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This was a quieter week which I certainly needed after the past few. It was not entirely without adventure though. Saturday was Zoo Poo Day and I very much wanted to visit the zoo's new anaerobic digester and obtain a container of the resulting compost. Turns out tours of the digester were not taking place but there were plenty of other ecology related things to learn about. I came home with a small stack of literature, seeds for Black Eyed Susans, and two 5-gallon pails of compost.
The weather was not at all favorable to strolling through the park (fortunately all of the Greenfest activities were inside at the nature center, except for picking up the compost which was set up under a tent in the large parking lot), but we did not let that deter us from visiting the Penguinarium which is quite near the entrance to the zoo and the butterfly exhibit. We we hustled over there and were delighted to see that there was almost no one there other than ourselves and the docents. It was amazing to be able to see the entire glass wall separating the penguins from the humans -- I'm so short I can never see over the wall of people usually blocking my view and I've never before been able to see the full exhibit from one stationary position. The lack of people stayed constant as we made our way through the exhibit, and we enjoyed watching the penguins swim and laze about in the water. I'd never given any thought to how the zoo deals with penguin poop before; turns out it tends to accumulate at the bottom of the tank next to the glass wall and the zoo has scuba divers with little hand-held vacuums to suck it up. The docent said the water is at 40 degrees (F) so even with a scuba suit I'm not certain that would be a pleasant job -- even if it allowed one to swim with the penguins. Not that I can scuba dive at all, mind you. Anyway, in talking with the docent we learned that polar bear exhibit would be closing for repairs in a day or two and decided that in spite of the wind, cold, and occasional bursts of rain we should hike down there to see it. So off we went, as fast fast my body would allow (which is not at all fast and left us fretting that the compost pick up would close before we could get there). We were so concerned that we played no Ingress on the way to or from the polar bears and stopped only once, when we noticed that the Arctic Foxes were visible from the path. I don't believe I've ever seen three at once before. When we made it further in, to where the outdoor portion of the polar bear's space begins, we noticed the youngest polar bear was frolicking in their pond. She was splashing in the water, raising up and falling in backwards, and tossing around the blue ball that was in there with her. At one point she had it balanced on her nose and that was amazing to see. We were so happy after seeing that we decided to skip the indoor portion of the exhibit and made our way to the exit. We found the spot where the compost was being distributed and I stayed and talked with the woman in charge of the project while
jebra went to fetch the van.The Farmington Community Band's "Colors of Spring" concert was on Sunday and the band sounded great. Lots of interesting pieces and I didn't dislike any of them. (This is rare because there are a number of pieces I strongly dislike and it seems that at least one of them will appear on the program.) The concert's theme, however, did not match the great outdoors at all. The dominant feature was ice-covered everything. The trees were gorgeous but I was not at all happy about all of downed branches or the people who lost power. Or the big tree at fell at Red Run, the city park nearest our house and home to two of the three Ingress portals closest to our house.
In supremely uninteresting unless you are me news, on Monday I began the first cat bed containing Anthrocon Security t-shirts. I'm going to be making these forever going by the number of t-shirts I received. I thought I was getting somewhere between 30-50 shirts; turns out 200-250 is the correct count. I also decided it was important to make the fabric of the shirts visible in each bed and therefore am using the tarn as yarn rather than as the interior core of the resulting fabric. In working on that first bed I have learned that this is a much slower process as I'm finding it difficult to grab all of the strands or yarn and tarn with the crochet hook and it takes a heck of a lot more force to pull the stitches through. I'm honestly wondering if I'm going to end up with a much bigger bicep on my right arm.
Scrapbook papers & elements from the kit Bohemian Breeze
For more information about the designers and their work, see
http://mrs-sweetpeach.dreamwidth.org/903338.html".
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