I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport, my flight to Phoenix is delayed by a half hour so I’m taking the extra time to chill in the United lounge that I have access to for another month through my lounge pass.
So, this past week! MJ was out of town on a work trip from Sunday night through Wednesday night. In spite of being on the west coast, I still work for a company on the east coast and hurricane Irene caused my on call Saturday evening and Sunday to be hectic rather than the relaxing stuck-at-home on call weekends I’m used to. Clean up from the storm in the form of rescuing a couple servers that didn’t quite survive the power issues and thinking of creative ways to handle internet outages for our multi-homed clients lasted much of the week. On Tuesday my boss let me take the afternoon off so I’d have a break and I took the opportunity to hop on MUNI and visit the zoo.
I checked the latest SF Zoo news before leaving home so I’d know what to check out and was delighted to learn about the pair of South AMerican coatis they have in the Childrens’ Zoo:
“No, it’s not a raccoon, but if you guessed that, you’re close! It’s a South American coati, and a set of sisters have just become our newest Childrens’ Zoo residents. Pictured here, one of our coatis is enjoying a welcome gift of enrichment treats.
“Also known as brown-nosed coatis or ringtailed coatis, they are related to raccoons and are found in forests in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, Guyana and Surinam. Unlike raccoons, they tend to be most active during the day with females and juveniles living together in groups. In the wild they have been observed self-grooming as well as grooming each other with tree resin that is thought to help prevent parasites. Without the resin available, our coatis dutifully rub down their tails with rosemary. Come meet our South American coatis, Maggie and Rosie, and see their adorable faces at the coati exhibit in the Children’s Zoo.”
I also picked up my first San Francisco Zoo key!
More photos from my afternoon are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157627558572518/
And some videos!
Coati: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giEB1p9FjNg
Silent Knight the sea lion swimming around his home: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxhDlj1DgKw
I checked in at work when I got home to tidy up some things and spent the rest of the evening relaxing with some games (my Wii is hooked up again!) and my pile of books and magazines.
I recently installed News RSS Ticker on my desktop in an attempt to keep up with news better. I got it nicely tuned to work with my XFCE desktop, screenshot in use on my desktop. So far it has worked much better than past attempts to stay updated with news (which included watching news shows and adding more RSS feeds to my reader, both of which failed miserably and quickly).
Wednesday night was super busy. As soon as I finished work I was helping run a software testing session for Lernid and even managed to drag in some additional testers at last minute. When that wrapped up I went to Noisebridge to meet up with my friend Grant at a little send-off event before he heads off to spend 3 months in Nairobi, Kenya to be a their technical lead for the Dreamfish program there, more details are over on his site: grantbow.com. I picked up a burrito on my way home and picked MJ up at the airport around 11PM.
Thursday evening MJ and I got to spend our only evening together this week, and as soon as I finished up work today I headed toward the airport.
And now I should pack up my things and head back down to my gate. Here’s hoping the delay isn’t any longer than anticipated and I can be on my way soon! Really looking forward to seeing my family, it’s been too long since I’ve seen them.