Pink Prickly Pear

...brown paper packages...

I finally got around to finishing baby Seamus' hat and booties.  About a month late, but his head and feet are probably still a mite too small for them.

Pray for pestilence, people.

I'm still trying to figure out whether the local high school is having a lice epidemic or if those boys across the street (and all their friends) are angry skinheads.

Friday in photographs #3

                                                                  

Animal Encounters

In DC, we always lived walking distance to the National Zoo.  Being part of the Smithsonian, it was free, so we spent more than our fair share of time wandering about the exhibits.  We could pop in and out with the sole intention of seeing how far along the flamingos were with their nests, or if the panda cub was out and about, or (mostly in my case) to use the toilets just inside the Connecticut Avenue entrance.

Politics of zoos aside, we knew we were going to miss our wanderings among the wild things, so when Mr. Pear's mother got us San Diego Zoo memberships for x-mess, it was a much appreciated gift.  Not only do we get free admission to the zoo downtown, but we also get free admission to the Wild Animal Park a few miles inland from us.

It is a pretty cool park - safari style enclosures, lots of different animals sharing large-ish habitats, a conservation center, programs that send animals back to the wild, education programs, botannical gardens, a native seed bank, but to pay for it all, they decided they needed some circus elements.  Like letting zoo patrons feed the giraffes for an additional fee.  Or the elephant show where we were first told the 52 year old elephant moved slowly due to her arthritis but then watched her trainer coax her into balancing on two legs.  And once inside, with admission (and separate parking fees!) paid, there was a tour bus of the African Safari area (too large to traverse on foot in the desert with children) that cost an additional $10 for adults and $6 for kids, and then a balloon which was $15 a head.  Even the carousel cost an extra $2 a head.

Okay, so I'm a cheapskate.  You know, it's not so much the additional money, because I suppport habitat and species conservation and I think it's worth it, it's just that I don't need all the accompanying cheap thrills at the animals' expense.

At the zoo in DC, they opened a children's zoo which featured a "Caring Corral".  For a limited number of hours each day, a limited number of children with adults were allowed into an area carefully monitored by keepers to groom some domesticated goats and donkeys.  At the Wild Animal Park, we opened the gate into the "Petting Kraal" to find an assortment of deerish, antelope family looking animals waddling away from herds of overenthusiastic children armed with fistfuls of corn purchased from a little dispenser.  No keepers in sight and the poor beasts were just weary and overweight and quite frankly, looking very stressed out indeed.

So it was a bit of a disappointment, but the hills and the heat made for some excellent people watching.  Kids were melting down left and right and there were a surprising number of women who seemed to think that high heeled boots were "the very thing!" for wearing while trekking about the zoo.  Their tempers were tweaked.  And don't even let me get started on the school tours.  They make me cringe every time.

Actually, I must share about the school group whose chaperones decided that sitting and watching the exotic bird training demonstration would be an excellent time to break out the lunch boxes.  What does the average first grader have in their lunch box?  Grapes, raisins, apple slices, little kibbles of cereal, among other things.  What does the average bird trainer rely on heavily during training?  Food, dude.  And it's a training  demo, like for birds who are not yet fully trained.  The birds were getting increasingly confused and the chaperones increasingly losing the battle to keep "these damn children sitting in one place"! and then the toucan just decided to hell with this noise and took off.  All animal keepers on deck!  They had crates and bunches of grapes and special little whistles and were radioing for the cherry picker...

So exciting.  

rant-o-rama

Dear Period,

We need to have a chat. 

I know you can't see worth a damn in there, but surely you can sense when I'm horizontal or vertical, no?  I thought you and gravity were pretty tight?

I guess I need to spell it out for you.  Horizontal for more than an hour?  I'm sleeping.  That's not the time to get all Niagara-esque on me, because I can't appreciate your true power until it's too late.

Give me break, alright?

Love Hate,

Triple P who is now down, not one, but two pairs of undies.

spontaneous lunchtime recitations

Now, are you a marsupial?
And have a little pouch?

If I pinch it on the outside,
does something inside holler ouch?

So later on that afternoon I'm telling Mr. Pear about the poem, "she totally made it up!  All by herself!" and she interrupts, "No! I read it in a book!"

"Oh."

tree huggers

So I was going to post about Sunday's Earth Fair in Balboa Park and the discovery of a nice little sushi joint in Solana Beach, but Monday proved that the sushi (or maybe just the mayonaise) was perhaps less than fresh...

Earth Fair was chock full of blog-fodder, hardly any of which I can remember now;(  There was some free-form dance/acrobatics/yoga demonstration (possibly spontaneous) outside the botannical garden that was fast evolving into an orgiastic tumble in the grass complete with full release of sexual tension for some and an overwhelming build up for others.  The adjacent drum circle wasn't helping.  It was also very crowded.  Being slightly (ha!) claustrophobic, I was almost glad when mini-pear's wearing of clogs without socks prompted a blister of such ugly proportions that I had to go barefoot and lend her my Tevas, so ending our milling about amongst the falafal eating, shower eshewing mob.  As a total aside, it made me feel very old to have a child who is now big enough to wear my shoes without tripping over them.  Granted, I don't have very big feet in the first place, but the whole experience fueled my baby-fever which, as close readers know, does not need any external fueling thankyouverymuch.

We didn't leave the fair, just tromped in ever widening circles from the epicenter, exploring the park a bit.  We finally decided to sit down near one of the stages.  It looked like maybe a bluegrass band was getting ready, but by the time I stood in line for our kettle corn (which I've never liked, but it was the least longest line and the least expensive fair food and I had plans for dinner anyway) and retrieved our free Naked juices and met up with the family, it turned out not to be a bluegrass band at all, but one woman on a synthesizer accompanied by another woman on a violin and it was very warbly and bad singer-songwriter-y and just the thing we needed to get us off our lazy behinds to start the long walk to the car.

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Many run-on sentences for you today!  Triple P is bleeding from the crotch and cannot be bothered with concise snippets.

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Damn, I've run out of time and I did want to share about the San Diego Wild Animal Park.   Later. 

Friday in photographs #2

worms and weather

Tomorrow morning I'm signed up for a vermicomposting workshop.  Mmmm, worms.  Mmmm, smaller bags of trash.

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It will be a sad, sad day when I'm fully acclimated to the weather here.  The other morning I walked the dog in a t-shirt, jeans and flip flops, as I do most mornings.  Sometimes I pull on a lightweight hoodie, no need to zip it up, and it's usually around my waist by the time I get home.  But on that same t-shirt and flip flop walk, there was a woman circling our block with a knitted hat with ear flaps and mittens.  Later that day at the playground, the conversation turned to the weather.  One woman said she couldn't remember the last time she'd needed to put the heat on in the mornings this late in April.  Then I noticed the woman sitting opposite me was wearing two layers of fleece.  My house is kind of chilly in the mornings, but it's not 'turn on the heat' chilly, but rather 'we slept with the windows open and the sun doesn't reach around our shade trees until mid-morning' chilly.  In short, put on a pair of slippers and a cardigan for an hour.

Not quite finished...

...but Rebecca requested a photo of my curtain making.  The fabric is not exactly what I might have chosen, but again, it was free.  A bit flowery for my taste, but the nubby texture and the blanket stitch bring it down to earth for me.  On the left is the view out my bedroom window.  It's mighty chilly in the morning, but the afternoon sun just streams in.  There are some unidentified flowers in the bed outside and some sort of palm in my neighbor's yard.  Mmmm, palms.  Makes it all vacation-land-y!
Here's something else that makes it vacation-land-y.  Hot air balloons sighted from the garden with some regularity.  Yeah, I don't know what's up with that overcast sky either.