I think the biggest surprise this Christmas week was that I didn't get to work from home Tuesday. In previous years someone up the boss chain had told everyone that they had the option to work from home the last two weeks of the year, and I don't know whether it was forgotten this year or was a conscious choice. Since Wednesday last week (and next) was a holiday I only had to go in the one day, and a lot of people brought a lot of food, so that's some consolation.
After work, though, we had our last chance to get to the Potter Park Zoo's Wonderland of Lights, which still hasn't returned to running after Christmas. Most of the snow that we'd gotten had melted by this point so the sights weren't as dramatic or good for county fair photograph season, but we were hardly sad to go.
For whatever reason we took the zoo's trail the ``wrong'' way this year. Apart from 2020 and 2021 they haven't really had a designated path, but there's a couple natural attractions, starting with the arctic fox and the otters, and instead of leading with those we went the other way. This worked out nicely, though; the terrain of the zoo is very familiar by now, and while they change some of the decorations every year it's not like they ever make radical wholesale changes. So this did a good bit to make the trail feel new. Also unfamiliar in that we kept getting caught up on questions like didn't this path used to be open? I think some of them are paths that in years past were open but that haven't been recently. But it's easy forgetting.
Taking the contra-flow path meant we saw some things ``early'', like the rainbow wall of lights, or the Corvid Corner, a bird enclosure that someone going the other way warned us had nothing visible. We could see one bird in there, in the far distance, not particularly moving, possibly because it was well after dark and there wasn't anything they wanted. And we were there in time to see in one of the indoor enclosures one of their rhinos pacing a bit. Didn't use the huge back-scratching brush. We did have the luck to see a snow leopard in silhouette, against the lights outside a building, and while the big cat meowed a bit in a way that sounded like a whiny complaint, they hustled off before we could get decent pictures. The spider monkeys were hidden altogether, we suppose in a private home, and the lemurs were heaped up far out of sight, sleeping.
After walking around a fair bit we had some time left so popped in to the discovery center where they, alas, had no animals on display to pet. They did have a couple of pelts on display, where I was able to identify the lynx pelt as ``I don't know, a bobcat?'' And a guy had a little demonstration quiz, pictures of various animals and the gifts they give others of their type and why they give that. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger got the five perfectly, and was only a little guided by being pretty sure we'd done this same quiz in previous years.
We did not see any otters, who may have been off celebrating their Fishmas. Anyway the light was off in their enclosure, as has been true the last couple years. In the long ago past of like 2019 we could get very blurry, badly-exposed pictures of bubbles and blurs.
In pictures, we're still at Plopsaland and are only one roller coaster in.
More wonders of the park: Frits and Frats sure offered something to eat, although we didn't get anything there. The roof line is great, though.
A bit of scenery in a giant spilled hot chocolate.
Another fine moment of parkitecture: the giants' table used as porch overhang for a dining area.
More decorations around a roller-skating-themed roller coaster. It's all giant for reasons we don't know.
But here's the coaster, naturally called K3.
Here's a fun-looking water-y ride we didn't go on, but, flying jetboats in a way. Whoever their superhero is flies over the ride, orbiting as the ride does.
Trivia: Throughout World War I the largest category of cargo unloaded at French ports for the British army was fodder for horses. Source: An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage. (Horse-drawn wagons being the best way available to carry supplies from train stations to the front.)
Currently Reading: A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II, Maury Klein.
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Date: 2025-12-27 01:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-12-27 08:31 pm (UTC)Spoiler: she wins our guessing contest (although that was locked up by the 23rd.)