Jeremiah Johnson – Failed Inventor

Pretend for a moment I’m buying a zoo.

Or rather that I own a zoo and need to fill it with animals. I go to the animal sales guy and he gives me a recommendation: two zebras, five orangutangs, two lions, four lionesses, hippos, giraffes, lemurs, tigers, three sets of apes, various monkeys, assorted fish and a myriad of other animals that is a complex cacophony of species and habitats. Oh, and once ocelot.

Now don’t get me wrong- I trust the guy selling me the animals but I have some questions. We talk about the direction of the zoo, the purpose, the fact that it’s next to Aquatic World™ and I don’t really need so many fish or dolphins. We argue lightly about orangutangs, apes and monkeys, as there are so many in the breakdown- not that some monkeys aren’t OK, but I really don’t like apes and would like to cut back on so much of the zoo being devoted to primates. I don’t mind if a habitat or two has a troupe of Capuchins or Rain Forest Marmosets, but the whole six types of ape, eight kinds of monkey thing really is not the direction I want to go.

Last and most important to the tale, I ask about the ocelot. Specifically I say that, well, won’t one and only one Ocelot be lonely?
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Christmas came early for one member of the family:

Found this little lady hanging out in my garage.

This is only the second black widow I’ve seen, the first was in Death Valley in 1998. I was pretty sure we had them around, but I’ve only seen a brown widow until now.

I trapped a housefly, and played die in the web after tearing it’s wing off- this wasn’t to be cruel, the black widow alternately came at me or hid when her web was disturbed. With the fly as bait I managed to get her where I could put her in a jar and release her later.

Ever since my Heavy Snow in Colorado! it seems like we’ve been having a worse than usual winter- only a few days of 45° and sunny between snows, not weeks.

That said, last week was bitter cold, down to -14° and this week it keeps snowing off and on. Currently it’s piled up about 4-5″ and it’s still coming down fast. We might have a foot by tomorrow.

The worst part, it hasn’t been sunny. For three or four days in a row last week it was not sunny, and that’s got to be like a record. This afternoon the snowfall was too thick to tell if it was sunny (ha-ha) but it was sunny yesterday and also this morning. It makes a big difference, both in the melting and in the attitude towards winter dragging on.

Earlier photo after the jump:
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Well not really withdrawal, but I haven’t played Fluxx since my parents left in September. After playing playing several games, there were a few areas I felt needed cards, and some others I just thought would be fun.

I recently bought several packs of blank cards online, and recently created several from my list and a few new ones. Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody I talk to back in Indiana always thinks we’ve been hammered with snow out here. I’m not sure exactly what the news is reporting, but somebody here told me we were in for two feet last night.

Instead, I woke up to a typical December morning in Colorado:

This is our bitter cold, feet of snow, dreary winter people. Yes, it does sometimes snow as much as several feet, but even when it does it’s sunny.

Frankly, I don’t know why people are so inured to Indiana. I bet it’s gray and dreary and will be until April. But no matter, I heard from a guy in Greenwood who won’t move somewhere warmer because he’s afraid the water will run out.

I don’t get it, I mean I understand not moving up under a mudslide in California, or avoiding a city that gets battered by Hurricanes every year in Florida, but to stay unwillingly in Indiana over a vague possibility of water problems somewhere else? Crazy.