San Diego Zoo and Aguanga

We're actually in Aguanga, CA now, but I have to catch up on a few entries from San Diego.  We had very spotty internet coverage in Santee Lakes, so blogging was difficult. But here in Aguanga, a tiny place east of Temecula, we have great service. There's just no predicting what we'll have. We actually have decided to switch to satellite internet based on the unpredictability, and that will probably be installed next week. We'll travel to Indio to get that done with Bill Adams, from Internet Anywhere.

One of the places we visited while in San Diego was the zoo. I have mixed feelings about zoos. I love to see the animals, but I don't love seeing them in confinement. I know they are not behaving naturally, even in the best of conditions, and supposedly the San Diego Zoo is one of the best.

Now that I've got that disclaimer out of the way, I can say that we really did enjoy ourselves, and Rick took some great photos. Most of these are his.I was feeling too ambivalent to take many pictures, except for the one above. No, that's not a live bird. It's a model of a prehistoric raptor of some sort. No ambivalence about a statue.

    

Koala sleeping under a heat lamp.

Red Panda

We saw plenty of sleepy animals at first, and a good many empty cages. But then things began to pick up.  It's a lot of walking and trying to find where you are on the map, but we eventually got to the animals we wanted to see. Rick really wanted to see the cats, and I wanted to see the birds and the monkeys.

A Chinese or Asian Leopard? I forget.

Bet you know what this is.

These were two of the many antelopes we saw.  These were the smallest and the skinniest. 

We didn't see a lot of the gorillas, but Rick got this great shot for the few
moments they showed themselves.

The pandas are very popular.
This one was sniffing out the zoo guest in the crowd
with the nice cologne.
At least that's what the zoo keeper said she was doing.

Back to the present: Today Rick is a putting tire pressure monitoring system on the trailer and the truck. This will help him keep an eye on the tires from inside the truck cab, to avoid blowouts and flats. Hope it works. 

Meanwhile I'm finally finishing an article on some research I did last year. It's taken me a long time to get it done - too many wonderful distractions and poor internet.  There's always a good excuse.