wildflowers to take pictures of. I got lucky when I happened across a really nice spruce bog. Well, "happened" is misleading. It's kinda my job to find bogs, so you could say I'm naturally attracted to them now. Regardless, I wandered around in the bog for a bit and found some really cool stuff. Bog walking, as it's known, takes some technique to a) not fall down b) not drop your camera or - perhaps most important- c) not manage to break through the moss layer and disappear into the bog, which, I imagine, would be a big drag. On a random side note, I kinda hadn't planned on this so I wore sneakers. Surprisingly bog water is very clean, and as an added perk I got clean sneakers out of the deal. So, to make a long story short (too late), here's my orchid de jour. Pink Lady's Slipper. Enjoy. Quick plug, I started a new online gallery at Artist Rising.com. There's a few other pictures on there, more to come I promise. :-)

Pink Lady's Slipper - Cypripedium acaule