Category: Celebration

Strategy.

Yes, planning session. Must have.

Approach. Direction. Map out the route. Implement. Execute.

Yup. Vital.

Necessary.

What’s that? Work? No, no, I’m not talking about work.

Food. At the baseball game. Tonight. Yup. The Good Man and I are currently engaged in a lengthy instant message conversation planning this out.

What needs to be consumed. Where it’s located. How to obtain efficiently.

Nice.

BTW, I learned this blitz strategy from my Mom. Attending the NM State Fair.

“Ok, we start out in the Spanish Village for a burrito…then across the way to the Native American Village for fry bread and honey…Mom needs a corndog…Karen wants funnel cake…”

You know the drill.

Hey, I learned from the best.

Dreaming of a Cha-Cha bowl now (bless you Orlando Cepeda!)…

Photo source.

Thar she blows!

Yup. There you go. The Good Man and me are legally licensed to run off like two crazy kids and hitch our lives together, willy-nilly without regard for consequences!

YIPE!

juuuuuust kidding!

The good news is that the county produces this handy illustrated booklet to help us get through “the rough patches”.

Last evening, we solemnly flipped through the pages.

Who knew that keys to a happy marriage included regular exercise and washing your vegetables before consuming?

Ah well…: plugs nose and jumps in :

____________________

PS: ok, that’s not the *actual* license above, rather a pretty souvenir the State of California provides…the real one is quite ugly…form-like, in triplicate and all that governmental schtuff.

So…what did YOU do for the Fourth?

How was your holiday? Didja do something nice? Fun? Cool as heck?

Yeah, how did that bbqpoolkidsfamilymomanddadhotdogsfireworksinthebackyard turn out?

Good? Great, happy to hear it!

My Fourth? Well.

The day was mostly quiet. As the sun was setting, that’s when it got interesting.

The evening kicked off, well, here:

That’s the, uh, San Carlos Airport.

And those there are, uh, you know, your standard issue Cessna type aeroplanes.

See…our next-door neighbor is a pilot. He started in the military then had a career piloting the “vomit comet” for NASA.

These days he’s semi-retired, making money by piloting incredibly expensive Gulf Stream and Eclipse jets for the Bay Area wealthy.

So an offer was made to The Good Man and me…see, he’d rented a plane for the evening…wanna go see fireworks from up there?

Yes! YES WE DO!

And we did!

Our original course was the big show in San Francisco.

However, San Francisco being what it is…this is what it looked like up there.

Gorgeous sunset. But miles and miles of fog. Not so swell for watching fireworks.

We headed down the peninsula, intent on taking in the fireworks near the much clearer San Jose, at the Great America amusement park.

Problem is, Great America is in the San Jose Airport airspace, and they don’t think weekend fireworks cruisers are all that interesting. Humorless, they are, as they keep busy landing and taking off a near steady stream of commercial airliners.

So we headed back up to mid-peninsula in took in the smaller shows in Redwood City and Foster City.

You ain’t never seen fireworks until you’ve seen them from up there.

Wow.

Can’t offer much in the way of fireworks photos. Between it being dark and the motion of the plane, none turned out. But damn…it’s amazing to see!

Oh, and the ol’ “vomit comet” pilot showed us what just two G’s feels like (fighter pilots get up to 9).

Feels like getting out of the damn plane and walking around on the ground again, please!

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I had a cooler Fourth of July than you did….:)

Whoa!

Had a mindblower of a weekend.

In celebration of the birth of The Good Man, we had a (much necessary) weekend away.

Somewhere where cell phones don’t work and television, p-feh…who needs ’em anyway?

We got a little wild. :)

We went to a place called Safari West. It’s located north of the Bay Area, just outside of Santa Rosa.

It’s an over 400-acre ranch that houses exotic animals of all kinds.

The owners have been working this place since the late 1980’s and it’s amazing.

I’m still processing it all…and the over 700 photos I took. (Yes, I said 700).

Highlights of the trip:

On the first night we were there, a baby Giraffe was born. It was a bit of a surprise to the Safari West folks. They knew mama Marla was pregnant, just didn’t know she was ready to go.

Here’s a photo of our as yet unnamed hero. This is about seven hours after his birth. Sssh, he’s sleepin’.

Is a hard thing getting born. Especially for a baby giraffe who plummets some six feet to the ground with a whump then is up on his wobbly pins about an hour later.

Here he is a bit knock kneed but doin’ it.

But that was not the only fascinating new thing…

That same night, Safari West took delivery of 38 flamingos and installed them in their new enclosure. I have always been a HUGE fan of flamingos. The Rio Grande Zoo used to have quite a few. Don’t know if they still do. But as a kid, they made a big impact on me.

These are “greater” Flamingos (their “lesser” and more colorful cousins will be arriving soon).

From there, it’s hard to pin down all the amazing things!

Lemurs.

Cape Buffalo (that’s some scary sh– right there….)

Cheetah

And on and on and on. That’s not even scratching the surface.

OH! And Zebra. I adore Zebra.

And Watusi cattle!

And! And! And!

It was amazing. A photographer’s dream (though tough too. Animals don’t, you know, pose).

We also slept in genuine tent cabins constructed by South African craftsmen and modeled on safari tents, including wood floors and open space. They were actually really nice and quite comfortable, though a bit cold at night.

In the dark we could hear all the animals of the safari calling and howling and, you know, doing what wild animals do.

I can’t even begin to write out how utterly geeked out I still am from the weekend…

We’ll be talking about this for weeks.