Sunday (Whitsun)
Firinel's aunt Cindy was injured in a workplace accident last year, and because of this she has been trying to get workman's compensation sorted out with lawyers. And the other week the lawyers said to her, "Would you like to visit the zoo? How many people would you like to take with you?" She took six of their free tickets: one each for her, her husband Herman, SaraMae, Riordon, Fin, and me. So yesterday we all drove off to Philly to visit the zoo.
It's a pretty good zoo. They had lots of kinds of bears, including polar bears who had a diving pool with a glass front so you could see them underwater; they also had giant otters with a similar arrangement. Riordon did a quiz about compost and got a sticker. After that she was interested to meet an okapi. The zoo also has peacocks and peahens walking everywhere around the place, displaying their tails and screeching every few minutes. They're beautiful. Fin took lots of pictures. They had no lions (they're in New York) nor tigers (they're in Ohio) nor elephants (they've been taken to an undisclosed location), though, which always seemed to be zoo staples to me.
Lunch was free, courtesy again of the law firm, who gave us all baseball caps to commemorate the occasion. We all crowded into a marquee with a lot of other people and ate hamburgers and hotdogs and pasta salad and drank cola and beer. (I was avoiding the beer because I thought I'd be carded and I had no ID on me, but they didn't check after all, and it was rather good.) Then after that there was ice-cream, and face painting for Riordon. (She was painted like some kind of a big cat. I thought it was a cheetah but she tells me it isn't.)
After all that, we went to the petting zoo and met a great number of rabbits. They had those arrangements where you put your head through a hole in a picture and people take pictures of you, and Fin took lots of pictures of me and Rio. There was a place where you could get goat-food to feed the goats. Fin filled her hat with it and took a handful out for the goat, but the goat stuck its nose in the hat and ate the lot, and then started trying to eat the hat. Later we saw a capybara, which Phlebas describes as "a very expensive-looking animal", all golden and shiny. We didn't get to go up in the balloon, though, because it was too windy. And then we came home and I worked on some code in the car. We'd bought a shirt for Sis, so we took it to her afterwards.
I should work on my prose style. This entry reads like a laundry list.
I've recently been noticing that apart from people I know from work, everyone I talk to these days is from LJ. Even all the talker crowd are all on LJ these days as well. (The only exception is a couple of IRC channels, and I hardly go on IRC any more except #pobox.) I wonder whether I should try to meet more non-LJ people again. (I suppose there are a few mono people I talk to who don't have LJs, but very few.)
I've decided to start my novel over again. I've got lots of new ideas for the first part, and the current version has run out of steam at about 25,000 words. I'm not sure whether it's worth letting people read the current version if there are going to be subsequent revisions, but maybe I should figure out a way of letting people read the new version as I write it, because then I'll get less discouraged. On the other hand, then I'll be less free to go back and add things as I go along. I just don't know.