My Night at the Zoo

I had a busy (and expensive) weekend. Saturday I purchased a digital camera for my upcoming Oregon trip. It’s a Cannon G1, several steps up from Cannon’s digital Elph that I got the Professor for Christmas. I was hoping that if I stuck with Cannon I’d be able to use the same software packages with it, and by and large that is the case, but I needed a different driver for downloading images from the camera, and I got a nicer package than the Professor got to edit the pictures. I’ve taken several dozen pictures of the Kitten with it, in an effort to get more comfortable with using it. It has a movie setting too, that I’ll have to play with later. That eats a lot of space on the memory though, so I doubt I’ll be using it on the trip.

Saturday night I spent taking tickets at a special event at the Philadelphia Zoo for kids with leukemia. It was sobering to see these young kids with no hair on their heads or in wheelchairs or wearing surgical masks to protect them while they were immunicompromised from chemotherapy. If you could get past appearances, they were in every way normal kids. They wanted to see the tigers and giraffes, and for some reason the monkies were especially popular. They wanted hot dogs and candy. They watched the keepers who were there to talk about their charges, and had awe in their eyes as they listened. I saw all this, and realized how little I was really doing to help, and wondered at how small my problems are in contrast. I think I need to do things like this more often.

I was supposed to spend Sunday cleaning up the place so that when I had The Sisters over to dinner Tuesday night it wouldn’t look like I was a total slob. Sister the younger called to cancel, though, so I didn’t accomplish nearly what I’d wanted to. I got a fair amount of filing done, though, and cleared most of my stuff off the dining room table.

The kitten is, I believe, beginning to wear on the Professor’s nerves a bit. She has a new trick of hurling herself off of the bed onto his shoulders as he sits at his computer. She isn’t very good at keeping her claws retracted yet, and the Prof is starting to get pretty badly scratched up where she lands on his neck. This morning she’s locked into the master bedroom while he works on his computer. I dread to think what the bedroom will look like when she’s done with it.

And now, if I want things cleared up on my desk by the end of the week, I’d best return to my duties.