Rangersyl

I don't think so!



He's only two days old! What great timing.

Went to the Wild Animal Park today, meeting some friends Mom and I met on our Arctic Cruise. We went on a caravan tour and got some great pictures. Today was for rhinos and baby elephants, it seems.



That's Nola, one of the very last Northern White Rhinos in existence. There are only about 7 left in the world.

More photos on my Flickr page.

Went to the Aquarium today for the first time this month -- too much travel and work recently, gah.

But anyway, it was fun -- though there were spring break crowds, it wasn't nearly as insane as MLK day. There was, however a class of ? first graders who were mostly well-behaved but kept trying to lift up a cover I put on a touch pool. And since I must make their visit a positive experience, I couldn't go all Dog Whisperer on them by snapping my fingers and saying: "TSST!" I did, however, manage to keep them from mutilating the animals, which is a good thing.

The other thing about today was the manual labor aspect. We were scrubbing out one of the shark holding (quarantine) tanks -- which means it has to be mostly drained and a lot of elbow grease applied to the layers of algae that have developed. My job was to clean off the pvc tubes we use to provide shark hiding places. They were covered with slimy brown-red algae (my personal favorite!). Major scrubbing, along with the added glee of having flecks of red algae flung everywhere - on my clothes, in my hair, on my face -- yuck! My back and shoulders are reminding me that was some old-school scrubbing going on!

But it's all in good fun. After having a total desk job the rest of the time, there's something very satisfying about cleaning slime off of a shark toy. Once you're done, you can see that you've accomplished something. Which is better for the psyche than just shuffling papers from one pile to another.

As for the desk job -- I have been cleaning my office. I've been expecting new office furniture for some time now, so I've let entropy take over. But last week I decided that entropy was causing me stress, and resolved to straighten up matters.

What a difference! I still have one corner to go, but it's already made a huge difference. It sounds so obvious, but all that clutter etc. represented a lot of subconscious stress. Now that it's mostly gone, my subconscious knows that there aren't long-forgotten assignments and botched tasks hiding in the piles. When I walk in now it's relaxing... I feel like working. Happy sigh.

And I've been whittling down my email inbox from a high of 426 emails. Wish me luck.