Thanks to holidays both MJ and I had Friday off from work. We took a leisurely start to the day and headed over to the Metreon to grab some lunch to enjoy overlooking Yerba Buena Gardens. For a park that is just a block from where we live we don’t go nearly enough. We came home to a package from my friend Dan, which was a delightful gift of hot chocolate mix and assorted goodies, including pink (peppermint) marshmallows! Thanks again Dan!
I was also treated earlier in the week to a gift from my friend Alex, an R2D2 USB hub, pictured here on my desk with my Squeeze stuffed toy, Android toy, and with my Nexus One plugged into it. Droid with Droid! Thanks Alex! It ended up being quite the useful gift since I’m always swapping around my USB devices.
And in the spirit of things, I also launched a contest on wallaceandgromit.net to raffle off a couple of Wallace and Gromit calendars I received from a publisher in the UK last week, awesome!
We spent much of the rest of the day Friday relaxing and catching up on some TV episodes, dinner ended up being leftover spinach lasagna I had made the previous day.
Saturday was Christmas, but neither of us actually celebrate the holiday, so we made plans at one of the few places in town open that day, the zoo!. They had a series of special holiday themed feedings throughout the day for their “Winter Goes Wild” event which runs for a couple weeks surrounding Christmas.
We hopped on MUNI and arrived at the zoo shortly before 1PM, just in time for the tiger holiday feeding! They put boxes and toys in the tiger cages and gave the tigers the opportunity to “open” their presents and get their treats.
Tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C82TQcQaWXk
Another tiger opening presents video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65d2Ft6AXrI
After the tigers, we headed to the Lemur cafe for some lunch. It was drizzling out prior to lunch, but while we were eating it turned into a downpour. They ended up cancelling the 2PM lemur feeding and we went to find some indoor exhibits. On our way to the rainforest indoor exhibit we walked through the soggy Austrailian part of the zoo where we got to see Koori, the 25th animal in the Zoo’s 25 animals of Christmas event, she was sleeping.
We also walked past the kangaroos, who were very bouncy and I ended up taking a very short video which, while quite poor, does give an indication of how rainy it was: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7vc-8Sqv7E
The polar bears didn’t seem to be particularly enjoying the weather either.
At 3PM they did the otter feeding, which consisted of a keeper coming out with a few bags of snow and sprinkling their food on and in it so they could enjoy digging it out. I uploaded a short video of the very excited otters here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYQ2sKgVQtE
3:30 was the penguin feeding, and thankfully a break from the rain.
The zoo closed at 4 so we headed out around there and caught the MUNI home. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner at Fang, a Chinese restaurant just down the block from where we live.
Sunday we jumped on BART and headed across the bay to FINALLY see the Oakland Museum’s Pixar: 25 Years of Animation exhibit.
This exhibit is an expansion upon the Pixar: 20 years of animation which started touring in 2005. The expansion must have been quite large, since they had a significant amount of work added to the exhibit to encompass the movies released in the past 5 years, including Toy Story 3 and UP! (two of my favorites to date). I’ve been meaning to see the exhibit since I first heard about it but kept finding my weekends filled up (or tickets sold out when I actually went to the museum in October!). I am very glad we finally made it out to see it, the exhibit was amazing. It closes on January 9th, so if you’re in the bay area and want to see it, hurry! We wrapped up our day out with a late lunch at Pacific Coast Brewing Co where I was able to enjoy their Holiday XXII Imperial Blue ale and a glass of their root beer.
I uploaded some more photos from the long weekend here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157625559744573/
This week is another short work week. Thursday night I’m planning to head down to Palo Alto for an Ubuntu Hour. I’ll be spending Friday at one of the local Partimus-sponsored schools working to upgrade the systems from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04. New Years night itself? No plans yet. We should probably do something about that.