Following a fashion trend....
It seems that the latest fashionable thing to do these days is to adopt an orphan from Africa. So much so that Sis and I couldn't resist adding to our own African foster family--yesterday we fostered another child, this one a poor little baby girl elephant, only four weeks old, who was lost to her family when she fell into a well.
The tribesmen who found her asked that she be named Lesanju, after a tribal chief who died recently, so now the Sheldrick people have another one on their hands--when she was found, the tribesmen notched her ears as they do their own cattle, but for elephants that's a serious mutilation, as the ears are the place where they radiate out excess heat, and they need every square inch that they can get. As young as she is, she's in danger of multiple complications--elephant infants are incredibly fragile creatures--so she may not make it to maturity, but we decided together that we'd add her to our foster family and keep our fingers crossed.
As for the rest of our little herd--Kora, my sister's son, has matured enough that he's been sent out of the nursery to live in one of the reintegration stockades, where the youngsters are encourages to forage for themselves, to wander in the bush, encounter other wildlife (including wild elephants) and generally begin the process of returning to the wild themselves. It'll be some time before Kora is ready to be fully independent. He still returns to the stockade at night for safety, and feeding, and in his case they're still treating the injury to his jaw that he received some time before he was brought to the Sheldrick people. That infection is still active. They're treating it the best they can, and decided that allowing him to move out of the nursery he could improve with the natural, mineral-rich forage.
My little boy, Zurura, is now without his best friend since Kora was moved away, but he's recovered from the loss pretty well and continues to be the "class clown" of the nursery. He gets along with the other "kids," but he loves to stir up action any way he can, and the older orphans have to sit on him a bit to keep him from being too much of a pain. All in all, though, he's a happy, healthy little guy (and I think he's beautiful, too, but I might be a little biased.)
Aside from adopting elephants, things have been quiet. It's coming up on Halloween, and we have our display for the trick-or-treaters planned. If things go as we picture, I'll be sitting out there on the driveway in my wheelchair, hiding it behind a table where we'll have this year's pumpkin (actually a plastic carveable fake pumpkin that we bought last year and never used.) I'm not planning on carving it--I'm going to decorate the shell using glue and glitter, and see if I can't reproduce the logo for the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. (This was my sister's choice of theme, I'm just in charge of design.) I'm using a special kind of art glitter, very, very fine stuff that looks ultra-cool. Now it's a matter of making it work for that design. I'll try to put up pictures if it works. One advantage of the plastic pumpkin--it doesn't rot, so we'll be able to take pictures at leisure afterward. I'll have a "treasure chest" of candy on the table, too, and we'll be playing music from the Disneyland ride that originated the whole thing. This all hangs on whether or not I'm up to sitting out there; if it's too cold or I'm not feeling well it'll have to change. But I at least want to do the pumpkin, even if I can't go out to see the reactions. (We've had people say that they come down our block every year on purpose to see what kind of pumpkin we've done this year--we never do anything traditional. The neighbors talked about my Darth Vader pumpkin for years.) Everybody needs a hobby.
Well, the wild fire season here in So. California is back in full force. There's another nasty burn going in the desert, and they've already determined that it's an arson case. It overtook a fire crew and sent two to the morgue, three to the hospital--two of them have since died, and the man who survived is so badly burned that the merciful thing would have been if he'd died too. If they get their hands on the asshole who started it, I hear they're talking murder charges. I hope it sticks.
Ah, it's almost election time. Ghods, I'm sick of the campaign ads on TV, going cross-eyed trying to keep up with the charges and counter-charges between opposing sides. I use and absentee ballot, so I can vote any time now if I want to, but I haven't even opened the envelope yet. I'll get around to it, but I'm either going to be tossing a coin or leaving a lot of spaces blank. Probably more of the latter. I have a feeling that the Schwarz is going to be re-elected for a full term. Really, who would have thought that the Terminator would actually make it work as the governor of the country's most populous state? But, despite being a total novice and making some really BIG mistakes along the way, he's done all right. Probably a lot better than that bland milquetoast he replaced in the recall election, when a lot of people treated his candidacy as a joke. Nobody's laughing at him now. Of course I give a lot of credit to his wife--Maria Shriver is a smart, politically canny woman, and you can bet that he listens to her. He'd be stupid not to, and one thing the Schwarz is NOT is stupid.
Well, I guess I'd better get on with preparing for my Pirate Night. Gotta get that eye patch fitted (although how it's going to work under my glasses I still haven't figured out...)
The tribesmen who found her asked that she be named Lesanju, after a tribal chief who died recently, so now the Sheldrick people have another one on their hands--when she was found, the tribesmen notched her ears as they do their own cattle, but for elephants that's a serious mutilation, as the ears are the place where they radiate out excess heat, and they need every square inch that they can get. As young as she is, she's in danger of multiple complications--elephant infants are incredibly fragile creatures--so she may not make it to maturity, but we decided together that we'd add her to our foster family and keep our fingers crossed.
As for the rest of our little herd--Kora, my sister's son, has matured enough that he's been sent out of the nursery to live in one of the reintegration stockades, where the youngsters are encourages to forage for themselves, to wander in the bush, encounter other wildlife (including wild elephants) and generally begin the process of returning to the wild themselves. It'll be some time before Kora is ready to be fully independent. He still returns to the stockade at night for safety, and feeding, and in his case they're still treating the injury to his jaw that he received some time before he was brought to the Sheldrick people. That infection is still active. They're treating it the best they can, and decided that allowing him to move out of the nursery he could improve with the natural, mineral-rich forage.
My little boy, Zurura, is now without his best friend since Kora was moved away, but he's recovered from the loss pretty well and continues to be the "class clown" of the nursery. He gets along with the other "kids," but he loves to stir up action any way he can, and the older orphans have to sit on him a bit to keep him from being too much of a pain. All in all, though, he's a happy, healthy little guy (and I think he's beautiful, too, but I might be a little biased.)
Aside from adopting elephants, things have been quiet. It's coming up on Halloween, and we have our display for the trick-or-treaters planned. If things go as we picture, I'll be sitting out there on the driveway in my wheelchair, hiding it behind a table where we'll have this year's pumpkin (actually a plastic carveable fake pumpkin that we bought last year and never used.) I'm not planning on carving it--I'm going to decorate the shell using glue and glitter, and see if I can't reproduce the logo for the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie. (This was my sister's choice of theme, I'm just in charge of design.) I'm using a special kind of art glitter, very, very fine stuff that looks ultra-cool. Now it's a matter of making it work for that design. I'll try to put up pictures if it works. One advantage of the plastic pumpkin--it doesn't rot, so we'll be able to take pictures at leisure afterward. I'll have a "treasure chest" of candy on the table, too, and we'll be playing music from the Disneyland ride that originated the whole thing. This all hangs on whether or not I'm up to sitting out there; if it's too cold or I'm not feeling well it'll have to change. But I at least want to do the pumpkin, even if I can't go out to see the reactions. (We've had people say that they come down our block every year on purpose to see what kind of pumpkin we've done this year--we never do anything traditional. The neighbors talked about my Darth Vader pumpkin for years.) Everybody needs a hobby.
Well, the wild fire season here in So. California is back in full force. There's another nasty burn going in the desert, and they've already determined that it's an arson case. It overtook a fire crew and sent two to the morgue, three to the hospital--two of them have since died, and the man who survived is so badly burned that the merciful thing would have been if he'd died too. If they get their hands on the asshole who started it, I hear they're talking murder charges. I hope it sticks.
Ah, it's almost election time. Ghods, I'm sick of the campaign ads on TV, going cross-eyed trying to keep up with the charges and counter-charges between opposing sides. I use and absentee ballot, so I can vote any time now if I want to, but I haven't even opened the envelope yet. I'll get around to it, but I'm either going to be tossing a coin or leaving a lot of spaces blank. Probably more of the latter. I have a feeling that the Schwarz is going to be re-elected for a full term. Really, who would have thought that the Terminator would actually make it work as the governor of the country's most populous state? But, despite being a total novice and making some really BIG mistakes along the way, he's done all right. Probably a lot better than that bland milquetoast he replaced in the recall election, when a lot of people treated his candidacy as a joke. Nobody's laughing at him now. Of course I give a lot of credit to his wife--Maria Shriver is a smart, politically canny woman, and you can bet that he listens to her. He'd be stupid not to, and one thing the Schwarz is NOT is stupid.
Well, I guess I'd better get on with preparing for my Pirate Night. Gotta get that eye patch fitted (although how it's going to work under my glasses I still haven't figured out...)