bunrab | And now an ordinary post

We went to the zoo yesterday. The one in Baltimore, not the National Zoo. It only recently became "The Maryland Zoo in Baltimore" rather than just the Baltimore Zoo - new management, new funding, lots of upgrades in process. They are working hard to improve things - many more keepers hired, animals moved to better environments, etc. It's a work in progress, and there are still parts of it that are a sad older zoo, but they are trying.

leiacat came with us, and it's nice to have someone who knows more about the city than we do along. I'm sorry we couldn't stay longer, but an hour and a half in the heat and walking uphill was all I could take - I came home and slept for 3 hours after that. They had wheelchairs available but not motorized scooters, and I hate using wheelchairs. For one thing, someone else would have had to get exhausted pushing me uphill. For another, people see one as "crippled" in a wheelchair in a way that scooters don't invoke. On an electric scooter, one is still a person, not a cripple. Anyone who thinks that the populace is enlightened enough by now about disabilities not to treat everyone in a wheelchair like an idiot has clearly not been in a wheelchair themselves. It's embarrassing! I suppose if I am going to do a lot of that sort of thing, I need to find a small folding electric scooter to use, since I can't count on finding them everywhere. I mean, there are times I don't need them - in cooler weather, and on level ground, I can fake being normal for longer periods of time. But there are other days... sometimes just walking up and down the aisles of a large supermarket can wear me out. Luckily, all the supermarkets we've run into here have been much smaller than most of the ones back in Austin. All the HEB supermarkets had electric scooter-carts available for patrons, and in a supermarket over 80,000 sf (many over 100,000 sf), I would frequently use them. In something as small as the Food Lion near our apartment here, though, I can walk fairly normally, especially given how often one stops in the normal course of grocery shopping anyway.

Anyway. We passed by the Parakeet Landing, as I have enough of small psitticines landing on me every day, thanks to The Beak. However, just glancing in there did have an effect - I dreamed last night that somehow many of the parakeets (and finches of all colors) had somehow escaped, into a long hallway that looked like a school or government office building, and I had to catch them, which I did in much the same manner as I used to catch stray bats when I worked for the Texas Dept. of Insurance. Some of the finches even clung to the little crossbars of the acoustic tile ceiling the same way bats did. I did grab a few finches and carry them back just in my hands, and man, those sharp little beaks can pinch and poke!
We went through the African area, and attended a keeper session at some of the african birds, particularly the Kori Bustard. Fascinating bird, and the keeper shared a lot of information about moving the birds, about breeding issues, and so on. The bustard is interesting looking, and especially when you look at the feet, you realize, no, not all the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. We also saw a few cheetahs, and some leaping lemurs - well, sifakas, same diff. We'll have to go back to see the polar bears and snowy owls some other time; I suspect they'll be more active when the weather is cooler.

More later...