On Wednesday I was able to take the afternoon off from work to offset some weekend time I put in last weekend and took the opportunity to take advantage of my new zoo membership. I’d been intending to get a zoo membership since I moved here, and I was delighted to learn that the membership to this zoo also gives me discounts as 120+ zoos and aquariums nationwide, including the Oakland zoo, cool!
I checked out of work at 1PM and hopped on the MUNI L to head down to the zoo. The wicked easy way to get down to the zoo is something that really tipped the balance on whether I’d get a membership, unfortunately they don’t do evening hours (would be neat if they had evening hours from time to time, even once a month!), so my visits will mostly have to be confined to weekend visits and spare afternoons I have off.
By 2PM I was wandering around the zoo! First stop was a swing up to Penguin Island, which I’d wanted to see again ever since watching SFZoo: Penguin Knocks Over Camera, hahahaha!
After watching them and the otters for a bit, I decided to hit the Lemur Cafe for some lunch. The zoo cafe is actually better than most I’ve been to, I snagged a cheeseburger and some mac&cheese and sat outside. That’s where I met a peacock who really wanted to eat my lunch. It’s a well-known fact that I’m afraid of birds (penguins are exempt, as are most ducks), but I was also quite hungry so I wouldn’t surrender, a few waves of my hat in his direction and the peacock was reluctantly on his way. It was scary though! Peacocks are huge!
Lunch consumed without further interruptions I wandered past some of the zoo’s hornbills, which were also scary but not as eerie as the resident Cassowary which just stands in its enclosure and stares at people with its scary eyes! I quickly moved on to fluffier animals, like Kangaroos!
And bears! They have a pair of grizzly bears who were cooling off on the warm day with a dip in their pool, and acting totally adorable while doing it.
The lions were also pretty cute. It occurs me that being afraid of birds (which are good for eating!) and wanting to hug bears and lions means I’m probably a bit of an evolutionary failure.
The anteaters are super fluffy-cute too, and I was very happy to see one of the zoo’s capybaras relaxing in the sun right near the edge of its enclosure, giving guests like myself a close up view!
I then headed back to Penguin Island for the 3:30 penguin feeding. Last year when MJ and I first visited the zoo one of the jobs of the folks feeding the penguins was to keep the seagulls away, which they accomplished by using a hose to spray some water in the direction of the seagulls from time to time. While I was there on Wednesday they employed an alternate tactic: bring out a huge bird of prey to hang out at Penguin Island during the feeding! A handler stood at the mid-to-far end of the Island with a giant bald eagle, inviting visitors to ask questions and get their pictures taken. It seemed to be quite effective (but scary! Bald eagles are HUGE!).
My last stop at the zoo was the Lemur Forest. Lemurs have to be one of my favorite animals (which makes me guilty for squeeing and awwing at baby fossas, their primary non-human threat in the wild). I must have spent a half hour watching the lemurs leap…
And roll around like Caligula!
I left the zoo around 4:15 and headed down to the beach right next to the zoo. I was able to get my feet wet (the Pacific is COLD up here!) and then relax on the beach with some music. The breeze from the ocean was quite a treat after the two days of hot weather we had earlier this week. At 5 I took a conference call from the beach, and hopped on a the train around 5:30 while still on the call to head down to Noisebridge for the weekly Linux Discussion evening. I arrived at Noisebridge shortly after 6 to the already-in-progress meeting where some folks were talking about the work they do as Linux sysadmins – cool! Much of the discussion was centered around running a small consulting firm that caters to Linux (much like the company I work for) and how they go about securing and keeping clients, and building working relationships with each other. From there we got into some core sysadmin talk, where I was tipped off to the existence of roundcube. I also learned a bit more about eBox, which looks to be a platform which is Doing It Right with regard to building a platform that really looks like it’s fully integrated with the core of the OS it sits on (Ubuntu), using the packages the OS ships with rather than building their own and allowing the admin to still admin as if it’s a regular Ubuntu machine if they choose not to use the eBox infrastructure exclusively. In all, quite a rewarding meeting for me!
Today we’re heading out to the California Academy of Sciences for the Extreme Mammals exhbit that I’ve been wanting to see for months. The closing date crept up on us, we’ll be in Philly during the last two weeks! So this weekend is our last opportunity to go. I also have a large pile of project work to catch up on before the Philly trip, I suspect that will probably take up much of my day tomorrow.
