Last night, as we were watching a really atrociously bad movie, I heard it! The first katydid of the season!

(It was very loud... while I couldn't see it, it must have been on the side of the building somewhere.)

Alex did hear one back in June while I was out of town, but neither of us heard another one since.

Jokingly I told him, as he took Bella out a couple hours later, to "let me know if you see any katydids!"

He came rushing back in about ten minutes later with something closed in his hand, saying "Come quick!"

I'm impressed that on the very first night we heard a katydid, he also found one, haha. He said he nearly stepped on the poor thing, which was sitting on the sidewalk.

So we got one of the katydid habitats set back up real quick. We even had some frozen green beans in the freezer, so heated those up and stuck those on a stick for him, ha.


Greenbean 2!

I believe this is another male, though we haven't heard him click yet. He did chow down on some green beans, though!

None of our katydid eggs from last year ever hatched. It's quite possible that they weren't fertile, as we didn't have the male and female housed together for very long (unless she'd had some relations before we caught her.) I don't know enough about their lifecycle to know if perhaps the eggs require a cold period over the winter, in which case the steady room temperature of the apartment may not have worked for them. Alas.

I was almost scammed yesterday. Got a phone call ostensibly from my bank and he (UK accent, slightly unusual but not impossible) launched right away into reassurance that he wasn't going to ask for my PIN or account details. Said he was from my bank's fraud dept and my credit card had been used for a transaction for over $1800.00 in Singapore, so as they knew I lived in Auckland, he was checking I wasn't on vacation there. I said no I wasn't.

He assured me they would block the payment, but said that unfortunately as someone had my card details, the bank would have to cancel my card and mail me a replacement. I moaned a bit about the hassle. Then he said he needed me to check my texts as there should be one related to the scam transaction. There was. Then he said could I read out the 6 digit authorisation number so he could cancel it. But the authorisation number had only 4 digits, so I got suspicious, told him I'd call my bank, and disconnected. Would I have fallen for it if he'd got the number of digits right? I hope not, but am unsure.

Sure enough it was a scam, and my bank's fraud dept hadn't contacted me. There was a small sum the scammer had tried to charge to my card, and my bank said if I'd given him the authorisation number he'd in fact have charged a huge amount to my card. The bad news is that the bank still have to cancel my card, and the REALLY ANNOYING news is that they're based in both Aussie and NZ and their new procedure is to mail my new card from fucking Australia, not locally. I know from past experience that mail from Aussie can take bloody weeks, so that's a huge bummer. (They say max. 2 weeks but I don't believe it). I have several payments automatically set up on my card and they're going to start bouncing.

Anyway, I'll just be over here gnashing my teeth, but be aware of this scam - they're very slick and believable. Don't ever give anyone purporting to be from your bank a texted (etc.) transaction authorisation number, no matter how small the amount is. In fact, don't do anything at all if "your bank" calls you. Hang up and call your bank to check.

I mentioned it briefly in my roundup of last week, but never actually posted about it, but...

Bella got two more AKC titles!

She got the first level of the CGC, the "Canine Good Citizen" test, which tests a mix of temperament and training, seeing if the dog behaves politely and obediently, even around unfamiliar people and dogs.

And then, because the CGC counts for a full half of the other test, she also got the first level of "Trick Dog," which really is just... stupid pet tricks, lol.

There are higher levels of both tests, but she now has the lowest levels of both. With a little work, I think she'll be able to get the higher CGC tests completed. Not sure if we'll have her go any farther with trick dog. She absolutely knows plenty of stupid pet tricks, but I don't think she knows *all* the ones they ask for, and we don't really have a reason to teach her those *except* to possibly do those tests.

Some of the upper level CGC tasks are more challenging, but those skills are actually useful to have even outside the test, unlike training to do silly tricks, haha.

The tests were last... Thursday, I think, so I was at work and didn't get to go, but Alex said she did pretty much perfectly on both! I didn't doubt she *could*, but was a little afraid she'd be too excited and flub some of her leash manners or something. She did great!

I was hoping to have ribbons to show off her new titles, but she didn't get any. ;_; Alex isn't sure if the evaluator just forgot, or if she didn't have any. (Though Bella has a FastCAT next week with the same organization that the evaluator is with, so he will ask then. We're hoping to put together a display for all her ribbons, even though I know it's silly, so I'd like to have them if we can!)


The beaft.

What images are used as avoda zarah, and can you benefit from things that have previously been used for avodah zarah? If so, what sorts of things and what needs to be done first, and who has to do them. Still a fun time!

( Read more... )

Now that I am done with Project Hail Mary and can see other people's takes and excitement for the movie, I am seeing a lot of comparing that story with The Martian. I don't plan to read the book, so I watched the movie last night. It was okay. It was good to get the context and I see why people want to compare and contrast the two so much.

I could almost feel the missing bits in the movie from what was cut to make it work as a film. I think/hope Project Hail Mary will adapt better.

This week I used my Malayan tapir sticker in the hopes of summoning the tapir at the zoo. It worked!

This week was pretty good. I did get a lot of my intended goals done. We had a good time on my days off, and while work felt extremely busy, it was fine. I did get some writing done, though on reviews and goal-setting, not on fiction. I was glad that I finished a couple books, even if I did so at the very end of the month! Bella had a good week, in that she got two new AKC titles: the first level of Canine Good Citizen and the first level for Trick Dog. The week felt quite productive overall, though there are a few things I should try harder to do next week.

Goals for the week:

• I did finish reading Night's Edge
• I wrote up my reviews of the books I read in July
• I did my getyourwordsout check in: 5260 words written in July, bringing my ytd to 76077, which means I've hit my goal of 75k written (just very little has been on fiction writing)
• We visited the zoo
• We signed our lease for the next year (even if the rent increase makes me want to cry)
• I put my laundry away
• I made some necessary phone calls
• I sort of started updating my reading page, but didn't get very far
• I did look at the OTW election candidates, reading their platforms and their Q&As
• I did not work on my idea inventory
• I put together my August tracking grids
• I stopped by my mom's house
• I started reading Uprooted
• I set my writing goals for August
• I cleaned up Berry Mad's pond and plant

Tracked habits:

• Work - 5/7
• Household Maintenance - 4/7
• Physical Activity - 2/7
• Wrote 500/1000+ Words - 2/7 - one day of over 1000, one day of over 500
• Wrote on 2nd+ Draft - 0/7
• Meta Work - 7/7
• Personal Writing - 6/7
• Other Creative Things - 3/7
• Reading - 7/7 - mostly I read Nights Edge, but I also finished my ebook side read, Alex and I read some Duma Key, I started Uprooted, and my new ebook side read A Queen Rises
• Attention to Media - 7/7 - Sunday had some youtube video essays in the background, then later storm chase and exploration videos, and I caught up on Re: Dracula; Monday was more storm chase and exploration videos in the background and a very short Re: Dracula; Tuesday another short Re: Dracula, and the watching news coverage of the huge earthquake near Russia and the potential for tsunami afterwards; Wednesday we watched Drop, which was fine but a bit silly, Last Night in Soho, which I really like, and Coherence, which I'd seen before, and is a decent low-budget thing; Thursday we watched 1BR which was an okay horror, and Triangle which I think is better than people give it credit for, but I do love fucked up timeloops; Friday listened to Re: Dracula and had storm and exploration videos in the background; Saturday some youtube in the background, a short Re: Dracula, more storm and paranormal videos, and listened to music.
• Video Games - 0/7
• Social Interaction - 6/7

Total words written: 4441 words written on reviews and intended plans for August

Last Tuesday, we decided to pick a park we hadn't been to before to check out. Alex read the pages for a few different county open space parks, and we picked Centennial Cone. It's a bit of a ways up one of the canyons, and definitely a pretty high elevation to start at!


It's a lovely view from up there!


Glanced over at the side of the trail and this little guy was just sitting right there! Super vibrant markings, much more so than the similar lizards I'm more used to seeing.

17 more pictures:

Clouds dipping below the top of the mountain.

Unfortunately, literally about five minutes into the hike we heard thunder. Checking the radar, we were right in the path of the *one* tiny little thunderstorm that popped up over the mountains. *Sigh.*

I think Alex may have been mildly annoyed that I kept stopping anyway (despite the thunder) to take pictures of things, but I can't help myself, lol.


Neat beetle! And some cute little succulent-type plants growing in the rocks.


Lovely mariposa lily!


I just wanted a picture of the paintbrush and didn't even notice the little insect! Probably a katydid or tree cricket nymph of some type? And looks like a second bug of some kind up around the right side, but can't see it well enough to know what kind.


I really wish this had actually been clear, but a cute little bumblebee and a cute little cactus!


I do really like the little barrel cacti.


More paintbrush!

It did start to rain a bit more as we headed into a treed area. It was a bit of a relief, as it cooled it down a bit. This day was *extremely* humid for Colorado. I think I saw that we tied a record dewpoint in Denver.

Though then of course because it was so humid, after the rain dampened everything, we were just wet and sticky the whole time, haha.


Ant lion burrows! :D


Little baby prickly pears!


A robber fly.


I wish I'd had a chance to really get this shot how I wanted it, but the thunder was getting a bit insistent for a while. But I liked the cactus at the edge of the rocks, with the mountains in the background.


From up here you could see the river and the road down below.

The rain mostly lightened up after a while, and the thunder got a bit less threatening. Luckily! For a while it just kept strengthening and it looked like it was headed right for us, ha.


So perfectly spherical!


Looks like someone was marking territory on the tree! (Scrape, scrape.)


One (1) distant deer.


A different neat beetle.


And a big velvet ant.

The rain started up again just a couple minutes after we made it back to the car, so our timing was pretty good!

We ended up taking a pretty long scenic detour in order to avoid some pretty extensive roadwork along the highway we came up.

It was a nice day out! The park is a bit distant for us to likely come to often, but I'd enjoy coming back on a day that had less threat from the weather, just so I could take my time looking at stuff a bit more.

updated 2025-08-04

This post is my complete list of recs for FBI: Most Wanted through Season 2, organized by time in canon (and then sorted by length). (For FBI: Most Wanted recs organized by ship & author instead, go here.) Note that any of Bastet5's fics in the lists below are for their series The Wild Hunt and may be confusing if you aren't reading the series in order.

I haven't watched any of Season 3 onwards yet, so I won't be adding any fics to this until I do. (I will endeavor to keep any ongoing fics updated as new chapters are posted, however.)

( Icon guide )

( Explanation of ratings )

( Content warnings and spoilers )

The fics below all have major ship(s) listed beneath them. If there are any minor/background ships you want to avoid, please leave a comment and ask for a list to be made for you. Note that ships may refer to one-sided or unrequited ones as well as to requited/mutual.


Below are the recs:

( 1x01 )

( 1x02 )

( 1x03 )

( 1x04 )

( 1x05 )

( 1x09 )

( 1x10 )

( 1x11 )

( 1x12 )

( 1x13 )

( 1x14 )

( 2x01 )

( 2x03 )

( 2x15 )

( backdoor pilot )

( indeterminate )

( multi )

( post-S1 )

( pre-series )

( S1 )

( S2 )

If any of the links above no longer work, please let me know so I can flag them as "Dead" in my database, thanks!

Enjoy! :)

* Project Hail Mary - There is going to be an extra meeting of my book club sometime this fall for it, but I wanted to read it early because some people were disappointed by how much was revealed in the trailer. So, I finished it last night and then finally saw the trailer. I am glad I read the book cold, not so much because of the obvious reveal, but more the smaller details. If you want to read the book before the film and have seen the trailer, maybe try to avoid watch it again.

I enjoyed it. For most of the book the way the science information was slowly built upon and discovered was really great, kind of felt like a really good video essay at times? But then there was a point where I really wanted the author to stop explaining experiments and just say the results. There is a whole section where most of what made the science bits work is just missing. It's not one element that's missing, it's several. This happens late in the book when there is a very small number of possible endings. I think a few 'amazingly, got the results that first time' instead of 'let me detail doing this same experiments six times' would really have helped.

I read it as an audiobook, but that format works really well for a couple of reasons. It's all first person POV of the main character.

( Mild spoilers, barely any if you have seen the trailer )

I have one big note about the overall plot( and it's a spoiler for the very last part of the book ) Okay maybe more than one note.

* What Moves The Dead - Finally got his read! It's also the next horror book club pick so I am somewhat on top of my book club reading. Really looking forward to the next book and also the upcoming book which I assume is the final one in the series? But, I am going to hold off until after book club. Her writing is really great. I definitely have some gender notes about this book and, uh I have an awkward feeling based on talk about it in book club discord that we might need to have a talk about the MC, pronouns and how Alex actually self ID's.

* Six of Crows - My reading of this was broken up by a few things including needing to power-read a book for book club. I am going to take a bit of a break between this book and Crooked Kingdom as these books are long and also I want to be able to focus on reading it unrushed and without pauses. Some aspects of the con/grist/heist stuff that was going on were very clear and well done, and making that all so clear is very tricky. But the physical aspects involving buildings... she kinda lost me there, but it might be due to reading it in chunks. I'll have to evaluate that on a re-read. Her character writing and some of the twists were amazing.

This book had a lot of reminders of how young some of these characters are, and also how young some of the characters in Shadow and Bone were supposed to be. I get it, these were written for the YA market, but at times it's like... really? For some of them, it tracks, for others?

* The Death of Jane Lawrence - Enjoyed it! The world building was tight and very interesting. I picked up on all of it despite consuming it as an audiobook. The print version uses formatting and a few other things to help clarify what's going on, but using my book club as a sample: some people who were audio-only got was going on and some people who read the print version didn't even notice things like sections without capitalization. The author was surprised that some of the people who read the physical version didn't even pick up on it.

I really enjoyed the author's skill in having such a shifting world/situation/etc, but it wasn't exactly my overall vibe. I will read some more by her

* My TBR shortlist right now is
- Ocean's Godori: I can't make the bookclub meeting for it, but I still want to read along
- A Dark And Drowning Tide: I don't typically like the romantasy club picks, but this interested me
- Jade City
- Deadly Education
- Left Hand of Darkness

Currently reading - The Shots You Take: It's the one Rachel Reid book I haven't read yet.

On the bright side, the advantage of using one-store-only virtual cards lets me know exactly which online restaurant ordering site (orderonlinemenu.com) has the leaky data security, and my credit card automatically denied the fraudulent charge.

Oy.

At least it was just a virtual number stolen, so from the email, it seems like maybe my credit card won't decide to cancel this number and give me a new one if I report the fraud. After the Really Absurd Number Of Times my card number got stolen last year, I had to make a list in a spreadsheet of which card and which virtual numbers on which cards were used on which sites, so I could update them. So even if not, this process is easier than it was. But the email just says to lock the virtual card number so it can't be fraudulently charged. Which it already has been.

This is just so annoying.

My favorite part of the Denver Zoo is the Tropical Discovery building. It houses most of the reptiles and amphibians at the zoo, as well as the fish. There are a few other animals in Tropical Discovery as well, but for the most part it's my cold-blooded friends.


I was very taken with the teeny tiny mushrooms on the branch. (And of course, the teeny tiny frogs.)


Vietnamese mossy frog. It sure is!

25 more pictures:

Spotted ray. :) And a spotted fish.


Posing nicely for a closeup.


Monkey frogs. They look so serious!


Golden frogs. They're very endangered in the wild, so glad to get to see them here.


So cute!


I love how unique all of their markings are. None of them look the same!


King cobra. :)


Intense eyes.


Gaboon viper. This one made me laugh, because Alex was looking at it and then said "It's weird that he has his head under a leaf." I looked for a second and said, "Wait, his head is the leaf!" Camouflage be camouflaging!


A few resident mammals. Capybaras! (They are very friend-shaped.)


And a monkey!


One of my favorites. It looks like a little dragon!


Upside-down jellies, and the prettiest opal fish.


Not a "good" picture, but it made me laugh. The instant I got my camera up, he spun to look at me, haha.


Such a stunning pattern on this guy!


Pretty angel.


I know lionfish are pests, but damn they're pretty.


Clownfish and anemone.


Nice big eastern diamondback.


Absolutely massive alligator snapping turtle. This guy standing up like this is between four and five feet tall! (Shortly after this there were several kids who came up and were very excited to get their pictures taken in front of the turtle.)


Boreal toads! :D They're native here, but very endangered in Colorado. The Denver Zoo does a lot of conservation work with them, and has done several big releases of captive-bred populations into the mountains.
(I shared that field note at Roxborough where someone said they'd seen a boreal toad on the trail there (cute!), but they're rare enough it seems more likely they saw a woodhouse toad.)


This is Maple. She's a baby pancake tortoise! Another endangered species, and it was quite exciting when she hatched this year.


Komodo dragon! SO BIG!


Serious side-eye.


Lake Titicaca frogs, my beloved weirdos. (Extremely endangered, glad this is one of the few facilities that has a breeding population!)

I'm glad we spent a decent amount of time going through. The way we typically loop through, this building comes toward the end of our visit, and we often have to rush through the last bits of it as we approach closing time. It was nice to do it toward the beginning... even though it wound up being most of the day!

Hopefully we'll go back fairly soon to catch the things we missed on this trip.

Horrible POS Matt Rife has *not* bought the Conjuring House. Lots of new sites are making mistakes because they are not familiar with the world of paranormal investigation.

The actual story is much worse. He, with a business partner, have bought The Warren's home and museum that contain the artifacts and allegedly haunted items that the Warrens collected over the years. (The Warrens were the exorcists in the 'true stories' of The Conjuring House and Annabelle films) He is now the 'legal guardian' of Annabelle. All the artifacts are in his care. he plans to open it to tours and overnight stays. Link.

So sleepover party with the real Annabelle anyone?

(Warrens were pieces of shit scammers with the best PR ever in the form of their books and those movies. But there are people within the paranormal space who think that the Annabelle doll is haunted, but not by a demon and the ghost had been stuck being treated like a demon since the Warrens intervened. There is a whole 'Free Anabelle' contingent.)

The whole cottage industry around paranormal investigations and renting locations seemingly being a booming industry remains interesting to me.

A Diary Of A Wimpy Kid knockoff published by Artscroll, and is exactly what you'd expect given its bona fides.

Dovi is a 4th grader at a new school and is having problems fitting in, except we have no reason to believe he's not fitting in, because that's told and not shown in any way, so it's not clear why his teacher sends him to the school therapist rabbi to be told to keep a diary. He misses his old school but we are never given any specifics about his old school or his old friends. Specifics? What specifics?

We don't even get a good idea of how many siblings he has and the age spread (his oldest brother -- probably -- went off to yeshiva in Israel, except considering the age spread of the kids, that's likely high school, but why mention any details?)

He does a lot of unspecified learning, including running a chavrusa program. He gains friends. He has no real problems and is not a wimpy kid. The shenanigans are generic and probably very boring to the target audience, who are used to the many books in this genre already, and except certain things from a confessional diary of a 4th grader at a new school who has to see the school therapist because he's not fitting in. Those things are not in this book.

Overall, I found it very bland. And that's probably the biggest problem.

Because the thing is, I don't like Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. It's better than Captain Underpants, but most things are better than Captain Underpants. All these Wimpy Kid books and that entire segment of midgrade -- I don't like them.

I'm not supposed to like them. They are written to appeal to a midgrade audience, not to the parents of the midgrade audience.

Dovi Diaries was written to appeal to adults.

But you know what? I've read worse from Artscroll.

updated 2025-08-03

This post is my complete list of recs for FBI: Most Wanted through Season 2, organized by major ships (and then author(. (For FBI: Most Wanted recs organized by time in canon & wordcount instead, go here.) I didn't originally have a post for this fandom because I had too few fics in my database for it, but I finally got around to adding all of the fics from Bastet5's series The Wild Hunt so now it's definitely over 30 fics. Note that any of their fics in the lists below are for that series and may be confusing if you aren't reading the series in order.

I haven't watched any of Season 3 onwards yet, so I won't be adding any fics to this until I do. (I will endeavor to keep any ongoing fics updated as new chapters are posted, however.)

( Icon guide )

( Explanation of ratings )

( Content warnings and spoilers )

The fics below are all organized by major ship(s). If there are any minor/background ships you want to avoid, please leave a comment and ask for a list to be made for you. Note that ships may refer to one-sided or unrequited ones as well as to requited/mutual.


Below are the recs:

( Clinton Skye & Kenny Crosby, Clinton Skye & Tali LaCroix, Jess LaCroix & Clinton Skye )

( Clinton Skye & OFC )

( Clinton Skye & OFC, Hana Gibson & OFC, Kenny Crosby & OFC )

( Clinton Skye & OFC, Jess LaCroix & Kenny Crosby )

( Clinton Skye & OFC, OMC & OFC )

( Clinton Skye & OFC, Sheryll Barnes & OFC )

( Clinton Skye & OFC, Tali LaCroix & OFC )

( Jess LaCroix & Clinton Skye )

( Kenny Crosby & Ivan Ortiz )

( Kenny Crosby/Hana Gibson )

( Kenny Crosby/Zadie )

( no major ships )

( OMC & OFC )

If any of the links above no longer work, please let me know so I can flag them as "Dead" in my database, thanks!

Enjoy! :)

At the start of last month, I wrote a piece on Brass Banding (the radio series, but also the wider concept) and along the way went down a bit of a rabbit hole listening to the back catalogue of it’s presenter Hannah Peel. The album that I’m writing about today - and that has been on heavy rotation all month - fit that theme admirably as it’s a symphonic piece written for analogue synthesisers and brass band. It’s also absolutely glorious.

Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is a seven movement work describing an imagined journey by - and I’m just going to quote the press release here - “an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself”. Apparently inspired by the quote that “we have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in the sky”. In my research adventures looking into the origins and inspirations for the album, I read a review that described it as being like a team up between the Flaming Lips and the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, and that really does hit the nail on the head. (While last month’s album made me feel that I’d have loved it substantially more if I’d encountered it twenty years ago, this is an album that I love now and yet still dearly want to press onto my seventeen year old self because it would blow her mind.) It’s a symphony for analogue synth and brass band - Tubular Brass to give them their due - and achieves that rare thing of balancing both in a way that shows affection and respect for both elements while combining and pushing them into something greater than a sum of their parts.

As I’ve often noted in my Tectonics reviews, even when writing for orchestra, electronic and modern classical composers lean heavily on strings and percussion and often ignore the more experimental potential of the brass section - if they even know what to do with it in the first place, sometimes they miss it out entirely. One of my favourite things about Public Service Broadcasting’s oeuvre is that they know what to do with a brass section - to the extent that when they do live shows, if there’s any non-electric instruments it’s usually a bit of brass. (The do love a wee wind trio of trumpet, trombone and saxophone.) But that’s generally the exception rather than the rule, it’s rare to get something that really explores the joys of brass and syths working together to build a greater whole. It’s incredibly cinematic, music fit for wider screen vistas or a planetarium show. The electronics are dreamy and gorgeous, but it’s the beautifully layered brass that really opens us up to the scale of what’s being depicted. It’s also a piece composed by someone who loves brass band music in it’s own right, who understands how epic and transporting brass - specifically this was written for a colliery brass band rather than an orchestra section, it’s a very specific sound - can be while being at the same time such a grounding and physically solid presence. There’s a gorgeous solo - is it a flugel horn or a cornet I puzzled for ages, the reason I couldn’t identify it is became it is in fact a synth! - in the second movement - Sunrise Through The Dusty Nebula - a segment that evokes both a brass band playing in a village hall, dust motes dancing in shafts of sunlight from high windows, and cinematic shots from the window of the ISS of the sun rising over the Earth amid the darkness of space. This is music for lying in the grass on a pitch black night in the middle of nowhere watching the stars wheel overhead.

The run time is just shy of thirty seven minutes, and if no-one uses it as the soundtrack to a short science-fiction film - ideally animated, perhaps heavy on the homage to both Wallace & Gromit and the works of Raymond Briggs and Oliver Postgate - then they’re missing a trick. (Now I want to use it to re-score A Grand Day Out…)

July postal mail received! james sent me a postcard with a reminder of how many days until Halloween and elayna sent me another postcard for my "wall of Alaska cards from elayna".

(I guess now it's the "Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance," but I still just think of it as the Denver Zoo, lol.)

On Monday we went to the zoo! We very much ran out of time, and really made it through less than half of the zoo as a whole, so we'll probably try to go back pretty soon. (We are able to get in quite cheaply because Alex gets food assistance... though they raised the price on those tickets and now limit what hours you're allowed to come. Still glad to have the program, since otherwise we couldn't afford to visit at all, but it sucks that you can't come early and spend the whole day.)

This was also an extremely hot day, one of the hottest we've had in a while (it did briefly hit 100°!) so lots of the animals were taking naps in the shade, or went to their indoor enclosures.

We spent most of our day in Tropical Discovery (my favorite, the building mostly devoted to reptiles, amphibians, and fish), so this post will be everything that wasn't in Tropical Discovery. (That still means this post only has like, a third of the pictures I took, but it was the best way to break it up that I could figure out.)

One of the things we keep wanting to do, but always end up running out of time for (even when we used to be able to come earlier) was visiting Stingray Cove. It's a seasonal exhibit where you can pet stingrays (and potentially sharks, though none of them came up for petting while we were there.) It costs a couple extra dollars, and for a couple extra more you can get some fish to feed them, too. This time we decided to do this first, so we couldn't run out of time to do it!


Such a variety of colors!

Four more of the rays:

Cownose rays really do just have a perfect " :3 " face.


I know that's their gills, but they also have a perfect " >w< " face.


Baby ray perfectly lined up with one of the adults.


In addition to the cownose rays, there are also southern stingrays. They're so much bigger!

Then we headed toward the Tropical Discovery building, but took a detour to see more animals:


There's a baby giraffe! :D

Four more pictures:

All four giraffes!

Then up "Harmony Hill," where you can see a couple native animals:


The grizzly bear!


The pair of leucistic raccoons. One splooting in the heat, the other heading to the water dish.

And over to the new flamingo habitat:


Flamingos! :D (I like that you can see the big lego sculpture flamingos in the background, ha.)

And then we spent a few hours in Tropical Discovery, haha.

After that, we tried to do a speed loop through the rest of the zoo to see some favorites, but had to skip basically 80% of the rest of it.

Possibly the weirdest "favorite" animal I have is the Malayan Tapir. (And yes, I have been thriving with all the adorable videos of the baby tapir at the Point Defiance Zoo.) I don't know that I can say I have a true favorite animal, because I really do love so many. Point me toward a frog or a snake or a bird and those are all my favorites, find me a cool bug and that's my favorite, bats, giraffes, okapi, foxes, cheetahs, etc. All favorites. But I do have a very specific soft spot for Malayan tapirs.

Tragically, almost every time we've come to the zoo, the tapirs aren't out in their enclosure. The only time in recent memory that one of them was was the time that Alex wasn't feeling well and stayed home. So he hasn't seen the tapirs in forever. I used a Malayan tapir sticker in my tracker this week, solely in the hopes of summoning it, haha.

Success!


She was napping!

It was really very hot out. Everyone was napping.

Two more nappers!

A napping zebra.


A napping hyena.

Alex's request for his other favorite thing to try and visit before closing time was "Primate Panorama" where the great apes are. (The apes are not typically my favorite, but they're neat to watch, and he humored me with my favorites, so to the apes we headed!)


There is a baby orangutan, not quite two years old, and she is very cute. (Not a great picture with the reflection on the glass, but oh well.)

Three more of the apes:

She climbed into the bucket, haha.


Though eventually climbed back out and onto mom.


And a gorilla!

It was a bummer we didn't have longer, but it was still a lot of fun. We'll have to go back sometime soon and see if we can get through all the parts we missed this time around.

I thought that going to Labubu Fest would be fun and I'd get some cute pictures. Oh dear god.... it was so crowded I literally gave up and pushed through some people to see more than one booth. There was lines 15-20 deep just to *look* at some booths and if you tried to sneak a peek to even see what they sold, people were not chill.

Also, when I left I walked by a guy in silver pants, a white tank top, a giant purse with a whole colony of Labubu on it, power walking towards the fest and puffing on a vape as hard as he could.

Anyway, I typically would not post pics like this from events, I don't post pics of just what people sell I try to have that not be the focus on a shot, but I did snipe a picture of the samples at the tattoo booth and also I went around the back of the tooth gems booth to see a Labubu being worked on:





I had planned to do a do a youtube short. I had hopes of cute pictures I could give captions to. That is not how the day went. The Labubu crowd is feral.

Then I went up to the Fremont Fair, which was a neighborhood street fair with 150 vendors. It was cute.

On my way home I hit up some stores I'd been meaning to hit, and also went to the Portland Aquarium. The Portland Aquarium is small, unremarkable, but I'd always meant to drop by:

Saw a shark:




I liked the glowy sea spider:


And I got some very Portlandy stickers and a pin:


The back of the souvenir guidebook has a timeline of Mike Bennet's careers from his days of 'guy who makes random art' to Crypto-Zoo which was a covid-safe project during lockdown where he made a walk-through 'A-Zoo' of cryptids in North Portland to give kids an activity to do, and then shows his other projects since then including Wonderwood Springs, Dinolandia and now an aquarium that benefits conservation efforts. Amusingly, some of my pictures of his work pre-date what's in the guide in the back.