Q and R are for:

Yes, yes, I am a huge slacker.  Well, not so much a slacker as incredibly busy and habitually exhausted! Anyway! Here are my next two. Mom is up to R, so I better catch the hell up! It's my blog mom, I can say hell if I want.

Q is for quilts! When I worked at JoAnn fabrics, I already had one potentially expensive crafting habit (knitting, which was the topic for K). Knitting doesn't have to be expensive, but it is when you do it like I do. I am now a yarn snob, no $2 skeins of Red Heart acrylic shit for me! But back to the letter at hand, quilting! Employees get free class admission, so I took the quilting class. I loved it! As with knitting, quilting allows me to be creative within the structured confines of a pattern. It speaks to both my left and right brain! I can pick out cool fabrics that look great together, while enjoying the technical aspects of getting everything perfect! Here is a pic of a quilt I happened to have handy. I have more, and better, but I still like this one. The mushrooms are trippy!

See the straight stitching lines? Those are a bitch and a half to get right! So for some present giving occasion or another, Mom decided to enable my habit and bought me a free form embroidery foot for my machine, and now I quilt in squiggles!

R is for rats. I'm just gonna let the adorableness of the following pictures speak for themselves.

Go check out mom's idea for what R means to her right over here!

O and P are for:

So I've been crazy busy lately. I have pics for most of my missed letters, but I haven't posted them yet. Well, I am going to remedy that starting today! On this post, I have my O and P contributions.

O is for opossum. To be exact, this is a short tailed opossum. We have two right now, a boy and a girl. This is the girl in a little piece of PVC tubing.

These little kids are my favorite new addition to our department. They have the coolest prehensile tails. The male likes to take the shredded paper we put in there and push pieces of it down into his tail and carry it all around curled up into his tail till he gets to his hut to make a nest. Cutest freaking thing ever!

P is for pigs! Warty pigs, but still pigs!

Don't really have a story for them, they're just cute!

And as always, check out what mom posted in a much more timely fashion than I did!

G is for:

Great Horned Owl. This post is coming in a day late because I went to sleep after work yesterday because I felt like shit. Anyway, we have two GHOs at the zoo. We have Annie, a 20 year old female, and Charlie, the 2 year old whipper snapper that I'm currently working with. Annie has been with us for nearly all of her 20 years, so she knows the drill in regards to handling, presentation, etc. Charlie we have had since the fall after he was hatched (so at little under a year old) and no one had time to work with him until I started working with him this last winter. So I'm training him to allow collection, and sitting nicely on the glove. He's doing pretty good. He has come a long way from when we first started, that's for sure! Both of these birds are at the zoo because they are non-releasable. Both have cataracts that severely impact their ability to hunt, and you may notice that Charlie's right eye is significantly smaller than his left.

The first two are Charlie sitting on my glove, giving me The Eye. The second two are Annie sitting on her perch with a delicious mouse.

Check out my mom's blog for her G contribution.

E is for:

Elephant. So this pic might be cheating a little, since I didn't technically take it, but I am in it! I figured mom might like a pic with me in it. It was taken by a coworker with the express purpose of this ABC challenge though, so I'm gonna go with it.

Go check out mom's E entry.

C is for

Coati! This is Zippy, our White Nosed Coati. He is adorable and I am really excited to get to work with him finally!

 

Go check out my mom's page for her C contribution!

Days 45 and 46

Day 45:

Thursdays and PetCo kick my ass.

Day 46:
I shadowed mammal string today at work (the zoo) and we gave a few of the animals roses. This is our wallaby eating one. So cute!

Day 40

Rhino rat snake. Cool or what!

Day 39

Lesser hedgehog tenrecs are adorable. Exhibit A:

He's nomming on a bowl of worms here. So cute!

Day 35

One of these days (today, today will be the day!), I will catch up and actually post on the day I'm supposed to. At any rate, yesterday at work I did my notes out in the weathering yard with Annie, the GHO. I loves me some owls!

Day 33

Yes, it's another Charlie picture. But can you blame me? He's just so handsome!

Day 32

Marty has the cutest face!

Day 26

This is Sal, the rooster. He's my department's newest acquisition. The Farm area at the zoo had him first, but he and the resident rooster started fighting shortly after Sal arrived, so we got him instead! he really likes to talk. When there's no one outside paying attention to him, and especially when he hears stuff outside his run, he'll crow like any good rooster. When you're in his enclosure, especially when putting food down, he makes these adorable little inquisitive chicken noises. I think he might be my new favorite animal! He'll peck worms out of your hand. If you've ever wondered if it hurts for a chicken to take food from your hand, the answer is no, at least not in my experience. He aims for the worms, not your skin.

Day 25

Today I took my room mate to the zoo. Working there, I obviously get in free, and also get to do most of the things to do free as well, like riding the train, feeding the giraffe, petting the sting rays, etc. It was pretty fun. Roomie didn't know the zoo was that big, the only time she's ever been is for ZooLights, and the lights are only on a small part of the zoo trails.

 

 

Day 21

Owls are adorable. This is all.

Day 14

I work four days a week at the zoo, and three of those four days I work with my manager, She is the one who collects Charlie the owl for me, and then hands him off to me to man him. Manning is where you just hold a bird on the glove, essentially getting them used to it (in Charlie's case) or just socializing with them so they don't always associate being on the glove with being in front of a bunch of annoying people! On days where my manager isn't there, or we don't get enough time to actually have Charlie out of his mew, I go in and sit with him to socialize him. Generally I sit on the log in his mew and putz around on my phone. I don't actually want to draw a lot of his attention to me, just get him used to sitting calmly with a person in his space.

It's really cute; he'll get all annoyed and fluff up and hiss or beak clack when I first walk in and he doesn't know what I'm going to do, but then when I sit down he calms down pretty quick and his little ear tufts go up. Sometimes he looks at me, but mostly he just does his owl thing and looks out one of the windows. He's the handsomest owl in town!

Day 13

You ever notice how a hedgehog with it's face in a food bowl is even cuter that a hedgehog just plain being cute!

Bernie

Boost

Day 12

When you're a bunny, a pine cone with peanut butter is the best thing ever!

Days 10 and 11

Yes, yes, I know, I did it again. Two days in one. I'm busy, so sue me!

Day 10:
At PetCo, associates are allowed to bring their pets in once in a while, if necessary. Well, the dog trainer brings hers in every time she's here. Granted, they are good for demonstrating in class, but still. She takes over the tiny break room with her stuff and their stuff. But they are pretty cute.

Shark and Zoe

Day 11:
We have 5 hedgehogs and 4 tenrecs at the zoo, and today was bath day!  This is too big of an undertaking for one person to complete in addition to all normal duties, so Ryan and Edie came down to APC and did baths while I continued my regular cleaning and stuff.

Greater Hedgehog Tenrecs getting baths!

Day 5

So I currently have two jobs, at the Phoenix Zoo, and at PetCo. The zoo is my intended career, PetCo is a means to making ends meet. I greatly dislike that job. I really like my job at the zoo, I get to do all kinds of awesome things. One of those things is the subject of today's photo. I work with the education, show, and outreach animals at the zoo, which means that we have to be able to handle our animals, and they have to be fine with it. Animals rarely come to us willing to be handled, so we have to work with them at it. Currently I am training a Great Horned Owl, getting him to chill the fuck out on the glove, being collected from his enclosure, being returned to it, etc. Eventually we'll work on crating, but for now, I'm just happy when he's sitting nicely!

Since you can't see his face in this one, today's post is a twofer!

Aaannd Theeeeenn

After mom and I spent, what, 2 days? in Chicago; she LEFT ME!! ("He left us, he left us!"  "But that's not what I'm gonna do!" name that movie!) All ALONE!!! In the big city of CHICAGO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To wait for Lindsey to come pick me up! :)

We had already checked out of the hotel (because those crazy places make you leave my like 11am, in what universe are people awake by 11am on their vacations? ...Oh yeah, this one.) The hotel people were nice enough to let me leave my baggage in the storage area so I didn't have to lug it around while exploring on my own and waiting for my ride. With just my purse and my jump on/jump off bus card, I took mom to the train station, cried a little, and rode the bus all by myself (look mom, I'm a Big Girl Now!) around the city till I decided what I would do. Unsurprisingly, I decided to go to the Lincoln Park Zoo.

I would just like to take this opportunity to say that Chicago has one of the nicest bus systems I've ever had the pleasure to navigate. I didn't use the L-train while I was there, but the buses are fantastic.

For those of you not in the know, the Lincoln Park Zoo is in Lincoln Park in Chicago just north of the Miracle Mile. It is huge and free to get in and parts of it are coaxingly nice, and I think that other parts will catch up eventually. I had my camera (when do I not) and took pics. I even recorded a bit of video of my talking to/for the animals like mom and I do so I could show her later when I go home. Yes, mom and I are those people.

They have a fantastic ape house with chimps and gorillas. I tried not to use my flash, so most of my pics from in there ended up blurry.

The big cat house needs some serious work, but they have lots of different cats, which I LOVE!

He's in a box! Like a house cat!

This tiger was so cute, it was like he was posing!

After I shot these, I took the bus back to Miracle Mile and found a place to sit and have a coffee while Lindsey was fighting traffic into the city. After she made it, we drove back out to the zoo and looked around for a bit since she had never been there before. While we were in the cat house, the male lion started roaring. He walked into his outside exhibit and continued while we watched (and while I filmed it). It was awesome! I love lion roars!

He tired himself out with all that effort and had to take a nice nap!

 After the zoo closed, Linds and I took the bus back into the city (it's a few blocks) while leaving her car since we found a free parking spot next to the zoo. We were going to go eat at this one place, possibly pizza, but we were starving! and the wait was like an hour, while standing outside in the COLD! So we went to the Hard Rock and ate.

After dinner was the long drive to Peoria, where Linds lives. The next day, we went to another zoo!!!