Sherlock, zoos and the vagaries of weather
In case any of you were waiting for this, I got an email this morning from Netflix that "Sherlock" series 2 is now streaming. So if you want a good cry at work you can watch "The Reichenbach Fall" on your phone now. Good luck with those TPS reports while gross sobbing. That may be today's worktime viewing. Lately it's been reruns of "Mythbusters." Man, I would commit murder to have "The West Wing" on streaming. I could listen to that for the rest of my working life. I'd just get to the end of season 7 and then start over at the beginning.
I have a busy weekend ahead. Tonight I have a walk in a park with The Club, Saturday we're doing a longish hike (7ish miles) at a state park about an hour north of here, and then Sunday I'm going on a field trip with some of my docent friends to the Toledo Zoo. Looking forward to that! Except now I see that it's supposed to rain on Saturday near the park. ARGHARGHARGH. Lately the weather's been doing this thing when it's glorious, sunny, blue-skied and beautifully cool all the time EXCEPT when I have an outdoor activity planned, at which time it turns to shit. At least it'll be nice for tonight's walk.
I've been going to the gym a LOT. I joined a fitness challenge group on my food logging website where you set a goal of minutes of exercise for the months of September and October. I set an admittedly ambitious goal of 3000 total minutes for those 61 days. I'm a tad behind right now because the last week or so has been slow, I've been feeling crappy. My Saturday hike will help a lot, that'll be at least four hours, provided we're not rained out (argh). I went last night and I'll go again tomorrow. I'm alternating cardio with a new strength training routine, although said routine is punishing enough that I might only be able to do it once a week at first. I can do an hour on the crosstrainer without difficulty now; last night I did 35 minutes treadmill, 30 minutes cross trainer.
Our zoo trip ought to be fun. My docent class has a little bit of a club; we often meet for dinner before our weekly Tuesday region meetings (which are about to end for the season, sad panda) and send each other notes from those meetings for those who can't attend. I've discovered that a side effect of becoming a zoo docent (apart from a sudden need to acquire animal-themed jewelry) is that you want to visit a lot of other zoos. See how they do things, see how they measure up. Now, the Columbus Zoo has been ranked as the #1 zoo in the country, and even if you don't agree with that ranking (the San Diego Zoo and Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo are often touted as such as well), our zoo is definitely one of the top zoos in the country, for size, breadth and depth of animal collection, as well as infamy...Jack Hanna is our director emeritus, this is his zoo. But different zoos do things differently, and it's fun to check out the competition. Looking at their map online, the Toledo Zoo is much smaller than our zoo, but they have some things I'm looking forward to seeing that we don't have, like African elephants (ours are Asian) and hippos!
One of the things I like about the Cbus zoo is our North America region. Not many zoos have a whole region dedicated to North American animals; most tend to focus on exotic animals, but the NA region is the most popular part of our zoo, not to mention the largest. It houses our awesome Polar Frontier polar bear exhibit, which also features a pair of truly entertaining huge brown bear brothers. There are also bison, pronghorns, two kinds of wolves, moose, reindeer, bobcats, cougars, wolverines, bald eagles, a grizzly bear, an aviary, river otters and the petting zoo. It's nice as well that the zoo visitors can have animals to see during the winter months when a lot of the animals in the Africa and Australia exhibits can't go outside (you can still see the gorillas and bonobos in winter because they have indoor viewing, but you can't see the orangutans or the kangaroos and a lot of other animals).
Today they had a groundbreaking ceremony for the brand-new region they're building at the zoo, an African Savannah region. It's going to expand the zoo considerably...it's already a ginormous zoo (over 350 acres) and now it's getting bigger. We're all excited - it'll be so nice to tell visitors that yes, we have giraffes (which we haven't had for over a decade)! It won't open for a year and a half but it'll be interesting to watch them execute this huge project.
I have a busy weekend ahead. Tonight I have a walk in a park with The Club, Saturday we're doing a longish hike (7ish miles) at a state park about an hour north of here, and then Sunday I'm going on a field trip with some of my docent friends to the Toledo Zoo. Looking forward to that! Except now I see that it's supposed to rain on Saturday near the park. ARGHARGHARGH. Lately the weather's been doing this thing when it's glorious, sunny, blue-skied and beautifully cool all the time EXCEPT when I have an outdoor activity planned, at which time it turns to shit. At least it'll be nice for tonight's walk.
I've been going to the gym a LOT. I joined a fitness challenge group on my food logging website where you set a goal of minutes of exercise for the months of September and October. I set an admittedly ambitious goal of 3000 total minutes for those 61 days. I'm a tad behind right now because the last week or so has been slow, I've been feeling crappy. My Saturday hike will help a lot, that'll be at least four hours, provided we're not rained out (argh). I went last night and I'll go again tomorrow. I'm alternating cardio with a new strength training routine, although said routine is punishing enough that I might only be able to do it once a week at first. I can do an hour on the crosstrainer without difficulty now; last night I did 35 minutes treadmill, 30 minutes cross trainer.
Our zoo trip ought to be fun. My docent class has a little bit of a club; we often meet for dinner before our weekly Tuesday region meetings (which are about to end for the season, sad panda) and send each other notes from those meetings for those who can't attend. I've discovered that a side effect of becoming a zoo docent (apart from a sudden need to acquire animal-themed jewelry) is that you want to visit a lot of other zoos. See how they do things, see how they measure up. Now, the Columbus Zoo has been ranked as the #1 zoo in the country, and even if you don't agree with that ranking (the San Diego Zoo and Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo are often touted as such as well), our zoo is definitely one of the top zoos in the country, for size, breadth and depth of animal collection, as well as infamy...Jack Hanna is our director emeritus, this is his zoo. But different zoos do things differently, and it's fun to check out the competition. Looking at their map online, the Toledo Zoo is much smaller than our zoo, but they have some things I'm looking forward to seeing that we don't have, like African elephants (ours are Asian) and hippos!
One of the things I like about the Cbus zoo is our North America region. Not many zoos have a whole region dedicated to North American animals; most tend to focus on exotic animals, but the NA region is the most popular part of our zoo, not to mention the largest. It houses our awesome Polar Frontier polar bear exhibit, which also features a pair of truly entertaining huge brown bear brothers. There are also bison, pronghorns, two kinds of wolves, moose, reindeer, bobcats, cougars, wolverines, bald eagles, a grizzly bear, an aviary, river otters and the petting zoo. It's nice as well that the zoo visitors can have animals to see during the winter months when a lot of the animals in the Africa and Australia exhibits can't go outside (you can still see the gorillas and bonobos in winter because they have indoor viewing, but you can't see the orangutans or the kangaroos and a lot of other animals).
Today they had a groundbreaking ceremony for the brand-new region they're building at the zoo, an African Savannah region. It's going to expand the zoo considerably...it's already a ginormous zoo (over 350 acres) and now it's getting bigger. We're all excited - it'll be so nice to tell visitors that yes, we have giraffes (which we haven't had for over a decade)! It won't open for a year and a half but it'll be interesting to watch them execute this huge project.