Dallas Zoo Dollar Day

It was yesterday, and we went. We had gone before, but it must have been many years ago. I remember it being crowded, but not this crowded.

I wonder what the difference was? Like maybe last time I went, not so many people used the Internet on a regular basis. Or, maybe last time there weren't all these Hispanic people who don't speak English, and this time there were many ads for the event in Spanish. Or, maybe last time I went it was so long ago that there wasn't a DART station.

I don't know, but something must have been different.

Anyway, I knew that the zoo opened an hour earlier, and I wanted to get there earlier, but maybe not that early. We stopped for frozen drinks and left at about ten after eight. I think if I ever do this again, I'd have to leave maybe ten after seven. The cops were out directing traffic, or we'd never have gotten to our parking space. We were in the overflow parking, but at least we got an actual parking space. Other people who came later were directed to park on the grass. And I'm sure that they still had to pay seven dollars even for that.

And it was hot. It was really, really hot. I have been to many zoos before, and I knew to bring bottled water. I knew not to bring any drinks with a straw or a plastic lid that might become trash that ends up in an animal's cage. Still, with my bottle of water with no straw and a tightly screwed on cap, they would not let me into some of the exhibits. Leave your drink here, and you can collect it on your way out. Right. There's a zillion bottles of water, mostly the same size, mostly with blue labels. If there's nothing special about your bottle of water, how are you supposed to find yours. You'll get someone else's by mistake and catch whatever germs they have.

I ended up finding some other hiding place for my water bottle and going in a bit later.

And we road the monorail thing, which we rarely do. It was an extra three dollar ticket, which I think is at least half of what it normally is. I'm not sure how long the wait was, but it was about three times as long as what I thought. I looked at the line and thought, that's long, but not too bad. But of course that wasn't the whole line, and there was another bridge or something that you wait in line past where I was looking, and still a bit more of a line past that. But, after you wait in line that long already, you keep waiting. I think it takes about a hundred people at a time, and there were at least two trains going, so we did eventually get on.

A bit after our ride, there was an announcement that due to the high temperatures and high humidity, they would close the ride at 1:30. It was nearly that time when they made the announcement. And the announcement made no sense. What did the temperature and the humidity have to do with the operation of the monorail? It made standing line very unpleasant, and it would have been nice of them to warn people how long they would be in line, but closing the thing because it's hot seemed a bit silly. It is hot all summer. What does that have to do with anything.

We did wonder if maybe they had sold so many tickets that they just couldn't sell anymore. But then why didn't they just announce that they were sold out?

Weird.

There was the regular overpriced zoo food, and then there was special dollar day food: dollar hot dogs, dollar sodas, dollar chips, dollar cotton candy (the kind that is made ahead of time and sold in a tub), dollar popcorn, etc.... We decided not to stand in line for the hot dogs or spend that much money on other stuff. We were tired and ready to leave soon anyway. We decided to look at a few more things and then head to Chili's for soup and salad and chips and salsa.

I just really wanted to see the giraffes. They have it set up now that you can get up close to them and pay to feed them. But while the zoo in Abilene sells some animal food for a dollar or two, this place sold lettuce for five dollars. That would have been ten dollars for the both of us (after already spending two dollars to get in, seven to park, and six for the monorail), and there were already plenty of people feeding the giraffes, so we decided against it.

Well, I'm not sorry that I went, but I think it will be a while before I want to go back.

Odessa and Abilene

Okay, so I mentioned going out of town for a few days. I almost didn't go. I kept getting the dates wrong and getting the places confused. I couldn't be out of town last weekend because of the party, and I can't be out of town this weekend because I'm supposed to go to a friend's birthday dinner on Sunday, etc...so I didn't think that I would be going out of town for a long time, even if he did get scheduled to go anyplace interesting.

Not that these places were particularly interesting. Just that I hadn't been out that way in a while.

I was thinking that a change of scenery would be nice. Literally. I wanted to look at the trees as we drove by them. I thought I might see some leaves that had turned color. I'm not sure why I thought that there would be more of that west of here than there is here, but I hoped for something interesting to look at.

We just don't have a lot of fall color like that. We have some trees that turn yellow, and we have some trees that turn orange, but not so much an attractive all over orange. Actual red trees are rare. Mostly, we seem to have trees that stay mostly green until frost, and then they just look dead overnight. And we have trees that stay green all year.

If you want the fall color thing, you have to plan for it and specially plant some maples or something. So we did see a patch or two here and there, but nothing really awesome.

What we do see out west, between about Abilene and Odessa, are giant wind turbines. Big white windmills, like they have in California, I think near Palm Springs. I think that there might be that many, though they aren't arranged so that you can see that many all at once. But there are a lot of them, and there are a lot more of them than whenever I was out that way last time.

So that was interesting.

My husband had to work in Westbrook on Tuesday. This is a place that I got the name mixed up with some other place that he had to work last week. Anyway, it is between Abilene and Odessa. It is a wide spot in the road. He wasn't sure that we could get a motel room there, so we stayed about ten miles away, at a slightly wider spot in the road. It took more than four hours to get there, so after getting the room and eating some pizza, he had to go to work. In fact, he had to leave before I finished eating.

I spent a couple of hours finishing up a green scarf, and then I worked on another scarf for a bit. And that was all. That was my day. I think I feel asleep soon after watching V.

The next morning we had to pack everything up and drive a couple more hours to Odessa. We passed more wind turbines.

Now, we got to Odessa with more time to spare and had time to think about where we wanted to go to lunch and if we wanted to look at anything else. We found a nice Mexican restaurant, where we probably spent too much money, since we had eaten pizza the day before. Then we went looking for giant rabbit statue. Well, it turns out that there is more than one giant rabbit in Odessa. Just as Kansas City had statues of steers and Fort Worth had statues of horses (and having no wildlife to speak of London invented the Superlambanana), Odessa has a lot of statues of rabbits. But there was once just the one rabbit before the others, and that was the one we went looking for, not knowing about the others. If we had known about the others, maybe we should have gotten a map to look for them all.

Or not. There are a lot of rabbits, and we wouldn't have had time to go looking for all of them. As it was we found the first one and drove by five or six of the others.

Anyway, on the way to getting a picture of the first giant rabbit, we stopped at a historical building and took pictures of that. What is funny to me is that while at the time this was a large spacious home, to me it isn't that big. In fact, it is so compact that there wasn't quite room for the staircase, so there's this little triangular thing in the ceiling under the stairs. Even with the odd steep stairs that the once used, the house needed to be a few feet longer for the stairs to fit without being seen in the ceiling of the room below. And while I think that the two of us might be happy with the space, or maybe a couple with a child or two, at some point the second owner of this house rented the upstairs as five apartments. The upstairs only has three rooms now, but at some point two of them were divided in half so that two more people would have a place to live, and six or more people lived in the house.

Anyway, we took some pictures of this and that and headed back to the motel. At some point a few years ago, my husband had stayed at a really nice motel with a hot tub and all of that. That motel now wants seventy dollars or more per night, so we couldn't stay there. Anyway, it was just for the one day. So no indoor pool or anything. Just the cable TV and the knitting.

As it turns out I felt too tired to even get much of that done.

The next morning we packed up everything again. The continental breakfast was this little pecan pie thing. I don't think that I have ever seen that before as a breakfast item, but I hadn't had one in a while so it was okay. After that we went to Target's and bought a lot of candy for 75% off. They had plenty of costumes left. Too bad I didn't know any kids who like Star Wars. I looked for a pirate costume but didn't find one, so I didn't buy anything else except for a wolf's head.

Then we went to take pictures of a Stonehenge replica. I wish we had thought to go and look at it the night before, maybe he could have gotten some better pictures of it dark and lit up, but we were very tired and didn't think of that. Maybe next time.

Then there was what seemed like a long drive to Abilene, though I don't suppose it was really that long. We stopped at Big Spring to find something for lunch, but there was a long stretch of road construction in front of everything that looked interesting. We got back on the freeway and stopped at a Diary Queen.

There was this whole list of stuff that I wanted to do in Abilene when I thought we were going to be there a couple of days a while back, but I'd forgotten about most of it. And really, we don't want to stay that long. I thought maybe the zoo and one historic building, but then since it was already after lunch, we decided just the zoo.

You might wonder why we thought taking the time to walk around a zoo was a good idea.

Well, for one thing I don't really like the long straight thru drives. I like to get out and walk around some. I like to have something to look forward to.

And, I look forward to zoos and animal parks in general. This one in particular lets you feed the giraffes (which is something I have rarely been allowed to do, even though I have visited zoos all over the country), and there is a bridge which allows you to be at eye level with the giraffes for a bit and then walk over their heads (which is something that I have seen nowhere else, even after visiting zoos all over the country). So, though small, the Abilene zoo is interesting just for that, and this is only the second time I have been in the area long enough to visit the zoo.

After that we drove towards home, stopped someplace for sodas, and then stopped at a Target in Fort Worth (which did not have anything on clearance that I wanted to buy, but I needed a place to stop and we needed to pick up a few things before we got home anyway). We got home around six, just in time to eat and unload the car before watching Flashfoward and Fringe and then going to bed.

I got a few things done yesterday, in between catching up on TV. I should be doing something now, but I've suddenly had a fit of coughing and sneezing after slicing and cooking some peppers. So I feel awful. Of course, I would feel awful today, the day before I'm supposed to go to a friend's house. I just always seem to not feel well any time the guy plans to have some of us over. Or, I feel fine and go, and then I feel bad when I am get there. They think that I am allergic to their cat, but I'm not allergic to anyone else's cat, so I don't see how that could be.

Anyway, I hope I stop coughing soon and tomorrow goes as planned.

The Logic of Cats

I tend to think that animals think about things the way that we do, only they are not as smart, and they will never figure out some things, and they might be able to do things that we can't, like figure out who is on the other side of the door by taking a sniff and also occasionally discover someone has cancer by the same means.

I do not expect them to know everything. I do not expect that dogs know when we leave Monday morning we are going to work or to school, and that going to work pays for the dog food, and that we get the dog food from the store, etc.... I do think that on some level the dog knows that it is Monday, or something like that, because after a couple of days of not having the weekday routine it is now back, and we go to work or to school or whatever. They can't know that we are going to work, but they have figured out that we go somewhere on a regular basis, and that we usually come home from that place at a certain time and all of that.

So I would also think that cats know a few things about cars. They don't necessarily see them the way that we do. I think that most cats do not ride in cars on a regular basis, and do not think of them as a means of transportation, or if they have figured out that part that the transportation is usually to a place that they do not want to go, like the vet. To a cat, a car has more practical purposes. It is something that can be climbed on for a look around, or maybe something to be climbed on to reach something even higher up, or something to sit on because it is warm, or maybe something to take a nap on.

So I realize that the fact of people using cars for transportation is mostly irrelevant to a cat, as cats do not often use them for transportation, and on those rare occasions it is usually transportation to someplace that they do not want to go. But I would think that cats are at least aware that people do use the cars for something, that the cars are not specifically provided by people for cats to use to climb on. I would at least think that cats have noticed that cars are not entirely stationary objects. While cars are often found parked in driveways and on the sides of streets and such, sometimes the cars are missing from their places in driveways and such, and cars are also sometimes seen rolling away from the driveways and moving up and down the streets and such as that. You would also think that the cats would notice that when the cars are moving or are about to be moved from driveways and such, that people are in the cars when this happens, and that they might have gone so far as to figure out that people make the cars move.

Well, maybe figuring out that people make cars move is to much, but they should have at least figured out that people know when the cars will move and that they get inside the cars just a bit before this happens.

It would therefore not be a good time to climb up on top of the car just after people are seen getting inside the car.

We went to my brother's this weekend for the usual, though we decided to drive there due to the fact that it had been raining and there was still mud and puddles of water here and there. We watched some TV and had a visit with my brother and Mean Kitty. Mean Kitty has been declawed and is a lot of fun to play fight with, except that one can never entirely be sure that she is just playing. And then we were leaving, and I forgot something and went back inside the house.

Mean Kitty is not supposed to go outside, and is certainly not permitted to be outside when it is getting dark.

I was aware that Mean Kitty had followed me to the door, but she rarely shows any interest in actually going outside, she just likes to have a look outside from the safety of the door. So at one point I was aware that there was a cat behind me, and then a few seconds later I saw that there was a cat in front of me walking around on top of the car, and then finding a good spot on the car for a nap.

I had a moment of panic, thinking that I had let Mean Kitty out the door. But the door had closed behind me, and there was Mean Kitty looking through the glass. On top of the car was a grey cat I had never seen before. It had a collar, but no tags.

My husband was already in the car. Not only had the cat seen my husband get in the car, but the cat then spent some time on the hood of the car looking at my husband through the windshield before continuing to climb onto the roof of the car. I am not sure why the cat would have thought that this car was a good place to settle down for a nap, considering that the cat had probably never seen the car before, and even if she had she would have known that the car doesn't stay in that spot for very long, and certainly is about to be moved from that spot now that people were getting into the car.

The grey cat was friendly enough and didn't seem to mind being picked up, though it was probably not entirely happy that the main reason for being picked up was to be moved from away from the car. My brother came outside to see what we were doing, and he didn't know whose cat it was, though he thought he had seen it around and maybe it belonged to someone on the street behind his.

The grey cat now had the attention of three people outside the house, plus a certain Mean Kitty watching from behind the glass door. The two cats looked each other over, and I expected a lot of noise from Mean Kitty, as Mean Kitty doesn't like other animals, or even other people much, except for my brother. But they both seemed quiet enough and just looked at each other, then the grey cat went back to exploring and looking at the people outside.

Well, I had long ago decided that I cannot have a cat or a dog in my present circumstances, and that was even before the current financial problems. Otherwise, I might have taken the friendly cat home with me, since there were no tags on the collar. We drove away, and my brother went back into the house. I hope the cat has a good home and went back to it.

I hate my life. And I can't even have a cat.