I saw a wild FOX yesterday morning! On our driveway! I happened to glance out the window and saw something trotting along by the fenceline of the small paddocks, and thought it was a stray cat. Went straight to my camera to use my zoom lens, which I often grab as a poor man's set of binoculars, and was astounded to see what at first glance I took to be a tiny coyote. I had coyotes on the brain, you see, because two nights before I had caught a glimpse of a coyote standing by the side of the road as my parents and I drove home through Kent (next door town) from an event. I might have been mistaken about that coyote; it could have been a dog. But there was no mistaking this lovely young Reynard.

He hunkered down in a storm drain depression for a minute or two, and I thought maybe he was trying to stalk the Canada geese who were flocked in the grass near him. But they weren't alarmed in any way, so if they knew he was there they weren't worried about any danger (he's probably the same size or smaller than a goose!), and he didn't appear to be doing any serious hunting. I think he must have been lost or just out for a stroll. Weird, though, in broad daylight like that. But I didn't care because it was just too amazing, a really neat moment. I do wish I had a better telephoto lens; I was about 150 yards away on my porch, shooting this, and then had to seriously crop it to enlarge it. But I was happy to get any recognizable image at all. You know me and my dreams of being a wildlife photographer...

One of the biggest and busiest events we hold at our library every year is "Pride in Library Day," a local event during Stow Pride Week. Every day of the week leading up to July 4th is some sort of Pride In... day, with a Pride Breakfast and a concert and a golf outing and fun run and ice cream social, etc. For Library Day we hold a booksale (the day before, now, because it's so busy!), special children's programming (this year we had a magician and a balloon twister do programs), our annual pet show, and annual Dixieland Jazz band concert. The jazz band and the pet show are held outside on our library lawn, a secluded grassy area that's walled off from the busy street. I took a ton of photos of the various events, and posted them on our library's Flickr stream. I think this little wirehaired dachshund comforting his owner was just the cutest I've ever taken... But it was hard NOT to take a cute photo with so many adorable animals and kids together in one place! You can also see the pics from our library's main webpage, http://www.smfpl.org/ (scroll down below the first few announcements). I was disappointed that the miniature horse wasn't able to make it, but we had a variety of other pets from chinchilla to hermit crab to rat... :-)

It's the end of a long, not-so-fun week for me; thought I'd post a recap. Last weekend, day after the Iron Chef Titanic party, I went to a gaming/birthday party at the house of friends in my scifi group. They have 2 very nice dogs, Misty, a German Shepherd and Cherry, a Shiba Inu, and as I'd never been to their house before it was fun to meet their pets. The Shiba is more standoffish to strangers than the Shepherd was; I could have petted the Shepherd all day, what a sweetheart.



I came with my friend Karen who brought her dog Velvet (beagle/terrier mix), and after some initial growliness they seemed to all get along okay. This group of friends is really into gaming, and the Wii now too, so there were various board games in progress all over the house all day and into the night. (I think we finally left around 9pm, but I'm sure others stayed much longer!) I got to try out a new game I'd just bought, courtesy of friends who found it for me with their online discount--Change Horses.

Yes, it's yet another horse racing board game, in my ever-growing collection of horse racing board games (I have an extensive niche collection of them now; I never get tired of seeing the creative ways designers can create a board game of my favorite sport). However, this one is different! The object of the game is to get your horse to cross the finish line LAST! Ha ha! It's quite unique, you can use a "slippery track" to slide horses into the next lane, or "stumble" them to slow them down, or simply switch to another horse entirely. And horse ownership is secret, so you don't know whose horse you're messing with until the end. I really enjoyed it. Not sure why several of the cards are in other languages, when you need to use all of the cards to play--thereby causing a bit of unnessary confusion; you'd think they'd just have a whole 'nother set of multilanguage cards and provide enough of them in ONE language! But it isn't anything that keeps you from playing it properly.

The next day I went to a theater matinee performance of "Bloody Murder," a funny spoof of murder mysteries presented by our local community theater, Weathervane Playhouse. It was a lot of fun; very silly, as the characters realize they are cliched characters in a murder mystery and decide they will revolt against their author, by refusing to let him kill them off one by one. Lots of "breaking the fourth wall" and over-the-top acting on purpose. I hadn't been to a play in a while, so that was very nice. Plus, a friend of mine from Stow Leadership was in the play, he's a regular company member, and it's always cool to see him inhabit another character on stage.

So, great weekend last weekend. But then on Tuesday morning I came down with--[cue Dragnet theme: Dum-de-dum-dum!]--the flu. Blecch. Double blecch. I hate being sick. I am the world's worst patient. And not much better at being a nurse to myself. Thankfully it was only a 24 hour bug, and I only missed two days of work. But it sure was not fun. I recovered pretty quickly, and went to book discussion group as usual on Thursday and then to Iron Chef Gone With the Wind last night. Today, my stomach seems to be telling me that I shouldn't have eaten quite as much of the party food last night as I did, but it's just rumbling to let me know it's there. Grrr. Our weather today is very warm--it's 47 degrees outside!! And this is February in Ohio??--with rain predicted, so it'll melt most if not all of our leftover grungy snow and ice, before we get more next week, I'm sure. I think the pretty stage of winter is past us now, and we're going to have the "gray yucky grungy" part of the season now. Sigh.

Wolves are one of my favorite wild mammals. This is one of the two wolves I saw Sunday at the Cleveland Zoo's Wolf Wilderness exhibit. I don't know if they currently have any more than this in the exhibit, but these two were the ones visible that day. They're just gorgeous and so noble. I do feel sad seeing them in a fenced enclosure, no matter how nicely it's been forested and made to seem like a true wilderness, but at least they are not starving or being hunted. And they are helping to educate so many kids and adults who come to visit them. It was hard to take good pictures of them, because the exhibit is set up as a log cabin; you enter it and see all the displays and gift shop and educational videos being screened, and step out onto the back porch to find it's enclosed in glass and there in the "backyard" is the woods with wolves prowling around the perimeter. Joined with it is a beaver pond that has two levels so that you can walk down in and see below the water and see their dam and lodge, even see the beavers swim up the tunnel into their lodge.


(This is a beaver swimming on the surface.) But, my main point is, if you wanna take photos you have to contend with that large fingerprinty scratched reflective glass. Sigh. I was mostly getting shots of the female (I'm pretending she's the female and the silver one the male, just 'cos they seem that way to me) running along the fenceline, until suddenly she came padding up to the glass and looked in at us. I think it's one-way glass so she couldn't really *see* us, but something interested her for a few minutes, and that's when I got my best shots. I had the flash turned off to avoid reflections, and so most of her moving shots are a little blurry. Argh. So it was quite nice of her to pose for sunnysky and me. :-) The other issue was my autofocus kept focusing on tree branches instead of wolf, so I was forced to manual focus which I'm glad I can do but it's a pain in the neck for fastmoving subjects. Sorry, I digress...

This is the two of them together. Like I said, lots of pacing. :-)

Other animals we saw included lots of bears, not just polar but also

the grizzly,


who looked very contented to be sitting in the sun at his log, almost like he was waiting at the dinner table for his meal to be served, and the Sloth Bears

who were digging up grubs or napping in the sun, depending on which one you watched.



And we saw LOTS of monkeys. These Colobus monkeys are on Monkey Island, which is kind of a misnomer because there were actually more non-monkeys there than monkeys. Only the Colobus were on the island, but at least 10 different species of monkey as well as apes live in the Primate House in another part of the zoo. The coinhabitants of Monkey Island are really cute deer called Klipspringers,

and rodentlike animals that aren't really rodents, called Rock Hyrax.
They're just the cutest little guys.

Put up more photos today. Here is Nico, one of the beluga whales, giving a "love nip" to either Natasha or Maris, the two females. The staff member giving a speech said that they are trying to breed them. I was really tickled to be able to catch this moment, it was very fleeting and I only saw him do it once. I could have stood there watching them for hours, they are so beautiful. The other cool thing they did was blow bubble rings, out of their mouth! It was so cool! But practically impossible for me to catch. Needed video camera. I also saw some awesome


Japanese Spider Crabs. The kooky


Weedy Sea Dragon, which looked like something created for a sci fi movie, was fascinating, and


the giant sea otters were a lot of fun. (Wait til you see the river otters, they were also adorable) Ta for now, gotta run to work!

Came across a really sweet video of two baby moose frolicing in a sprinkler that is really adorable. I didn't much care for the treacly song in the background; I don't think it's needed, because the images speak for themselves. A little grainy but a lot of love. And, finally, the Muppets variety show is airing on the Disney Channel this weekend yaaaaayyyy! Click here for details and commercials (which I so appreciate, because I never watch Disney Channel just on my own, so this spares me that :-) I had heard about it weeks ago but the airdate was delayed, argh. They're going to have a second one this fall. It's short and full of tweenybopper stars, but that's cool, I love seeing the Muppets introduced to a new generation. Wocka wocka on!

During our break time at the Youth Services Symposium (see previous post), a friend and I went walking on the nature trail that is adjacent to the golf course at the resort. I've been attending this conference since probably 1994 or 95, and in all the times it has been held at Sawmill Creek I never knew this place existed! I had only hung out inside the conference center. Turns out there is a Sheldon Marsh State Nature Preserve right there. It was fantastic. In only half an hour or so, we spotted at least seven vastly different species of birds, from egrets to red-winged blackbirds, and saw a beaver (or muskrat? You be the judge!) in the water. I really wanted to take the trail all the way to Lake Erie, its end point, but we didn't have enough time for that long of a walk. (Especially with me stopping every yard or so to snap a dozen photos!) I also wanted to go at sunset, but that was right during dinner, and believe me, you don't miss out on a Sawmill Creek Lodge dinner, they're very good. So, the following are some of the nature shots I got from that short walk. I was having fun being Marlin Perkins... (anybody remember him from the old Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom show? :-)

I think this is a Downy Woodpecker, but I didn't see any red on the back of the head, so if that's correct then it is a female. (I never used to be much of a birdwatcher, but as I find I enjoy taking photos of them, I am learning a lot more about them!)



Muskrat Susie, Muskrat Sam... okay okay I won't go on and force you to get that song stuck in your head. This might be a beaver, I couldn't tell from the quick glimpse we had of it as the sun was setting and it swam speedily by. I never saw the tail, flat or round. It seemed smaller than a beaver, but I haven't seen one of those up close in ages. I also did not see any dams or lodges nearby, and the fact that it was carrying reeds or leaves, and not sticks, all made me think muskrat. But who knows really. He was cute whatever he was.

One more:


The Red-winged Blackbird. Very common, but this is the first time I've ever gotten a really good photo of one, and he's singing, too! I was just tickled...
There's more on the flickr stream, shots of the marsh as a whole, but you can explore those on your own. Thanks for reading this far.