Hey Bree,

Youre about the most not crazy lady I know. Truly. Have a wonderful Christmas. 

Tomorrow morning I'm heading out to buy a couple of live two pound Dungeness crabs. I'll prepare them tomorrow evening. Crab, butter, Sourdough bread, and champagne. Doesn't get much better than that!

Merry Christmas!

Emma

LOL  You have never seen me completely lose my mind in the presence of a tiny garter snake.  Phobias are fun!  I can handle heights, spiders, bugs(except maggots, so gross), whatever, but things have to have LEGS, FINS, WINGS, or something.  Some sort of limbs.  I love all limbed reptiles, but not the limbless ones.  The legless lizard freaks me out to.  I'm convinced the biology peeps are nuts and lying to me, that's a snake. 

Hm...blue crab mabye...but don't quote me in stone on that. Grandpa used to take me to Assateague Island a lot, I love that place, it's a rolling island off the coast of Maryland/Virginia.  If you've ever heard of the book Misty of Chincoteague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misty_of_Chincoteague) book series, they're written about Assateague and it's sister island Chincoteague.  There's a herd of wild ponies on Assateague (with a fanciful origin story of a sinking spanish galleon, but most likely someone was using the island as a natural corral and never went back) and you can camp on the Maryland side of the island with the ponies roaming around, it's awesome.  They come right through your camp site as they please.  Waking up to find one looking int the window of the camper at you was amazing.  Once a year on the Virginia side they round them all up, swim them on the channel between the islands, and auction off the foals to support the fire house and other emergency services on the island with a large fair, best crabcake sandwhiches ever, quite the spectacle.  People who buy them though need to be aware they're only ponies because of the high salt content in all the vegetation stunting their growth, if you take a foal and feed it nutritious food you will have a full horse.    I love Assateauge so much, we're going to try to orchestrate a camping week this summer.   One summer I got within a foot of a great blue heron, I'm not sure who was more starlted, bird or Bree.

But one of the things you can do there is crabbing by these docks, and we had a little too much fun and had a little too much crab, so we brought it all home and shared with the neighbors and unwittingly unleashed the Great Crab Plague of 1992 I think it was.  One neighbor put them in her tub until it was time to cook them, and they got out and chased her and her husband around the apartment.  Another's dog got curious and apparently went streaming through the apartment yelping with a crab hanging off it's tail like a streamer.  LOL  They weren't very big, but had to be at least 5 inches across to keep.  The ranger station gave out these little flexible  plastic red crab rulers, very helpful. 

I nearly lost a finger on that trip, since neither Grandpa nor I live near any good crabbing spots we opted to by the $5 cloth net instead of the $20 metal net.  We didn't realize the reason the metals nets are there (they're like solid metal baskets on a pole) was that those little crabs are manaical about getting tangled in the cloth ones.  So I wasn't as careful as I should have been trying to untangle it, and it got a hold of my hand just under one of my finger knuckles.  A nearby fellow fisher realized what was happening.  Now to my point of view, I'm in incredible pain in my hand, and a strange man grabs me and is pushing me down to the dock facefirst more or less.  So I'm screaming bloody murder, Grandpa is completely stunned, and no one milling around knows what to do.  But the minute he got my hand in the water that little sucker let go and I was free!  Apparently he was quite the crabber, and told us to be REAL careful aroudn them, if they get you on the knuckle their pounds per square inch is enough to take the finger.  OY!  And then he taught us how to tell a male from a female for that species (the bottom markings were either a half circle like a dome building, or a tower shape like the washing monument, and if it was a cone shape the crab was changing sex). 

I wish we'd caught him, I totally would have eaten him in vengeance.  But I ate one of his relatives instead.