it’s something…

I had some boneless chicken breasts in the fridge and wanted to do something different. So I am thinking about what I can do and I notice the bottle of hot sauce…hmm. Buffalo chicken strips. Little hot sauce, little soy sauce, some hoisin sauce, and a touch of cider vinegar. I have never made “buffalo” anything before so I was just make this up. Cut the chicken into strips and went out to light the grill. I guess the chicken marinated for about 20 minutes while the grill warmed up. While the chicken grilled I boiled the leftover marinade. I pulled the chicken of the grill and drizzled with some of the cooked down marinade.

Then I took a picture…

Then I ate it all with some ranch dressing.

So out of my many trips to Animal Kingdom I have been to the Pangani Forest thing maybe a dozen or more times. Most of the time I blow by the primate exhibit in the front…I don’t know that I have ever slowed down enough to pay attention to what kind of primate they are. I just know they are behind some kind of a mesh thing that will fuck up pictures…so I move on. Naked mole rats…meh I have stopped a couple times, but been there done that, and again no pics cause everything in there is behind glass. Birds…again, kind of meh, but I have slowed done once to try to get some pics and it just was…meh. Anyway moving on…Hippos. I think the very first time I went through there you could see the hippos, now all you can see is hippo shit.

Next is the meerkats. I have stopped several times, but always a lot of people standing around and really nothing to see. This past tripped I decided to pause a little longer and give the little guys a chance to show me something. I figure it has something to do with watching a few episodes of Meerkat Manor, or it could be just because it wasn’t packed with people. Anyway I am glad I stopped cause I got a few decent pics.

Sorry for the lack of a “new” pic, but I think some of these shots deserve some special attention.

I was able to get the rest of the pictures from yesterday uploaded, so I figured I would maybe pic out another of my favorites from the set.

I wish I could do a better job of telling these guys apart, but I can’t really do it from the pics so good. Anyway I think this is one of the guys from the play session. I think they call him Spike, but I learned something interesting about their names. Since they know their names when the keepers talk about or interact with them “on show” (in front of guests), they don’t use their names. They are worried that if guests knew their names they would constantly yell out their names and eventually the gorillas would just ignore them. The problem is they would ignore the keepers also. So the only reason I heard their names yesterday is because some of the gorilla people already knew them.

So where was I? Oh yeah, so I think this might be one of the “individuals” (that is keeper lingo) from the play session. When I look at this shot, I can’t help but wonder what he is thinking about. Maybe something like “dude…I can’t believe someone ate all the oranges…I really wanted another orange”

You can find the rest of the pics here.

I asked the family what they wanted to do today and the reply was an enthusiastic “meh”, so I figured I would go out and take some pics. I decided to head over to my favorite photographic theme park destination, Animal Kingdom.

I figured I would grab a fast pass for the safari then check out the goings on over in Asia, but for some reason they had closed the fast pass and the standby line was 50 minutes. OK, so I figured I could go watch the gorillas for a bit then come back and check the wait time.

I stopped and grabbed a few pics of the meerkats then went around to the gorillas. As I am walking around taking pics, I notice there are a bunch of people walking around with the conference badges. You know the badges they give to conference goers so they know who the other conference goers are. I notice that all of them seem to be from animal related facilities, mostly zoos.

Anyway I am taking pics of one of the males and out of no where one of the other males comes running up to ham and throws a palm frawn at him. This turned into a 20 to 30 minute “play” session between the two of them…a play session that from the beginning seem just a little bit…teh ghey. I don’t think I am the only one thinking along those lines, because I heard someone behind me say “that’s not very Disney”. I am pretty sure he said this around the time that one of them was sticking his finger in the other ones ass then sniffing his finger…

So the lady standing next to me during this play session is one of the conference goers. She is talking about how she knew these two gorillas when they were little and that they had been together for a long time and stuff. She asks someone further down the fence if they see this kind of play in the wild. And I realize that the crowd around me of 20 or 30 people are all from the conference. As the play session ends and the crowd disperses I ask one of the keepers what the deal is with the conference goers. She tells me they are all in town for a conference about gorillas. That would explain why they all got pretty excited about the play session.

A few minutes later one of the other bachelors has climbed up a tree. This also draws a huge crowd of “gorilla people”. I hear someone say “John you don’t ever see this in captivity.” John is the same guy that was asked about play in the wild…John and his wife work in the Congo. So the guy in the tree makes his way down with a nice big branch to snack on, and as soon as his feet hit the ground two of his buddies go after his branch. Naturally it ended up in the hands of the dominate one.

I ended up talking to the keeper for a bit more and she tipped me off that I should hang out for a bit longer because they would be taking the boys inside soon and it is pretty neat to watch how they stage them to go inside.

So in all I took about 300 pictures today, after I got rid of the really bad ones I still have 170 or so. Some of the ones I did keep are a bit blurry, but they are all of the play session and I am OK with them being blurred, because it demonstrates how fast these guys were moving.

I would have liked to include some of the pics along with the story, but it is going to take a while to upload all of the pics. Anyway when I manage to get them uploaded they will all be in this gallery. For know here is one of my favorites…

Florida is not really known for having a change of seasons. In other words, living here means we don’t really get to see the leaves change colors in the fall. So imagine my surprise when I pull into the library parking lot today, and see “colored” leaves. This tree or bush thing just sitting there with like ten or fifteen leaves. Luckily I looked at a group of leaves hanging on some of the low branches and could see a picture.

I feel like I should write some more about this picture, but I think I have used all of my words for the day, cause I can’t figure what I want to say. So I will just let the picture say the rest.

Oh yeah, one thing I do want to say…taking pictures of games was a nice thing to keep me busy, but this is so much better for me…natural even.

I have some bad news for you…I have run out of games. Well to be more specific I have run out of games that are worthy of being photographed. Sure I have a deck of cards, even an Uno deck, but I for the life of me can’t figure out how to make an interesting shot out out of playing cards…sorry. I thought I had a chess set somewhere, but I can’t find it.

I guess I could shoot Rummikub, but really I think Chess is about the only game that can follow Monopoly…

“I like the classics better.”

I knew that the pic from last night wasn’t going to be a huge hit, but I am running out of games so I was trying stretch things out a bit. So by popular demand, tonight we have another classic. I might even go so far as to say this is one of the top five classics…without a doubt it in the top 10. The thing is I have never been a fan of this game. Not sure why, but it has always annoyed me.

Maybe cause it isn’t really anything like real life…

BTW, my kid said it looks like they were attacked like in Cloverfield.

As we continue down this road, we come to a game that I am sure most of you have never ever heard of. I really should go get the box instead of trying to remember all of this, but I am too lazy so fuck it…

The game is something like a Monopoly parody from the folks at Mad Magazine. The twist is that you are trying to loose all of you money instead of win all of your…er…the money. I am thinking that I got this game as a gift sometime in the late 70’s or early 80’s… The thing is I don’t think at the time I really had any clue about Mad Magazine or the “star” of the game, Alfred E. Neuman, but I as far as I can remember this did not make the game any less enjoyable. Of course I am sure that at the time most of the jokes went right over my head.

Oh look what I found…click me!

Q: What company’s first camera was a box camera named No. 1?

A: Kodak

Seriously…I took the shot, then figured it would be fun to put a question from the game in the blog, so I go and grab a card. Just picked one up one of the cards laying on the board, and that was the fucking question. Pretty neat.

I guess I should point out that this version is “The Young People Edition”, from like the mid-eighties.

A few years ago I was using dual monitors at work. It was nice to have a whole bunch of screen realestate, but a couple years ago I got a laptop. Laptops are not great at supporting dual monitors, but I wasn’t really complaining. See this bad boy has a 17″ screen with a resolution of 1920×1200. If you don’t know that is a fuck load of pixels. So I had plenty of screen, I just had to get used to the tiny words on my screen. I looked for monitors that supported this resolution, but they where all more that $500. I just couldn’t convince my boss to drop this kind of coin on a monitor. Well recently the price on LCD monitors has been coming down, and last week we found the monitor I wanted on eBay for $375…a price that my boss could swallow a bit better.

So today UPS arrived with my 24″ Dell, and it is a beautiful thing. It is weird because I have been working with the same resolution for however long now, but it is just so much more dramatic on this monitor. I tried to take a picture to capture the glory of these pixels, but it isn’t a very good picture from a technical standpoint. So you can bitch about, but this is the best shot I’ve got…