"Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!"

A big shout out to the Urban Fox who is sticking her head out of her den for the first time in awhile. What's been going on? Since May? Gads, we need to discuss this over some tea sometime!

Let me start out the post by sharing my activities of Saturday night. On the recommendation of SlowTalker, I attended an event at a dungeon/play space in the South Bay. It was a class on corporal punishment. Interesting. The woman who taught it had been a professional dom for many years, and she had a lot of things to spank people with. Wow!

I was mostly tired yesterday, but got good rest and was ready for the activities of today. There are a lot of pictures today....

I actually started my day with a bagel at Cafe Trieste, an SF transplant to Berkeley, which happens to be right next door to another SF transplant to Berkeley, Good Vibrations. There were a few things I was interested in looking for after the class I'd attended. I ended up leaving with books and an instructional video (I so don't need more books...). Then it was off to the important event of the day:

I started out my visit with a ride on the Skyrail. It was a wonderful, gentle ride above the "African Safari" portion of the park. It also took you into a portion of the park not open to pedestrians, but where some buffalo and antelope are playing. No I didn't sing the song, but now I wish that I had.

Here are some camels I saw from above...the one on the right looks dead, but by the time the ride had brought me back over the camel portion he'd turned onto his other side. I can only imagine he was wanting an even tan!

There are the lions lounging in their area away from visitors eyes. It was a giggle moment because you could see people at the fence desparately looking for lions in the public area of the enclosure. They couldn't see the "backstage."

I, actually found that many of the animals were in hiding (or perhaps napping after lunch), and didn't get many pictures worthy of presentation until I got to the children's zoo. This is the portion of the zoo where the exhibits allow you to get a little closer to the animals. This was the first of the exhibits. He looks like he's about to jump the fence.

I ran into OfficeMate and her partner, randomly, in my earlier part of the zoo visit. They had just come from the children's zoo and had reported that the goats were under seige. By the time I got to the goat petting area, they had retreated to their "resting area" on the rocks. This one was actually scratching himself on that rock.

Flash, from our visit to the British Natural History Museum, will attest to my interest in bugs. I like them better than the reptiles. At the bug house, I discovered the largest grasshoppers, and although you can't really tell from the photo, they were mating. It's really not that interesting.

These are fruit bats...Aren't they cool! The one that's all spread out was doing all sorts of acrobatics while I was there.

And this is a Malaysian Sunbear. It was looking pretty overheated to me, so I'm not sure that it's an appropriate name. I first thought it was a baby grizzly, then it got up and I saw it's feet and thought it was a sloth. It's an interesting critter.

By this time, I was exhausted and just wanted to get home for a nap. So that's where I went next. Not much more to tell about my day...it was good.

I will just note that going someplace like the zoo, on a Sunday, reaffirms my 2 feelings about children: 1) how cute they are, and 2) how much I enjoy watching them from afar.