As today is Independence Day I had the day off work and spent the whole day pretty much with Abi.  I guess I should say here that I used the time to capture some great new images for the blog, but I didn’t get to do any of that.

Abi and I spent the early afternoon in the hot tub (it was in the mid 70’s outside) and then we went to the movies together to see Brave.  We had a really great time together.

By 4pm I was starting to worry as I didn’t have an image to post tonight, but Lisa pointed out that we were going to a July 4^th barbeque and I would get a chance to capture something there.

So at 6 o’clock we walked up the road to Chuck and MaryLou’s house for a neighborhood get-together.  We had lots of food and drink and set off some (neighborhood safe) fireworks for the younger kids.

Two things struck me this evening; firstly there is definitely a sweet spot for children who like fireworks, probably below 11 years old.  Then they become horribly miserable until they can watch them legally with alcohol when they are older.  I say this as the 11’s and under were having a great time, and the adults, who were drinking and lighting fireworks (not a good idea at the same time by the way), were enjoying themselves.  But my son and his girlfriend (15 year olds) were totally uninterested and miserable.

I also observed that we say the strangest thing to our kids on holidays like this.  What other time in the year would you tell a 9 year old to go out into the middle of the street and wave around a phosphorus coated pyrotechnic that you just set alight and tell them to have fun!  Any other time I’d shout at them, asking “what are you doing playing with fire?  It’s incredibly dangerous and a stupid thing to do!”   We are very odd.

Anyway I did manage to get a nice picture.  Abi was playing on the grass with her friend Serra and Jillian, her old baby sitter.   They were doing handstands together and laughing on the grass.  I jumped at the chance to get a nice shot of the girls.

Carter and Master Chief were feeling very patriotic today and lit their sparklers to celebrate July 4th.

One of my favorite animals that we saw at the zoo, has to be the meerkat.  These incredibly cute (Abi’s words) big rats (my words) live in gangs or mobs of around 20 and are actually members of the mongoose family (informative eh?)  At the zoo they had an enclosure that was indoors that had an underground tunnel system for them to play in and an incredibly realistic mural, depicting their native South Africa.

They were clearly fooled by the surroundings as they seemed to be pretty happy, and based on the size of the one in the image below, relatively well fed!

It was quite funny standing there looking at them, as they were all lined up just staring back.  I’m not sure who was viewing who.  They were also standing pretty still, obviously they heard I was coming and they were all posing for portrait shots.  These little guys do look very cute, but Lisa and I decided that if you did try to cuddle one, he would probably relieve you of a finger.

Carter and Master Chief saw Abi and I relaxing in the hot tub the other day but it’s a little big for them so they made their own – in the bird bath.

Recently I visited Northwest Trek which is a wildlife park for animals that are native to the Pacific Northwest.  While there I saw loads of herbivores but all the scary “interesting” animals were hiding.  I guess the point of Northwest Trek is to see animals in their real habitat, where they have loads of places to run, play and hide.  And they hide very well.  So all in all it was a bit disappointing.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when we went to Woodland Park Zoo and saw some of the carnivores we missed at Northwest Trek.  Now a lot of people say that zoos are cruel, that the animal cages are too small, and it’s wrong to cage and display wild animals.  Well all that may be true, but you get much better pictures.

Joking aside I feel the same way, you get the impression that all the animals are either “very sad”, or quite mad.  There is a lot of pacing up and down and I did feel bad for them.  But the Grizzly enclosure was quite large, it had a cave and small stream for the bears.  I guess the question is how much work towards conservation and animal safety and rehabilitation does the zoo do.  If a number of the animals are rescued I guess it’s better than being injured or worse.

The bear in the picture below was walking back and forth (pacing) between it’s cave and the edge of the enclosure where I captured this shot.

The guys wanted to play Mancala tonight.  Master Chief was doing rather well, much to Carters disappointment.

Today’s image was also taken at Woodland Park Zoo and I have to say it’s probably my favorite.  Not necessarily because it’s a great picture, but more because it was hysterically funny.

We saw this Patas monkey pretty early on while walking around the zoo.  Apparently these monkeys are also called Red Guenons and stem from all over Africa.  They are mainly ground-dwelling primates and like to live in open bush and the grass savanna.

So what was it about this monkey that made it so interesting, what was the joke?  Well, kids joke that monkeys throw poo, but apparently that’s not all they do with it!  This one was pulling chunks out of its bottom and scoffing the lot.  He even licked his fingers after.  I was literally laughing out loud – Lisa say’s I’m too loud and can be embarrassing but come on, this wasn’t my fault.

There were a couple of Patas there, this one, eating lunch, and another sitting on top of the rocks watching.  I took a few shots but favored the tighter version showing the monkey nice a big in the frame.

Families would walk past and kids would stop and stare.  When the mums realized what the monkey was doing they grabbed their kids and pulled them away.  This somehow made it even funnier.

It’s also worth pointing out today that I’m officially half way through the year, yes today is day 183 our of 366.  So only another 183 days to go.

Master Chief was playing with a slap (or snap) bracelet this afternoon and got stuck!  So Carter helped him out.

This is definitely an interesting New Years Resolution.  It’s got to the stage now where it’s pretty much all consuming, I think about pictures and post topics all the time and have lots of people providing ideas to help.  This morning I got up pretty early for a Saturday, had some breakfast and sat down with Abi for 20 minutes.  Anyway I fell asleep and woke up 3 hours later – what a waste of a morning.

I had intended to go to a farmers market with Lisa but she let me sleep and everyone kind of left me alone.  When I woke they all said, “well that’s the day over”, but it was only 12:30.  Desperate for a picture idea I convinced the family to go to Woodland Park Zoo for the afternoon.  The sky was cloudy but it was warm outside (around 70 degrees) and reluctantly they agreed.

So around 1pm we headed out (it takes ages to get them all moving – say’s the guy who slept till noon), Lisa, Abi and James, and James’ girlfriend Alex and I set off.  Of course as we hit the road it started to rain, but undeterred we carried on to Seattle.

We decided that if it was raining when we got to the zoo, we would find somewhere else to go, but we were lucky as when we got there it had just stopped.  While we had black clouds over us all afternoon, it was still warm and it only rained for 5 minutes later in the day.

The zoo wasn’t too busy, obviously the possibility of bad weather kept the crowds away, and we had a really great time.  I took around 850 pictures in total, and will get out of them possibly 5 or 6 shots that I can post.  That may sound quite low but I take around 40 of the same animal and no matter how many come out I can only really post one lion (it would be a little boring otherwise).  If I get 10 pictures I will consider myself really lucky.  We were there for 4 hours and if I can get 2 pictures an hour I class it as a valuable “Picture a Day” trip.

Tonight’s image is a lion – duh.  When we got to the lion’s enclosure I didn’t expect to see anything as they are usually asleep and hiding.  But this male lion was sitting there posing for the camera.  He was pretty far away but fortunately I have some nice glass and got the shot below.  I’m really pleased with this one, animals can be really hard to capture and I’m not very good at it, so I’m classing this one as a success.

Now I should say here that I had planned a zoo trip with a friend from work (Chris) so he is gonna’ be mad when he reads this, but the whole afternoon was so good, I’ll go again with him next month.

This evening Master Chief decided to work on his camouflage skills, Carter helped.