I think (not sure though) this qualifies as a "DUH!" moment. At the very least the pot and kettle come to mind. But..... I have a little bit to catch you up on. I should be "doing chores" but for starters, it's 84 Degrees inside the house and I do my best work around 65 :-) plus, I also started a different schedule. Monthly goals, attached to daily chores. With Mike coming home at unscheduled/odd hours, and my problem of not wanting to do housework when he's here, unless he's working too, there was no way I could do what was on the schedule for any given day, and I'm behind again..... So I'm trying something else.
THE ARNHEM ZOO WAS AWESOME!!!!! I was going to go by myself, than we were going to go by train, and since we wanted to leave about 2 hours before the first train would depart our little village, we ended up driving. It was so nice. We talked almost the whole way up. Mind you, this was 2 hours uninterrupted, 2-way conversation, no phone, no tv.... nothing :-) We chatted like we used to on our midnight star watching trips in the dessert. That alone made the day great!
We were at the zoo 15 minutes before it opened, and about 50th in line, but not only were ALL the registers open, taking money, and handing out tickets, the gates were open to walk on in to the zoo as well. Not like some (the one here included) where the employees make their way to the register right at openingtime, take their time to open up, get settled etc, and THAN someone makes their way to the gate that will allow you to get a ticket, before opening the gate to the zoo itself........... Since the zoo opened at 9, and closed at 7, I was looking forward to 10 hours of zoo-time. There was just a little miscalculation in my fiendish plan....... my body!
We started out in the big greenhouse and thru there to the safari part, to the ocean part, where we sat in awe over the biggest aquarium either one of us had ever seen. There were various basins, that seemingly seamlessly turned into eachother. We saw flat sharks (I know, they have another name, I just don't know it for sure, but I think they were sand sharks LOL) BLUE starfish, a fish that looked like a box, or as Mike put it, an early submarine, all squared. It was so cool. Even Mike was interested, and he has nothing with fish, normally. I did realize that THIS is what I remembered as being the cave aquarium in Valkenburg, which turned out to be a dingy, wet, freak-show, so....... Now I know that I didn't totally lose my mind, it was just discombubbled on the location. LOL. Than we went back thru the greenhouse, saw some more tropical plants, got strafed by a bat, and went into the desert. We were so looking forward to the TEX-MEX restaurant for lunch, and had planned the route so we would end up there between 11 and 1, and were sorely dissappointed. Not only was it not a restaurant, but the whole Tex-Mex experience consisted of Dos Equus beer, and tortillachips........... so we had coffee and a piece of apple-pie and called it good. After "lunch" we also noticed that we wouldn't make it till closing time, but we happilly kept going. I kept telling Mike that we shouldn't have sat down, but he wasn't buying it..... After the Desert, we went back thru the greenhouse, and on to the Rimba, where the non african big cats were. The tigers didn't like eachother very much, they were on opposite ends of the area they were in. They had a cat I had never seen, or heard of.... the Sri Lanka Panther. SOOOOO beautiful! It had a very nice habitat, with a little waterfall and "fool around in" pond, visible from 2 different sides.
I managed to actually get a decent picture of him to..... :-)
After the Rimba, we went to the Mangrove, where it seemed to be mainly birds, and to our surprise, wallaby's.
While walking around, we decided that they must be rebuilding a lot of the paddocks in that area, because about 1/3 was empty and it had all but disappeared from the sign posts telling you which direction to go :-)
When we discovered we had taken a sit down break about every half hour since lunch, we decided it had been enough, since Mike still had to drive 2 hours to get us home, and we called it a day at 5.30.
A wonderful, tiring, relaxed, perfect day!
I've been building scrap pages with the pictures we took, and as soon as they are done, I will post them. It's so nice not to have to remember where the parts came from, because I'm only posting them here and they are going straight into an album after I print them :-)
I finally met a dear friend from the site that got me into Digi Scrapping, Deco-Pages in person. I met Helen in Venlo, and we hit it off, like I thought we would, but sometimes you just don't know what happens between "on line" and "in your face" and you end up losing a good online friend in the process. NOT so, this time, I'm happy to say!
I think I'm all caught up with you, so I'm going to quit for now, and see if the temperature in the kitchen is down enough to light the stove and start dinner. In my infinate wisdom (no laughing!) I decided to make a roast today, so after the browning process, it needs to simmer a couple of hours, for that fall-of-the-bone tenderness I like, putting that much loved (NOT!) humidity and heat in the house... as if 80-some degrees with 79% humidity didn't do the trick on its own :-(
Don't forget to love a hugged one! :-)
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