Fun with Stuffed Animals

My partner and I like to have fun with our stuffed animals. ...Okay, it's mostly me. I enjoy posing them in situations and telling stories about what they're doing, and she mostly finds it funny. Mostly. For example: hawk on her dragon's hoard of beads, hawk on a hoard of coins, Hawkes wine tasting, learning we'd mis-gendered an eagle.

We're not into just any stuffed animals, though; or even the common ones. We have a lot of hawks because they're my partner's namesake. Hawks are hard to find, though. Owls? Slightly easier. But owls suck.

Where can one find stuffed hawks? We keep our eyes open. Sometimes we find a beautiful hawk in the darnedest place.  We like to check out visitor centers at national/state parks because that's where we have a better chance of finding such toys— or "liberating a hawk", as Hawk calls it. When we visited Amicalola Falls in Georgia a few weeks ago we saw one or two hawks that we already own copies of... but we saw two other interesting stuffed animals.

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For the first time ever I saw an Ent or Treant— or "Enchanted Tree" as manufacturer Folkmanis labels it. I presume they went with that generic name to avoid licensing issues with whatever global megacorps currently own the rights to Tolkien's works and Dungeons and Dragons, though a quick web search I did indicates that the words "Ent" and "Treant" are not trademarked and have been ruled by the courts to be in the public domain.

Folkmanis makes stuffed animals that aren't just stuffed animals but hand puppets. Our first hawk ever was a Folkmanis red tail hawk, a treasured gift that sadly wore out after enough years and had to be sent to the great aerie in the sky. Though we did find another copy of the Folkmanis red-tail hawk on eBay a few years ago.

I had fun checking out this "Enchanted Tree" hand puppet. I made a short video showing how, as I discovered, you can put your fingers in the branches atop the tree's head and move them around. ...And this bad-attitude Treant can give you the finger!

Now, laughing at rude poses with hand puppets wasn't the only thing we did at the park's gift shop. While we did see a hawk or two there and they were ones we already own better versions of, we did find a hawk "accessory"— a snake!

We bought the snake as gift for our hawks to play with.



Here's one of our red-tail hawk toys, "Winter", enjoying his new toy/meal as a reward for waiting patiently in the back of the car as we were out hiking. 🤣

Georgia Trip Retrospective

It's been a few weeks now since we got back from our trip to Georgia so it's time to write a retrospective. ...Actually the ideal time to do this would've been 10 days ago, but it was only Sunday that I finished clearing my backlog of trip blogs from the trip. Anyway, here are Five Things:

1. First, overall, it was a very enjoyable trip— and I attribute this to our "Not too little, not too much, but just right" approach to planning. We like to plan knowing what we can do without over-scheduling what we will do— or when. For example, in Savannah we knew there were a variety of things we could do across the span of a few days, but we purposefully didn't overplan them in advance, like, "On Sunday we do A and B; on Monday, C, D, and E; on Tuesday, etc." This left us with plenty of ideas to keep busy for several days coupled with the flexibility to choose activities day by day based on things that can't be determined far in advance, like what the weather or how much energy we have is any given day.


2. Five days was the right amount of time to spend with relatives. (Really it was more like 4⅓ since we met them for dinner Saturday.) I love my sister— and I enjoy spending time with my brother-in-law and niece, too— but saying our farewells late Wednesday evening was the right timing. We were together long enough to do everything we wanted to do together, and just short enough that we left on a high note.


3. Torpedoing the rental car in Savannah turned out to be a great move. We saved $300 forgoing a rental that ultimately would've provided little value. I reserved the car because I hesitated to rely on my sister and BIL driving us around, but with their two cars and us in a hotel literally 2 miles from their house it was no bother.


4. Logistics-wise, I counted on doing a load of laundry at my sister's house. That enabled me to feel comfortable with fresh clothes every day without overstuffing the suitcases we carried.


5. Doing two things during the week— first visiting my sister and her family for several days, then Hawk and I going waterfall-hunting for a few days in the mountains— worked well. The equation of a one-week trip (usually 8-9 days in reality) = 2 shorter trips in the same region has worked well many times. It lets us get 2 trips in vacation without feeling like either one has been too rushed.

Oh, and +1 bonus item:

6. Forgetting my camera was a mistake. Mostly. Being forced to rely on my smartphone for pics this whole trip was enlightening. I found that for sightseeing photography in town, at the beach, at historical sites nearby, etc., I was fine using my smartphone. Would my dedicated camera have captured better pics? Yes, but in few enough situations and/or with little enough incremental value that I was fine with my recent-gen smartphone's camera. While out hiking, however, and especially while hiking to waterfalls, I missed the capabilities of my dedicated camera— and not just once or twice, but on nearly Every. Single. Hike.