At The Zoo

We watched this ostrich lay this egg. It was pretty cool.

She had a whole nest of eggs, but I doubt they would be fertile since there is no male ostrich at the zoo.
At the gorilla enclosure, I wondered who was watching who. Were the people watching the gorilla,
Or was the gorilla watching the people?

Meanwhile, the sea lions were too busy cavorting in their new home to worry about who was watching and who wasn't.

What everyone was watching, however, was the polar bears.
They were quite the hit.
All in all, it was a good trip.
Now for an update on Scarlett--this morning when I changed her water, I noticed she had pooped and peed. This is good news because it means she got some nutrition out of her recently aborted meal. She is still very active and alert, moving about her smaller enclosure, flicking her tongue and checking things out.
Now, if only she starts keeping her food down...

Going to the Zoo

Cody and I are planning a trip to the Memphis Zoo tomorrow. The Northwest Passage exhibit is completed and opened now. I can't wait to see it in its entirety.

In anticipation of the outing, I've posted two of my absolute favorite zoo photos. Yes, I took both of these.



The first one is a Southern Copperhead, and the second is an Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake. I wouldn't want to be this up close and personal with these two without a pane of glass between us!

An update on the Scarlett saga...I've moved her into a smaller Kritter Keeper plastic box in order to better monitor her. She has been sleeping nearly all day. I won't be feeding her or handling her until the 24th of this month. All I'll be doing is changing her water daily with fresh, Nutribac enriched water. She seems so small now--

I'm going to start uploading my Italy pictures tonight. The first album will be pictures of Rome. Here is a link to what is there so far.

Plowing Has Started

Soon the fields will be planted and greening with young crops. I could smell the fresh tilled earth as we drove home from karate.

Speaking of karate, I'm a bit irked at sensei--again. When he first told us that James and I would be testing this spring, I told him to let me know as soon as possible when the test would be because I'd need to put in for my day off. You have to put in two to three months ahead of time to get your vacation approved because they only let 10 people per day--per shift--have vacation time. Anyway, Tuesday night he said we would be testing definitely in May. Then he said, "I need to call and arrange it so you can put in for your day off."

It's too late for that. May is already booked solid. I'll have to call in sick to take the test. Which is really not that big of a deal except that I had a chance at a perfect attendance for the first time in the 11 years I've been working there. (They give perfect attendance every 6 months there.) Heavy sigh....

Mr Tedder really worked with James and me tonight, and I'm starting to feel better about the test. If he works with us like that every class until the test, I feel I'll be much better prepared. Next week, we'll do self defense and bunkai.

It was kind of funny because we started doing our kata with the kiais in them. We are so used to not doing them, that we kept forgetting to put them where they belong. (For those who don't know, a "kiai" is a spirit yell.) We used to do full focus kata with spirit all the time, but have kind of gotten away from them these last couple of years. Every time we would kiai, she would run off the floor crying.

Bad news...Scarlett regurgitated her mouse today. This is the second meal in a row. I'm going to switch her with Blaze. She may do better in his tank since it is in a much quieter area of the house.

Good news...Blaze shed this evening. Perfect shed in every way. Going to measure and feed him tomorrow, then clean out his tank really well and put Scarlett in there.

Why is it always the special ones that have the problems?

New DAUB Drawings.

I'm having a really hard time getting motivated to work through this book. I finally got the last bit of homework from chapter 1 done. Maybe the book will get better as it goes on. The first chapter wasn't nearly as fun as the first chapter of Drawing for Dummies.

My photos have been much more pleasing of late.

Ferns

Growing wild in the woods at Grenada Lake. It looks so much nicer there than in a basket, don't you think?

I didn't really have time to post yesterday because Cody needed the computer for a science project. He did really well, I thought. He drew a full color picture of the solar system, then looked up all sorts of facts about each planet and put them on the poster next to the planet they pertain to. It looked very nice when he was done, but irony of ironies, his teacher was absent today and he didn't even have to turn it in.

My little bloodred baby Scarlett had really been worrying me this last week. She regurgitated her meal last time I fed her, and after that, has just not been active or anything. I was really worried that she might be sick. I got home from work yesterday, and she had presented me with an absolutely perfect shed! No wonder she'd been hiding so much. I'd completely missed the signs of impending shed. What a relief. Tonight when we got home from karate, she was out and about, cruising her tank like always. I usually measure my snakes each time they shed, and this time was no exception. She is 17.66 inches long. She'd grown an inch and a half since I got her! This is great! I'd been worried because she and Blaze both are so tiny.

Blaze is also getting ready to shed, but he is perfectly obvious about it.

Tonight in karate we did sanchin kata with the lights out. Those who didn't know sanchin did slow motion kicks. Sensei says that is a good way to practice sanchin, but since I usually take my glasses off for it, I can't see anyway. So it didn't make that much difference to me.

I wrote a bit last week about how aggravated I was with Sensei. Well, I finally got around to filling out my dojo feedback form. Sensei had put them out a couple of months ago. When I asked him about them, he said, "Be brutally honest." So I did. I told him exactly what I thought. I won't go into detail here, but my main points were:

a) be more consistent and stop showing favoritism,
b) establish a minimum time in rank and stick to it,
c) start keeping student records, and
d) make the kids behave in class.

I also added for him not to forget that his higher ranking students still need instruction, too. I doubt it will change anything, but at least now he knows that people notice what he is doing. I wrote in a couple of places describing what he does that is inconsistent, and I put "this is favoritism and it does get noticed." Well, we'll see if it helps...

A Dragon

I'm Finished!

I've scanned all of my pictures of Italy! Finally! Now I just have to crop and sort and categorize and upload them all. There were 420 that I uploaded, and one more that I still have to find. I think it is in a box under the bed, but I don't want to dig all that out just yet.

I love this picture of an Italian house that was built along the Amalfi Coast. I thought it was the niftiest house, built right into the side of the cliff like it was. It reminds me a bit of a castle. I made my ex (before he was my ex) stop so I could get out and take this picture.

This was so cute. Someone had made a model of a little village or something right in this little cave on the side of a road, which was on the side of a cliff. Again, I made my ex (before he was my ex) stop so I could take this picture.

And they also built real villages on the sides of cliffs also. This one is a touristy spot. I don't know which village it is, but by the way the buildings are painted, you can tell it was built for tourists. Real Italian houses are usually left unfinished on the outside. That way, they can avoid paying the higher tax rate for a finished building.

It's a pretty little place, where ever it is.

I'll let you know as I get all my pictures uploaded to my Webshots albums.

Lake Riverdale

is back. We had some humdingers of storms last night, complete with tornadoes and hail. This was the same storm system that killed 12 people in Tennessee. Fortunately, we had no damage, other than a limb down, and it was a small one.

A bit about movies. Last week I found Not Without My Daughter in the $5.50 bin at Wal-mart. Very good movie. Of course, the Arab anti-defamation leagues had a field day when this movie came out. But as much as they want to whoop and holler, it is a true story. That is, the BOOK is a true story, the movie is Hollywood's idea of truth. Which means it may have very little resemblance to reality. The public library has the book. I'm going to have to read it.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe came out Tuesday. This is one of only two movies Cody and I went and saw at the theater last year. (The other one was Star Wars III.) This movie is destined to become one of our family favorites, right up there with The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I got home from work today and Cody was watching Iron Eagle. Now, Cody loves this movie. After watching it, he decided he wanted to join the Air Force and become a fighter pilot. That lasted only until he watched Top Gun. Now, of course, he wants to join the real military. The NAVY.

But back to Iron Eagle. This has got to be the silliest movie I've ever seen. I can suspend disbelief in most situations, but does anyone really expect a teenage boy still in high school to hop into an F-16, fly it into an enemy military base (most likely Libya seeing it was made in the '80s), LAND the plane, get out and rescue his prisoner father, get back into the plane and make it safely back to the States all without crashing, getting shot down, or captured himself? Granted, the boy knew how to fly a Cessna, but there's a world of difference between a Cessna and an F-16.

I suppose if you like unrealistic movies that don't even have that much action in them, this is your movie.

And you can have it.

Frustrated

I'm more than a little aggravated with Sensei right now. This isn't anything that's come about suddenly. It's been building up for a while. I think it all started about a year or so ago. I was due for a rank promotion, but Sensei made me wait for Barrett to get out of fire fighter academy before I could test.

Wait for Barrett??? Why????

I was ready, and there was opportunity. I knew all my requirements long before then. Plus, he gave a rank test during the six weeks Barrett was gone, but he wouldn't test me then, even though it had been 6 months since my last test. He made me wait two more months, for Barrett to get back and get ready for his promotion. It ended up being 8 months between my promotions, because I had to wait for Barrett. Why? Why make me wait?

If it was because he thought I wasn't ready, that would be one thing. But why did I have to wait for Barrett?

And now, he's letting Barrett test for Ni-kyu this month. He only got promoted to san-kyu in February. I had all my requirements for ni-kyu long before I even tested for san-kyu, yet Sensei still made me wait 8 months between my tests. (I had to wait for Barrett to finish fire fighter academy...) And now he is letting Barrett test for ni-kyu after only two months? What's fair about that? If James and I had to wait 6-8 months between advancements, then ALL the brown belts should have to wait that long. But it seems the rules don't apply to everybody.

Cody nearly cried last night when Sensei told him he would be testing for his black stripe on his purple belt. He thought he would be testing for his brown belt. You see, not every child in the dojo has to go through so many stripes.

Ok, the ranking system for kids under 12 are :

White belt
White with one sideways green stripe
White with two sideways green stripes
White with a yellow stripe
Yellow with a white stripe
Yellow
Yellow with a black stripe
White with a blue stripe
Blue with a white stripe
Blue
Blue with a black stripe
White with a lengthwise green stripe
Green with a white stripe
Green
Green with a black stripe
White with a purple stripe
Purple with a white stripe
Purple
Purple with a black stripe

I don't know where it goes from there, because that is the highest ranking kid we have. Chad Aurell is purple with black stripe, and Cody is solid purple. The next highest kid we have, with one notable exception) is blue with a black stripe.

Now, on the one hand, there are all these ten, eleven, and twelve year olds that are having to go through all these in-between ranks and extra stripes and such. On the other hand, you have one eleven year old that has gone straight from solid rank to solid rank with never a stripe on his belt. Now, after training for barely over a year, he is testing for purple belt. There are better students, the same age and older, that have taken two and three years to get to the same spot. Danny Ruth, for example. He's a very good student, the same age as the other one--well, within a few months at least, and has been training over two years--close to three, yet he is still a blue/black stripe. Cody and Chad--both purple belts, ages 12 and 11 respectively--have been training for nearly four years, and this other kid, 11 years old, mind you, is testing for his purple after barely a year? It seems the rules don't apply to everybody. What's fair about that?

On kata--

Sensei has been watching me do kusanku kata since November, yet when Mr. Tedder went over it in class with me last night, I found out I was doing most of the kata wrong. If Mr. T hadn't pointed several things out to me, I'd have done them wrong on the black belt test, because Sensei never said anything about them. Boy, would that have been embarrassing. I feel like I'm going to have to relearn the whole kata before next month. I honestly don't feel like I'm ready to test for shodan--for reasons like these. When I express my concerns to Sensei, he just says, "Oh, you'll do ok." I feel like he's brushing me off--not taking my concerns seriously.

It's getting to the point that I'm about ready to walk away and not look back. If Sensei keeps on like he's going, he's going to end up losing his dojo.

Lily Of The Valley

I got off work early today, so I went out and had a bit of a putter in the garden. It was a very small putter, since I don't have much of a garden. Just a hosta and a few of these Lily of the Valleys. This was the first one to bloom this year.

I transplanted a few that were starting to creep out into the yard, and pulled a few weeds, including the grass you see in the picture above.

At one time, I had quite extensive gardens, including daffodils, tulips, gladiolus, crocus, iris, roses, day lilies, tiger lilies, and bleeding hearts. Most of them have died by now. I don't have time to cultivate like they needed to be. Gardening is a lot more work than I thought it would be.

Spring Flowers

A violet.

My dad would never mow the lawn until the last of the violets had died back every spring.

I don't know what these are, but they sure are pretty.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I'm posting so many pictures here lately.

It's because I haven't got a thing to say.

A Lone Pine Tree

stands sentinel over sleeping fields, waiting for them to awaken with new life.

Last Year's Cotton

Waiting patiently to be plowed under to make way for this year's crop, while grass has grown over the rest of the field.

Michaelangelo's David

I'd seen pictures of it before. They don't do it justice.

Neither will this one.

In person, he is breathtaking. Every detail is perfect.

Absolutely perfect.

The veins in his hands. The wrinkles of skin around his knuckles. His muscles. Even his toenails. Perfect detail.

I never knew until I saw him in person that he holds a stone in his right hand.

Breathtaking.

That's all I can say about it.

Kickathon

The second annual kickathon at the dojo was a little late because of sensei's surgery last fall. McGruff the Crime Dog was there, with the police department and the fire department. All told, 26 students participated and did some 13, 000 kicks to Kick Crime in Grenada.

The children's safety seminar with McGruff the Crime Dog:

And the advanced children and adult classes:

Good news! I finished scanning in the first album of my Italy pictures. Now working on the second...

This is me, June 21, 1992 in the ruins of Pompeii.

And this is what is left of what was once a beautiful fountain.

The little white things outlining the fountain are sea shells. In those days, the house surrounded the yard, instead of the yard surrounding the house. All of the rooms opened into a central courtyard, usually containing a fountain or two, and certainly containing well tended gardens. In many of the buildings, there are remains of frescos and paintings. Pompeii was once such a beautiful city. More pics later...

Bad News! Of the seven snakes I fed this weekend, four refused their mice. Ok, Sunset I'm not surprised, because he seems to be in breeding mode. He's been eating really irregularly these last few months anyway. The ball pythons, I wasn't really that surprised either because they are notorious for going off their feed for weeks at a time for no apparent reason. Onyx surprised me. He seldom refuses a meal. But I let Cody play with him before feeding him, and I think that got him a bit worked up. We won't make that mistake next week.