At the Zoo
My dad's taking this week off from work: it's a slow time between seasons at the greenhouse, so he's taking advantage of it. I've got a couple short days on my own work schedule, but we can very easily schedule things around that. We've got nothing huge planned, so it's more of a Spending Time Together kind of vacation (I believe the modern term is a "staycation"??).
So! Today's adventure had us off the the Stone Zoo, which we used to visit at least once a year when I was a kid, but we slacked off for a number of years, though we were there for their Zoo Lights this past January. It's changed a lot over that time: due to cut-backs in the 1990s (and in fact, the place was shut down for a while) they no longer have any large exotic animals (lions, tigers, an elephant, sea lions, once they had a rhinoceros and a hippotamus; there also used to be a large glassed-in aviary which if I remember correctly, was damaged in an ice storm in the late 1980s) like they used to, and the focus has shifted to North and South American species (a lynx, a barn owl, a great horned owl; also a jaguar, a coyote and some coatimundis) with some monkeys (gibbons, spider monkeys, a family of Colobus Monkeys who had a pair of male babies this June), markhors (a kind of goat-like critter from the Himalayas), a snow leopard (who was not in his exhibit today for some reason), an extremely shy wolf (we never did manage to see him, and we suspect he might have been hiding in the rocks in his enclosure), a few reptiles (snakes and gila monsters), a fake mine shaft with a flock of leaf-nosed bats (fun to watch them swirl around and zig-zag every time someone came through the canvas curtain covering the entrance to their plexi-glas-sed in enclosure; the light was making them batty!).
This summer, they were hosting an Australian animal exhibit with two rather sleepy koalas (come to find out koalas sleep up to twenty hours a day, due to a wonky metabolism), a palm cockatoo, a citron-crested cockatoo, a kea (a kind of brown parrot from New Zealand) and a kookaburra. Also, they had an enclosed flight area with a large flock of budgies swirling and chattering about. I had three little widgets come and land on my hand, wrist and forearm (don't tell our pet budgie, Flurry: he would most likely get very jealous if he knew some of his relatives had decided to take over "his" perch on his human!), whilst I was offering them some seed on a stick, courtesy of the zoo.
We also went to the zoo's flight show featuring several of their native birds of prey (including a vulture that swooped inches above my head, and a rather clumsy great-horned owl who nearly crash-landed on the ground), a clever crow named Einstein who plucked bottles from the hands of some audience volunteers and dropped the bottles into a recycling bin (well, sort of: he had a bit of a mind of his own and seemed more curious about one audience member's painted toenails, which prompted my mother to jokingly remark, "Kids and animals and birds: they don't always do what you tell them to do!"), an Australian wedge-tailed eagle, and two Military Macaws (called so because their feathers are a drab green very much like the color of some military uniforms).
Also, got a package in the mail: I had ordered a copy of Peter Cummings's "The Neuropathology of Zombies", a book by one of the scientists who had given a talk on zombie physiology at our town's library earlier this summer; he had not had any copies available to sell that night, but had directed folks to order it online. I'm also currently juggling Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's "The Fall", the second of their "Strain" trilogy (think Bram Stoker's "Dracula" meets Michael Chricton's "The Andromeda Strain"), with some of the things I'd pulled from my book shelves this weekend (an autobiography of an English housemaid, a few science fiction short story anthologies). I'm taking a bit of a break from writing, at least for a couple of days, and then I will be getting back to the dry work of editing and polishing that Arrow/Torchwood crossover, which is due to be posted the middle of next month. And I've also been digging about, trying to find the notebook that contained the draft of a random World War Z, and so I'd planned to submit it during their amnesty period. Hopefully I can find that soon, so I can get back to writing that one and eventually post it.
So! Today's adventure had us off the the Stone Zoo, which we used to visit at least once a year when I was a kid, but we slacked off for a number of years, though we were there for their Zoo Lights this past January. It's changed a lot over that time: due to cut-backs in the 1990s (and in fact, the place was shut down for a while) they no longer have any large exotic animals (lions, tigers, an elephant, sea lions, once they had a rhinoceros and a hippotamus; there also used to be a large glassed-in aviary which if I remember correctly, was damaged in an ice storm in the late 1980s) like they used to, and the focus has shifted to North and South American species (a lynx, a barn owl, a great horned owl; also a jaguar, a coyote and some coatimundis) with some monkeys (gibbons, spider monkeys, a family of Colobus Monkeys who had a pair of male babies this June), markhors (a kind of goat-like critter from the Himalayas), a snow leopard (who was not in his exhibit today for some reason), an extremely shy wolf (we never did manage to see him, and we suspect he might have been hiding in the rocks in his enclosure), a few reptiles (snakes and gila monsters), a fake mine shaft with a flock of leaf-nosed bats (fun to watch them swirl around and zig-zag every time someone came through the canvas curtain covering the entrance to their plexi-glas-sed in enclosure; the light was making them batty!).
This summer, they were hosting an Australian animal exhibit with two rather sleepy koalas (come to find out koalas sleep up to twenty hours a day, due to a wonky metabolism), a palm cockatoo, a citron-crested cockatoo, a kea (a kind of brown parrot from New Zealand) and a kookaburra. Also, they had an enclosed flight area with a large flock of budgies swirling and chattering about. I had three little widgets come and land on my hand, wrist and forearm (don't tell our pet budgie, Flurry: he would most likely get very jealous if he knew some of his relatives had decided to take over "his" perch on his human!), whilst I was offering them some seed on a stick, courtesy of the zoo.
We also went to the zoo's flight show featuring several of their native birds of prey (including a vulture that swooped inches above my head, and a rather clumsy great-horned owl who nearly crash-landed on the ground), a clever crow named Einstein who plucked bottles from the hands of some audience volunteers and dropped the bottles into a recycling bin (well, sort of: he had a bit of a mind of his own and seemed more curious about one audience member's painted toenails, which prompted my mother to jokingly remark, "Kids and animals and birds: they don't always do what you tell them to do!"), an Australian wedge-tailed eagle, and two Military Macaws (called so because their feathers are a drab green very much like the color of some military uniforms).
Also, got a package in the mail: I had ordered a copy of Peter Cummings's "The Neuropathology of Zombies", a book by one of the scientists who had given a talk on zombie physiology at our town's library earlier this summer; he had not had any copies available to sell that night, but had directed folks to order it online. I'm also currently juggling Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan's "The Fall", the second of their "Strain" trilogy (think Bram Stoker's "Dracula" meets Michael Chricton's "The Andromeda Strain"), with some of the things I'd pulled from my book shelves this weekend (an autobiography of an English housemaid, a few science fiction short story anthologies). I'm taking a bit of a break from writing, at least for a couple of days, and then I will be getting back to the dry work of editing and polishing that Arrow/Torchwood crossover, which is due to be posted the middle of next month. And I've also been digging about, trying to find the notebook that contained the draft of a random World War Z, and so I'd planned to submit it during their amnesty period. Hopefully I can find that soon, so I can get back to writing that one and eventually post it.