Dog Walks and the Zoo

Life in San Diego is great: we get to have dog walks and see all kinds of things.  The cat seems to be fine, Kathleen and Phillip should be in Australia by now, and the world is unfolding as it should.

Every town, city, or metropolis has a flat-iron building or two.  Here's one just a few blocks away.  Kind of skinny and likely a waste of space, but a flat-iron all the same.

There isn't all that much graffiti nearby, and this wall seemed to be painted by the store itself. The only other place we've seen a lot of graffiti has been on railway cars.

Everything wants to grow here, and flowers peek out of fences everywhere.

San Diego has not had enough rain for months and plants are starting to suffer.  These clouds were a welcome sight for the locals, but we were looking at the very tall palm trees.  These trees are just a block or so away, and very beautiful additions to the streetscape.

Pally figured that if he covered Maverick's eyes, he wouldn't be so scary.

As you can see, Pally's quite a bit more relaxed about having to train a dog...

Back to dog walks: we spoke with a gardener who installed this cactus garden to replace his lawn.  San Diego has a program to help owners reduce their water use. This owner replaced his lawn and also replaced his automatic watering with drip irrigation. After all the required forms and inspections, he received over two thousand dollars from the city and saved over $100 per month on his water bill. What a great program!  The city even asked him to compete in a 'best garden' type of competition.  Sounds smart to me.

Note that this garden is less than two years old, and most of the plants were quite small when installed.  He'll be busy keeping it in shape when things grow so quickly!

Joan and I went for our first trip to the zoo for this year.  We took the sky-train, a gondola that takes you up to where the polar bears should be.  As you can see, they are still making improvements to the zoo; every year they move animals around, usually to new and larger premises.

If you look closely, you might see Joan's first Bobcat sighting this year.

The Zoo is famous for its Panda Bear exhibit.  Here's the Mom of the six babies that have been born in the Zoo.  She seems to be napping a lot; probably to recover from rearing the little ones.

Speaking of little ones, here's her 18 month old, spending time eating bamboo, the only food pandas eat. The zoo has now started the weaning process and is keeping them apart for 4 hours a day.

We spent about three hours at the zoo, and near the entrance/exit, there's usually a riot going on: these flamingoes get excited for no reason and they voice their concerns at the top of their lungs, enough to stop normal conversation fifty feet away.  They seem to have enough flamingoes to handle a birthday party for seniors, but I digress.