Going Apeshit

Last year, Lucy, John and I went to the San Francisco Zoo, and I put up photos of many of the animals. Lucy and John are Zoo members ("there's no 'zoo' in 'zoological'" quotes John), and I enjoyed my trip there, so I suggested we go again. So today we did.

And boy, we couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day to go to the Zoo! Low 70s and sunny, it was just about perfect.

When planning this outing, Lucy had suggested that I try to arrive around 10:30. I said I'd try, but I hoped she wouldn't squash me like a bug if I showed up around 11. Well, it turns out that all my efforts to show up to parties 'fashionably late' has had a reciprocal effect: I tried to show up at 10:30, and arrived at 10:20!

And of course, Lucy said, "You're early! I thought we said 11! I'm cooking breakfast! Want some bacon and eggs?"

So we ate food and then drove to the zoo. Parking was terrible, and we later discovered that the food stands in the zoo were running out of food, presumably because they hadn't expected a huge turnout of people in early February due to lovely weather. But we found a spot and went inside.

Here's a new batch of photos for this year:

	Meercats playing. (43k)
	Prairie dogs scurrying around their burrows. (53k) I love prairie dogs; they're awfully cute. They also breed quickly and are vermin in some parts of the country, but they're still darned cute.
	Prairie dogs eating. (87k)
	A big ol' wild turkey, its feathers fully fluffed out, guarding its hens (off-panel to the left, completely asleep) against the invading humans. (66k) The hens were probably thinking, "Oh, humans again. Someday we'll have to tell him how fences work..."
	A flock o' flamingoes. (55k)
	Feeding time for the giraffes. (61k) The one in back is a different sort of giraffe from the other two; the latter two are the smallest species of giraffe. I mentioned that giraffes are one of those animals that makes you realize just how diverse the results of evolution can be.
	A blurry photo of a hippopotomus lying in the sun on land. (36k) Lucy said, "I've never seen the hippos out of the water!" The other hippo is in the water to the left. Man, they're big
	Lucy tells me that this animal is called a Black Buck. It was aggressively pushing its ball around for many minutes, and was really entertaining. (9k)

I also had a photo of a couple of parrots, but for some reason I was unable to download it to my Mac. Oh, well.

The story of the day (also related by Lucy) is this: We went to see the gorillas, who are a lot of fun, especially as they have a two-year-old baby. All the gorillas were pretty active, walking around, with the baby chasing one that I presume is its mother. We walked to each of the several observation areas, which are about 20 feet above the gorillas' level.

Well, one of the apes, which I think was a female, was rather agitated. She was walking around and gesturing and looking menacingly at all the people. Finally, as Lucy and I were watching from opposite ends of an observation area, the ape ran towards us, and flung ape shit at our crowd! Lucy got glancingly hit (but on several sides), though the people in front of her apparently got solidly pelted.

Perhaps more authentic a gorilla experience than any of us were expecting! (I commented, "I wondered what they do since they don't have the weather for snowball fights...") Lucy managed to mostly clean up, but I think was happy to get home and change clothes. Boy, gorilla poop is pungent!

Other than that, though, we had a great trip. We did end up passing on a trip to Borderlands Books since Lucy and John had had enough walking around. But we got to sit around with Lucy and John's cats for a while and chat, which was a good alternative.

Here's a gratuitous photo of yr hmbl journaller with her cat Keiko which Lucy snapped with my digicam:

I came home to discover that my Macintosh wouldn't boot up. Some strange error on trying to start the Finder. Yes, I still haven't replaced the clock battery. Boy am I a bum. I thought if I had my Mac OS 9 CD that I could run Norton Utilities on it and fix it, but I realized that my cow-orker Tom had been borrowing it since last year. So I phoned him at home, but he wasn't there. Finally I called him at work, which is where he was, and he brought over my CD several hours later.

The problem was easily fixed by Norton, and I'm certain it was due to the clock problem. Someday I'll get it fixed... grump...

Anyway, that's why this weekend's entries haven't been posted until Tuesday.

And the dogs ate my homework. Really!