If you’re local, you really owe it to yourself to check this out. Potawatomi Zoo remains one of the major highlights of the area. You’ve got a few more days; Zooluminate runs until June 1. This was a hell of a lot of fun.
Tag: zoos
#REVIEW: The Phoenix Keeper, by S.A. MacLean
It’s possible that by the time I go to sleep tonight I will have finished five books this weekend, and two of them I did not like very much. One of them may have been my fault, as it demanded a more careful reader than I’ve had the energy to be lately, and one, to my dismay, turned out to be something called extreme horror, which is code for “mentions things being crusted in pubic hair four times in the first fifty pages,” at which point I noped out.
We had an afternoon wedding in Indianapolis today, and I read S.A. MacLean’s The Phoenix Keeper cover-to-cover on the drive, closing the book with perhaps a minute of driving to go until we got home, and it was wonderful. Pay no attention to the tagline on the cover, which is referring to the phoenixes, not the people; dating is one of the many things on the main character’s mind, and she goes out with two people over the course of the book, but this is very much not a romantasy, a genre that I’m growing a trifle tired of at the moment. It’s a subplot and while it works out delightfully (there’s that word again) it’s very much not what the book is about. Also, the blurb appears on the back of my lovely Illumicrate edition of the book, and not on the front, which is nice.
One subgenre I’m not tired of yet, though, is the cozy fantasy, and … oh, man, this book is a hoodie and a warm blanket and maybe a sleeping cat in your lap to go with it. The titular character, Aila, is a 28-year old zookeeper with an anxiety disorder and maybe a touch of the ’tism to go with it,(*) and the entire book takes place at the zoo, with only a couple of brief interludes to her apartment and one (1) date at a restaurant. The problem driving the narrative is getting a second phoenix for her zoo so that she can have a breeding pair (the author explicitly references how zoos brought the California condor back to viability in a foreword, and the parallels are not subtle) and then how she manages to convince these complicated animals to accept each other and mate.
There are complications. There’s another zookeeper she doesn’t get along with. It’ll all be fine.
Turns out I like books set in zoos, and while I’m normally a stickler for worldbuilding, “this isn’t set on Earth, there are magical animals, fuckin’ roll with it” is more or less all the worldbuilding you’re gonna get, and it’s really all the book needs. I mean, there’s drama; there are poachers to worry about, and there’s the relationship stuff, but a big part of being cozy fantasy is relatively low stakes, and again, you know it’s all gonna work out fine and it does. I really enjoyed reading this, and I’ll definitely check out whatever S.A. MacLean comes up with next.
(Also: this book does queernormative societies quite well; Aila goes out with a guy, and then goes out with a girl, and it’s all good, and there’s a trans character and her transness is revealed in the most natural and easy and clean way I think I’ve ever seen in a book before. I’ve talked about this before, but trans side characters can be tricky, and there’s no Sekrit Penis moment in this book and the reveal, such as it is, comes in what felt like perfectly natural dialogue. Extra points for all of that.)
(*) I can imagine a reader who feels like Aila is kind of A Lot. I am not that reader.)
Okay, but … giraffes
Feeding the giraffes was awesome, although it turns out they’re super skittish right now, because they’re not terribly used to people yet, so a lot of the experience involved being Very Patient and standing Very Still as an animal that could kick me into the upper stratosphere if it wanted to thought very carefully about whether I was too scary to accept lettuce from. Moving your arm slightly and watching as a sixteen-foot-tall, 3000-pound monstrosity turns and flees from your presence is kind of hilarious. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen giraffes run. It does not look right.
My training on Monday was, surprisingly, pretty good.
Everything else in the last few days has sucked, and I had my first shit day at work of the school year today as I showed up in a bad mood and absolutely could not shake it. This situation with the teacher who was attacked last week is becoming a bigger problem by the day. I’ve also taken on two additional classes– more on that later, as I don’t think I’ve actually talked about it around here yet– and right now my exhaustion level is back to first week of school levels. I didn’t want to skip three days in a row, though, so … giraffe.
It is Sunday and I am not at work
We went to the zoo today. I haven’t been to the zoo in two damn years, and I love our zoo. I am probably going to have a sunburn on the top of my bald-ass head tomorrow and I feel good about it.
They have two peacocks; they just let them wander around.
A brief note about the dog, if you’ll indulge me again a bit: you may recall that while I was finishing up that piece yesterday the doorbell rang and I didn’t answer the door. That wasn’t an invention for the piece; it actually happened. My wife and son were out of the house for a little while and they got home just a few minutes later.
There was a vase of fresh flowers on our doorstep, delivered to us on behalf of our vet’s office. The dog had been gone for maybe three hours. Guys, if you live anywhere near me, and you have pets, you could do a lot worse than letting Clayview Animal Clinic take care of them.
Tomorrow should be an exciting day: I actually get to find out what my job is! I’m not teaching this year, as you’re probably aware if you’ve been paying attention, and while I know the broad outlines of the new position it’s not necessarily immediately clear what I’ll be doing on a day-to-day basis. For example: the first day of school? I have absolutely no idea what I’ll be doing right now on the first day of school, or really even the first couple of weeks. I mean, I’m on the administrative team in a school; there’s gonna be stuff to do if I decide I wanna do things (and I do,) but none of those things will be my job. The next couple of days I’m in training for my specific position and I’ll be much clearer on what my day-to-day job is going to look like by the time it’s over.
So yeah. I’m excited.
What’s your week looking like?
Just to make sure we’re clear…
…this is what a chimpanzee can do to a small creature that it finds in its enclosure and doesn’t want there. I suspect there is not much weight difference between a toddler and a large raccoon. There is, however, an enormous difference between the strength level of a chimpanzee and a silverback gorilla:
I just figured, judging from the chatter I’ve seen on the internet today, that this might be a useful thing to think about.
We went to the zoo yesterday
I only took a few pictures, but why not, they make for a good Monday morning post. The zoo previously had two elderly Amur tigers who both passed away in the last year from natural causes. They just recently replaced them with four, effectively, kittens. They’re all two years old, and apparently the tiger people are having fits from having to adjust from two geriatric tigers to four energetic babies.
Well, not so much “energetic” today, I guess. Witness the Triangle of Tiger! The fourth one was around the corner.
Flamingo. They have a dozen or so but this one was close by.
And a peacock. The zoo has two peacocks and they’re allowed to just wander around as they see fit. Both of them were hanging around the food court trying to steal french fries. It was pretty cool.
Note that this isn’t typical behavior for them, which is kind of surprising. If I was a bird and I knew there was easy food at the food court all the time, I’d be there more often, but I’ve never seen the peacocks there before.
That time I pissed off a squirrel
It was lovely yesterday; last week was basically the first nice week of the year, and it’s projected to be seventy degrees tomorrow. So we decided to take the boy to the zoo, which was open for all of three hours to people with memberships.
I like our zoo. It’s nothing enormously special as zoos go, but for a town this size I’d say they do pretty well, and most of the animals were at least out of their enclosures and hanging out where people could look at them. The emus were booming, too, which is always a neat thing, because I think emus are neat animals and they’re startlingly loud.
But I don’t actually want to talk about any of the regular animals. We were walking past the anteater (who came outside to piss as we walked past; every time we go to this zoo, we get to see the anteater take a piss) and past the (empty) macaw enclosure when I heard a weird noise from overhead. I thought at first it was the macaw, but after looking around a bit more we realized it was a squirrel.
A squirrel, in a tree, busily eating a Styrofoam cup. The odd sound of squirrel teeth on Styrofoam was what I’d heard.
Um.
“You’re not supposed to be eating those,” I called out to the squirrel. He dropped the cup.
Feeling proud of myself– I had communicated with a squirrel!– I went to pick the cup up. And the squirrel barreled down the tree, chattering at me angrily, and causing me, for the first time in my life, to consider how interested I was in starting shit with an overgrown rat.
My son, of course, was nearby, and terribly interested in the squirrel. The squirrel was screeching at me for getting too close to his coffee cup, and bystanders were starting to take an interest in the whole thing. I mean, this cup is gonna kill him if he swallows too much of it. I’m a person, squirrel! I’m smarter than you! You don’t want to eat this thing!
Holy crap, can squirrels do effective death glares.
Anyway, eventually, once the I’m-not-joking standoff ended, with the squirrel deciding there were too many people around and retreating a few feet back up the tree, I kicked the half-eaten cup (which appeared to have contained hot chocolate, which explained why he was eating it) away from him and picked it up.
Holy hell was that the wrong thing to do.
About thirty feet away from the squirrel’s tree is a life-size statue of a Galapagos tortoise that little kids are encouraged to climb on. My son, being three, wanted to climb on the tortoise, and my wife wanted to take his picture. I couldn’t find a trashcan nearby, so I just sort of stood near them, holding the cup.
The squirrel came down the tree, stood about twenty feet away from us, and just glared. The whole time. Seriously. He’d have killed me if he could.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never made a nonhuman animal that mad at me before.
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