Day 31

It's 10:30 pm and still 77degrees outside. Good god its starting already!

Day 29

Today, among other things, I took a quick trip to the Desert Botanical Garden next door to the zoo. Since I work at the zoo, I get reciprocal admission to a number of places, including the Garden. I took a bunch of pictures, and here are a few!

 Now, that free admission doesn't generally include extras at the places I can get in to. One of those extras would be the butterfly garden at the DBG; but for some reason, today when I presented my card, I got a butterfly sticker which got me into the butterfly garden. It was great!

 I love when the cactus bloom!

Goldfield

I had the day off Tuesday, and so did my friend Nikki, so we decided to take a little trip. I had found this ghost town online that was only like 35min from here called Goldfield Ghost Town. It's this little tourist trap kind of place. The guy who built it did so in an area near the Superstition Mountains where a lot of people had discovered gold in the rush. He built very near the original town site, but most of the town an disappeared years before. All the buildings are built to look like they're from the early-mid 1800's.

There's a narrow gauge train that takes you on a circuit around the town and the conductor tells you all about the area and why this was built, etc etc. Since it was summer, the reptile house that I really wanted to see was closed for the season. I'll  have to come back in the winter. There's also a mine tour and a mystery house. We didn't do either of those things. We wandered around and looked at the shops.

Nikki and I in front of the train.

Hurry Up Ernie giving the tour.

Goldfield from the train.

This was just cool.

Superstition Mountains

After we left we went to see this housing complex that Nikki is thinking of getting a house in. Looking at that house made me want a house. I am tired of renting, but I also don't want to buy a house and have that keeping me here. I want to leave Arizona in a few years and don't want to have to sell a house.

After that adventure we went to Sweet Tomatoes for a late lunch, vegged out at my place for a while, and then parted ways. I then took a short nap, and watched 8 episodes of Criminal Minds. It was a good day off!

Outside the Bordello in a Go-Go dancer cage

Took this pick just for mom!

                                                                      We're in elevators!

The Zoo Saga, part 1

Me and Annie, the GHO. I'll get to this stuff later, we're starting from the very beginning here!

This all started about a year and a month ago, in May of 2010. As you may know, I had been applying for zoo jobs all over the country for months and months. I had just about given up on finding one any time soon, and had actually decided to stop for the time being and just work, get my own place, etc etc. At the end of April I moved out of the Desnoyer House (and away from Kate The Horrible Roommate!) and was currently living with my grandma and aunt. A few days before I moved, I got a call from Phoenix asking if I would like to set up an interview. Well, obviously I took it, because to not would have been crazy. I had my interview over the phone at my parent's house.

It seemed to go well, but they needed a video of my presentation skills, since a large part of this job was presenting animals to the public. I can't tell you what an ordeal this was! I decided to do a little giraffe talk, and since I like props, I got a little stuffed giraffe puppet and held it on my hand while recording myself giving this talk. Apparently the talk didn't actually have to be factual or even very informational; they just wanted to see my style. I must have recorded and re-recorded myself 10 or more times. I had propped the camera up in my mom's office and was doing it myself since this was embarrassing. Well finally I just had my dad hold the camera outside, did it twice more and decided that it was as good as it was gonna get, uploaded it to YouTube, and let fate take the rest. A few days later I got the call offering me the job.

I SCREAMED! I may have frightened my future boss a little. I think I got offered the job sometime around the second week of May. My start date was the beginning of the second week of June. My parent's were gonna be gone most of the first week of June helping Andy and his girlfriend move to Cincinnati . I don't know that this could have come at a worse time.