New camera edition

How I love you, November, with your cool, crisp days and your extra hour of sleep! To celebrate, I headed out this morning to get myself a special breakfast treat at my favorite local bakery, Bread and Chocolate:

Now doesn't that look delicious? Especially since it was taken on my new camera, to be referred to hereafter as The Best Birthday Present Ever. I've been having a great time getting myself acquainted with all of TBBPE's features and exploring the limits of its 12x optical zoom.

This afternoon I'm going to see my favorite opera, La Boheme, with my family, and will finally have the opportunity to use the opera glasses I inherited from my grandmother. They were not originally hers, but as she had been the recipient of almost all of her family's things, I'm not sure who they belonged to originally. They are beautifully inlaid with mother of pearl, and from my pokings-around on the internets, it appears that they date back to sometime in the second half of the 19th century and are French.

I'll let you all know it goes! This will be my first time going to the opera State-side, so I'm excited to finally be able to read an understand the subtitles accompanying the performance (the majority of my other opera experiences were in German and Czech speaking countries).

Pity Party: Check

It's very nearly too hot to blog again. I'm practicing the ancient Yoga tradition of stilling one's entire body save the typing fingers.

Pity parties = wild amounts of fun. I'm thinking of making this an annual or semiannual event. So cleansing! Getting all that anger and frustration off of one's chest, defacing inflatable men, burning things, torturing the Homer Simpson voodoo doll...

Give the people a sharpie and a wall to write on, and look at the wonderful gems they produce:

Hopefully my SIL will email me the rest of the pictures from the party soon, so I can show you all the lovely play doh figurines T and I sculpted for the center-pieces, and so you can see the all of the yummy chocolate desserts we enjoyed.

Days till next vacation: too many to count

Days on vacation: 15
Pictures taken: 1,444
Miles driven: 1,840
Books read: 5
Approximate number of different types of animals seen (that can be readily identified -- I'm not so good with birds): 35*

FAQ

1. So, are you tired of eating seafood yet? No, no I'm not. In fact, I feel like I'm going through seafood withdrawal. Must! Eat! More! Seafood! Now!

2. Can you look back ont your pre-trip anxieties about not being able to find food and laugh? No, no I cannot. There were a few days where we had a hard time finding a restaurant or even a store that sold food. There are some seriously unpopulated areas of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia! I guess that isn't surprising given that there are more people in California than in the entire country of Canada. Let this be a lesson to you all: sometimes my craziness is prophetic AND well-founded.

3. What books did you manage to read? I'm so glad you asked. Here is the list. The ones I liked in particular are in bold. I'm also happy to say that Book and I were generally exhausted enough at the end of each day that I didn't get much reading done. I consider this evidence of a successful vacation.

• Stardust, Neil Gaiman
• Shadow and Claw, Gene Wolfe
• Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson
• A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
• Charlotte Sometimes, Penelope Farmer

4. Will you be writing about your vacation on this blog? Um? Maybe? I guess I'm not sure. Do you guys really want to hear about it? Probably not in a huge amount of detail, but maybe I'll give you the highlights from each day with an accompanying picture or two. Or seven. Did I mention how many pictures I took?

5. What didn't you get to do that you wish you had? It would have been nice to have time to go on a kayaking trip in the Bay of Fundy to see some of the 15 species of whale that are there this time of year, and it would have been nice to have more time for hiking in Nova Scotia. But that's why this was a whirl-wind, fact-finding tour of the Maritimes: now we know where we want to visit in the future and to see in more depth.

6. Wait, so you have to go to work tomorrow? *quiet sobbing*


I'll leave you all with something you may not know about me. I'm a giant!**

*Birds: turkey vulture, osprey, seagull, ducks, chickens, crow, bald eagle, loon, yellow warbler, crow, a heron of some kind, canada goose, double crested cormorant, white-winged scoter, scarf scoter, ruby-throated hummingbird
Sea creatures: starfish, muscles, snails, harbor seals, grey seals
Misc: squirrels, chipmunks, horeses, goats, sheep, llamas, alpacas, dogs, cats, deer, frogs, cows, porcupines

**And also that pictures of me from below are hugely unflattering. As are pictures of me from the front. And pictures of me from the side...

Trip to the middle of the country

We got back Wednesday night from our trip to the Chain Restaurant and Shopping Capital of the World, aka Book's home town. We usually spend the time with his family eating, playing games and watching movies, but this time was different. His Mom had a Plan of Action, and we were out doing things every day. Despite the incapacitating heat (nb: I happen to know a lot of people who love 90+ degree weather. I am not one of these people. Give me a cool, humid, overcast day anytime. Sadly for me we left the latter for the former, and this Bibliophile turned into a lump that could barely propel itself from place to another).

I mentioned about a week ago that I had particular animals in mind I wanted to see and capture on film during our trip: the red pandas and sun bears. Last time I had been at this particular zoo the sun bears were not out yet, and the red pandas were sleeping. Well, last week I had partial success: the red pandas were still sleeping, but I got a whole slew of pictures of the sun bear! It's hard for me to choose which ones to show you guys. So I will show a couple:

Look at that cute tongue! This guy was really quite small, and seemed to be enjoying exploring his habitat. I also got a cute picture of two elephants fighting over a stream of water in their exhibit:

Our excitement didn't end there, though. The next day we went to this great conservatory with several interesting biomes filled with beautiful plants and flowers.

One was even filled with butterflies! There was also a beautiful garden outside the conservatory

with a large sculpture I really loved (here are two wee small parts of it):

There were also lots of exciting birds (red winged black birds, common grackles, great blue heron, green heron, cardinals, hummingbirds, just to name a few) and other animals in the backyard (squirrels, chipmunks and HUGE bullfrogs).

All in all, we had a great time!

A farm, two tots and some really good Korean food

Wow, it's been a full day! We started off the morning going to a local farm with these two Tots (and their respective parents, of course):

We'll call them Tot #1 and Tot #2. Sure, they aren't standing very close together in this picture, but they were just getting reacquainted. There were lots of animals for them to meet. Goats,

and, my personal favorite, baby sheep:

But what really captured the heart of Tot #1 was the tractor. This is what happened when the tractor drove away:

You wouldn't believe how long Tot #1 chased that tractor down the road! After a nice picnic lunch it was time for Book Group. (In case anyone is wondering why there aren't more pictures of Tot #2: he wouldn't stay still long enough to get more than a colorful blur moving across the frame. He ran from the goats to the sheep to the cows to the horses to the pigs to the chickens...all before I had taken my 150 pictures of the lambs. Boy can that kid move!)

E baked a wonderful basil pound cake (yes, E, it tasted wonderful despite it's poor appearance) and we chatted until dinner, at which time we decided to rustle up the spouses/significant others for a meal at THE BEST Korean BBQ place I've found in the area.

Despite the fact that this restaurant is one of my favorites around here, we only get out to it about twice a year. But the wait staff still seem to know who we are and what we like to order! That's what I call service. The food was amazing, per usual, and E was going to take pictures and document the meal for her blog, but it was impossible *not* to eat once the food started coming off the grill, and all she managed to take were a few pictures of empty dishes stacked all over the table. Stay tuned for those pictures here.

Amazing things in the backyard

I came home from work this evening to the sound of a crow cawing away like there was no tomorrow. Having learned to interpret Bird from watching the BBC's Life of Birds, I knew there was some large predator nearby. But what? And then I saw it: a red-tailed hawk! The crow was leaping and cawing all around the hawk trying to drive it away, but the hawk was just sitting there as calm as anything. I tried to get a picture of it through the window, but was met with only a modicum of success. Sorry for the horrible picture quality, folks, but when I tried to creep outside for an unobstructed shot, it flew away (you can thank me later, other birds):


My first thoughts once I started to get over my excitement, were for another bird family (who knew we had crow eggs/babies in the backyard? I'll have to try and track down that nest tomorrow.) we found over the weekend acting skittish and peculiar. Here's mom:


And here's dad:It turns out they have a nest with three eggs in a bush about two feet off the ground, right next to the house. That's right, three eggs! The incubation period is 11-13 days, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we have some baby birds on hand sometime next week. I'm hoping to get the canonical wide-mouthed baby bird shot, but I doubt Mom and Dad will let me get close enough.