Prior to my trips to Texas and Croatia, MJ and I were able to make it over to Sherith Israel to enjoy the wonderful acoustics in a show by the Musicians of the San Francisco Symphony in a concert to benefit the SF-Marin Food Bank. It was a wonderful concert, and a wonderful way to round out a busy weekend before my trips.
During intermission
Last weekend our friend Danita came into town to visit for a week. Saturday we spent with a leisurely brunch at the Beach Chalet, one of my favorites. From there we went to the San Francisco Zoo to catch up with our new little friend, the baby patas monkey, who has grown even since my last visit a couple weeks ago!
We visited with the giraffes, as is appropriate since it was World Giraffe Day. I also got to finally see the peccary babies, but we were too late to make it into the lion house by 4pm to visit the two-toed sloth who I’ve never met. Next time.
On Sunday we went the amusement park route and made our way up to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. Given my health lately, I wasn’t keen on going on any rides, but I learned a while back that this park has walruses (the only place in the bay area that does), along with lots of other animals, so I was pretty excited.
The walruses didn’t disappoint. One of the larger of the three seemed thrilled to delight the humans who were visiting their tank:
And the rest swam around doing walrus things. It was awesome to see them, I’m a general pinniped fan but I don’t get to see walruses all that often.
I also got to visit the seals and sea lions, and got to feed a mamma sea lion, the baby was a bit too shy.
Continuing on our giraffe trend, we also got to visit the giraffes there at the park as they celebrated a whole weekend of World Giraffe Day!
More photos from Six Flags here (I even got one of a roller coaster!): https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157645359472733/
Then I had a busy week. I attended Google I/O for the first time, which I’ll write about later. I also had an Upper Endoscopic Ultrasound (EUS) done to poke around to see what was going in with my gallbladder. The worst part about the procedure was the sore throat and mild neck bruising I had following it, which hasn’t made me feel great when coupled with the cough I’m recovering from. The doctor looking at the initial results mentioned sludge, but didn’t think there was concern, but upon follow-up with the surgeon I’ve been working with I learned that the amount of sludge when combined with my symptoms and family history made him think the right course of action would be gallbladder removal. I’m scheduled to have it removed on July 24th. I’ve never had surgery aside from wisdom teeth removal, so I’m pretty apprehensive about the procedure, but thankful that they finally found something so there is hope that the abdominal pain I’ve been having since April will finally go away.