Gentry Wild Animal Park

Here are the wild pics from the drive-thru safari park in Gentry, Arkansas, near Siloam Springs.

Check out the horns on this guy!


And this guy wasn't shy at ALL.

Here he is again...


Chuck took a FANTASTIC picture of this black rat snake with his new camera. GREAT composition!


These were the baby bears -- they were hilarious! It was like watching roly-poly baby puppies playing around. At one point they decided to scale the prison walls and it was pretty funny watching the bear race. The middle one fell off the fence and landed with a thud and I swear I heard something that sounded like an "oof" from his direction, hehehe!


Here's me just about three feet from a baby kangaroo and a wallaby. Note how I'm NOT looking at the camera -- it's because the whole right side of my face looks like I got pummeled by Tyson... I'm holding a kleenex over the stupid abcess as well because I sprung a leak. (ewww).


And I have NO IDEA what these chickies are called but they were just bizarre enough looking that we had to photograph them. They just stood like that paired up for as long as we stared at them. Talk about having some Don King hair issues!

Super Staph!

Only it's not so super, really. For those of you that know me pretty well, you know I tend to update my blog fairly frequently. So for me to not even turn on a computer for about a week, you KNOW I'm sick, heh heh.

I somehow caught a staph infection called "staph MRSA" last Tuesday, and it made a pretty big hole in my upper right lip area, and the worst swelling I've ever seen on my face. My entire lip was swollen from Tuesday night until about Monday afternoon -- total misery. The first doc put me on antibiotics that didn't work -- the infection was spreading and the swelling was getting worse. So Friday they put me on a different antibiotic, and at twice the normal dosage. It was a pretty miserable week with swelling, fever, and the worst facial pain I've ever had. Finally by Sunday it decided to start cutting loose and OH GROSS! Nuff said there.

Monday morning I saw doc #3, who put me on four times the antibiotic I was previously taking, and also an antibiotic cream for the abcess. It's Wednesday and I'm feeling great. I've got a band-aid on my lip but at least the swelling's probably 98% gone and things are looking up. I'm not looking forward to gigging this weekend with a stupid band-aid on my face, but oh well... at least I'll be able to MAKE the gigs.

Suede Friday night and The Scene Saturday night all you Tulsans! :)

This past Sunday Chuck took me to a great wild animal park in Gentry, Arkansas, to get me out of the house and out of some depression/moodiness I'd slipped into after 5 days of a swollen face. It was a ton of fun -- it was mostly a drive-through wild animal park, pretty neat stuff! Pics to follow!

Monday's for Friday's

Had yet another Monday today. Networkia Circuitus, the evil goddess of the computer and all networks associated with it was especially angry today. Started from the moment I walked in the door, blech! New intern and new employees need ID's into the system. Suddenly an employee that's logged into the system every day for several years insists he can't login with his login. I look, his login is his first name instead of first letter first name and full last name like everyone else's on the network. He says, "How come it's like that? I've never logged in like that before! Who changed it?" I assured him that although I do enjoy entertaining myself and handing myself menial tasks to do, I do have enough on my plate without having to change his login name for my own enjoyment pleasure. *rolls eyes and sighs longsufferingly*


Ok, that felt good. So it's the end of the day and I decided I'd splurge by meeting my friend Jose at Friday's for a drink and some buffalo chicken strips. Jose's a good guy. Even better when he's 100% agave but his "gold" is not too bad.

Mark sent me a BIZARRE link today about hamster-driven MIDI. This has gotta rank as one of the oddest things I've ever seen on the internet. Check it out!
MIDI Sequencing with Hamster Control



Elephant Run was FUN this past weekend, but I'm pretty exhausted. My sleep wake schedule's all jacked up, but oh well. :) Price to pay for fame (har har).

This weekend I'm off to Hawaii for three days! It'll be the first I've been home in at least 6+ months, so I'm well due for a trip there. And I'll be bringing home my precious tako!

Have a killer week everyone. Eat something weird.

Wholphin

Anyone have big plans for the weekend? It's Tax Day -- UGH. I ended up filing an extension... I've got WAY too much going on right now to sit down an deal with that mess!

We're playing this weekend at Elephant Run -- should be a pretty wild and crazy night. I'm so ready to get the stress/nerves relaxed by jumping around like an idiot all night :)

My day's insane -- this Friday's been like a Monday so far, so I gotta keep this blog short. But check out the new baby wholphin at Sea Life Park in Hawaii!

Tulsa Zoo

Saturday was an absolutely beautiful day to hit the Tulsa Zoo and test out the new digital camera. The koala exhibit had begun, however, it was a little bit of a disappointing exhibit compared to featured exhibits in Tulsa Zoo's past. It was pretty crowded at the zoo as well, but we had fun and got a lot of great shots in as well. Enjoy!










Awwwwwwww. :)

I'm getting pretty frustrated with Blogger these days -- if it's not down, then I'm getting "UnknownHostException". After much surfing, I found out that Blogger's got 2 billion bugs, one of them being that their DNS sometimes doesn't like resolving for your ftp publishing settings. So I went to http://centralops.net/co/DomainDossier.aspx and typed in my ftp hostname to get its IP address. Then I went back into Blogger settings and edited the original ftp hostname to be that IP address. Then voila! It's happy again.

I'd love to change blog software/hosts but I'd hate to lose the posts that I have -- even if I have them on my site, I'd have to reconfigure all the posts, and frankly, eww. Who's got time for that? Soooooo... hopefully Blogger will get on the ball and fix their billion bugs. I'd be more than happy to pay a bit for the service if it'd be consistent and uptime would be better.

Hope you're not stressing too much over taxes -- I've still got to do mine *ducks*. Looking forward to two gigs this weekend, that'll be tiring but getting paid's always a nice bonus :) More blogging hopefully this week when I'm not studying my tail off for my 70-315 exam.

Cya!

Weekend Weekend Weekend!

And boy am I ready for it. Man it's been a long, insane week. Didn't feel like I got much accomplished until this morning because I kept getting called into 80 million meetings. Chuck and I were planning to go on a little camping trip this weekend but since it rained something akin to The Great Flood, we figured the hiking trails would be way too muddy to attempt. So it looks like I have to be responsible and unpack *blech*. At least it'll be a catch-up-on-housework weekend and perhaps a less stressful week next week. I adore music and singing in a band, but it's extra sweet to be off this entire weekend, we've been gigging an awful lot lately.

And now for the tako update:

I FOUND TAKO!

White River Fish Market here in Tulsa had tako for $3/lb, and it was a little over a whole raw (frozen) 2.5lb tako. I defrosted and steamed up "Bob", and he was quite scrumptious. Not as large as the nigiri type tako that you get at Fuji but will do in a pinch, most definitely. My quest for tako is looking better, although I'm still importing "the big dogs" from Hawaii when I go down there at the end of the month. Nothing like tako legs that are nearly 2" in diameter.... *purring*. Yah yah, I'm weird.

Have a great weekend! Stay safe! New stuff comin' up soon!

Tulsa Tako?

Blogger's been crazy slow lately, I dunno what the deal is, so if you don't see an update it might not be me! :)

Check out this hi-tech (?) arch, heh heh:



And apparently this is what the Japanese do when they get bored and want to entertain their emperor penguins. Don't ask.



Speaking of Japanese, I am on a Holy Grail quest of sorts. The quest? To find tako in Tulsa. For those of you landlubbers, "tako" is octopus. It's delicious, quit making that face. It's most commonly served nigiri style, which means the slice of tako (sliver of the octopus leg about 1/4" thick) over sushi rice, with wasabi and soy sauce. Food of the heavens is what this stuff is. And for the non-sushi savvy that think (sushi == raw), many different types of sushi are actually cooked. Octopus is steamed for example. But try finding it in this state unless you're belly-up to the sushi bar at a restaurant.



I made an attempt at Bodean's today, and all they had were baby octopi -- the teeny tiny kind that aren't what you use to make tako nigiri. I spoke with the manager and he said to call him tomorrow and he might be able to place an order for the large octopus. So everyone please say a prayer to the nigiri gods for me tonight! :)

Ketchup

I have not blogged in ages! Bad, bad, blogger! Especially when I've had so much blogworthy in the past four or five days.

Blogworthy Item #1 - Thursday, March 31st
Surprise picnic in the park! Talk about a wonderful way to break up the workday. Chuck picked me up at work and took me to a park where we sat on a blanket and did the deli goodies in the park lunch. r-a-w-k! Makes it REALLY hard to go back to work when you've spent an hour in the park basking in the sun and talking.

Blogworthy Item #2 - Saturday, April 2nd
Wild Onion Dinner at All Tribes. If you've never gone to a wild onion dinner, you definitely must. The food is mouth-watering American Indian cuisine, and consists of wild onions mixed with scrambled eggs, salt pork, beans, fry bread, grape dumplings and dessert. YUM.

Blogworthy Item #3 - Saturday, April 2nd
MONSTER BULL! lol. Talk about some different, off-the-wall fun. We hit the Monster Bull 2005 show at the Expo Pavilion Saturday night. Was wild watching the "Mexican Fighting Bulls" take after the bullfighters (I guess formerly called rodeo clowns), and seeing riders get thrown eight feet in the air by a Brahma bull. There was even a "steel cage match" between a bullfighter and one of the small, fast bulls. Pretty rowdy fun, heh.



I promise I'll blog more times this week!