As you know, Wednesdays are Bagel Days!  We take this day to do a long ride as well — about 7 miles prior to breakfast and then 10 or 11 miles after breakfast. Gotta work off that bagel:

We were on the post breakfast ride. John was riding in front of me and he looked back a couple of times. He said he saw something orange  in the shoulder and it was moving. He wanted to go check it out. We turned around and I spotted it in the middle of the road! There were cars coming and I thought for sure it would be squished by the time we got to it.  However, fate smiled on the little guy and I scooped him up.

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Turns out this is a juvenile Eastern red spotted newt (salamander).  The adults end up larger and green.

He was pretty active and unafraid:

Look at him strutting his stuff! LOL.

I learned more about this newt via the DEC website:

• This salamander is native to NY.
• This guy can live 12 to 17 years! Provided he doesn’t get run over by a car…
• They eat mosquito larvae. Now we just need 100 of them in our back yard right now.
• The babies excrete a poisonous toxin. Yikes! I was thinking I was more worried about salmonella, but okay. The color of the juveniles warns away predators.

Pretty neat! It’s always fun to find wildlife.

On a side note, I will share some of my business stuff. Normally I don’t get much time to experiment and the like just because of everything that needs to get done, but I am trying to do more with our products to showcase what they can be used for.  Activated charcoal is one of the new “in” things. I see people brush their teeth with it, use it for masks, etc. It is also popular in soap as an acne bar. Of course, you are not supposed to make a medical claim about your soap because then it becomes a drug and the FDA can go after you. I see too many soapers making claims on their soap.

At any rate, I am working on a tutorial for activated charcoal soap and this is the end result:

The top design is made with a spoon if you can believe that. I don’t do this with my regular soap bars because they won’t fit into my boxes if I do that. But this batch is just for show so I wanted to have some fun.  It’s all shiny because it is fresh soap (also called wet soap) and at a very thick pudding stage here.  This will be ready to try in about a month.  Soap is a very creative medium.