Earthshake!

We ended July as we had begun it, with a trip to Los Angeles. After Maya gets off work at about 7:00 in the evening we pile our stuff in the car and then head on to L.A. right then. It’s about 3 hours away so it is a reasonable trip to make, even starting at 8:00 at night. Plus there is always a lot less traffic! Most of the way between here and there is a two-lane (each way) highway but people here don’t seem to know how to use it! Right lane for slower traffic and left lane for faster traffic doesn’t seem to be part of how people on the Central Coast drive. Invariably when we travel U.S. 101 we get caught behind someone in the fast lane going the same speed or only marginally faster than traffic in the slow lane. We’ve even seen people going slower in the fast lane. The thing that amazes us over and over again about this is that these jack-ups appear to be totally unaware that they are jacking things up! Even when there are 10-15 cars behind them as they creep past a semi or when several people pass them on the right they just continue to drift along in their own little alternate reality where road rules don’t apply to them! So, at night we meet far fewer of these slow-downs.

Also at night we get to see the scary off-shore oil derricks that work in the Santa Barbara Channel. You can’t really see them in the daytime, but at night they are lit up bright and they shine across the water like monstrous robots fighting machines waiting for the signal to invade or maybe carnival islands where shady characters turn kids into donkeys. Except “shine” isn’t really the right word. They kind of glow with eerie light. We always think Matt’s sister, Sarah, and how much she wouldn’t like them. Seeing those oil drilling platforms means two things. That you get a little bit of a shiver and that you are getting close to L.A.

In L.A. we always like to do a little shopping. Not like high-fashion shopping at the stores that only a metropolis like L.A. has. More like the regular stores that L.A. has because it’s so large that are far and few between on the Central Coast. Like Target, for instance. The Target happens to be next to a California Pizza Kitchen so we all (us and Maya’s grandparents) went there for lunch. They got some kind a pizza with steak. It’s a favorite of theirs. We got a Vegetarian with Japanese Eggplant pizza. It had red pepper, red onions, broccoli and, of course, Japanese eggplants. It was the second best CPK pizza we’ve ever had! Across the street from those stores was a World Market and even though we do have one of those near us we wanted to look at this one too. We can hardly ever resist a World Market…

The Big Fun of this trip was our visit to the Santa Anna Zoo. We were on our way when an earthquake struck. Really! We were just leaving and had only gotten about two blocks from the house (the renovations are almost done) when it struck. Matt thought there was something in the road and Maya thought there was something wrong with the car, but then we came to the stop at the end of the street and saw that the poles for the street lights were shaking. There was no wind so then we knew we’d felt an earthquake. The shaking didn’t feel long. Maybe as much as ten seconds. Maybe. We don’t know if there’s any kind of protocol for just after a quake, but we looked up and down the street and no one else had stopped driving. Nothing looked to be damaged so we just turned onto the main street and went on. It was only later when family called to check on us that we even thought it might have been a big deal. It was a magnitude 5.4 which is considered strong, but there was no major damage. Some brick façades fell down right at the center of it and a few buildings had to be closed for repairs. Nothing major.

So the zoo… Maya knew it was small. Grandpa told us it was small but when we got there we found that it was… small. And part of it was closed! It may be bigger than the Charles Paddock Zoo, but it somehow didn’t feel as big or as open. The habitats were also not that impressive. But animals are almost always enjoyable to see. The zoo seems to specialize in primates. They have a whole Primate Row with 15 or more different types of monkeys and small apes. The gibbon was lounging but consented to have his picture taken. We looked at the Bolivian squirrel monkeys for quite a while. They are small and cute, but their expressions and movements are strangely familiar. We also liked the acouchi very much. We didn’t get a great picture and the ones available on-line are not as cute as the one we saw. He was sitting in a planter to the side of the cage. Just sitting there in the pot and watching everything. He looked like a lucky captain acouchi king.
In the South America yard we met a very pretty guanaco and across the path in the Australia yard was a very sad looking creature called a swamp wallaby. It had a look about like it had been a-moldering in the swamp until very recently. It looked sad and sort of lost like it had been pulled out of its happy moldering swamp and left to dry out in a strange, sunny world. Maybe that goes a bit too far. Maybe. We also found another bird for our theoretical future aviary. The scarlet ibis looks just fantastic. We sat down in the Colors of the Amazon aviary and talked about our green house slash solarium and how well grow orange trees even back in Kentucky and have birds and stream running through the place where we can relax and enjoy our exotic birds and our eccentric plants.

The last section of the zoo we visited had farm-type animals. We saw pigs and goats and geese and a donkey: farm-type animals. There was also a large, sad rabbit who just wouldn’t come out to talk to us. There used to be two rabbits in the enclosure but one of the names was scratched off. We think the remaining rabbit is just sad and lonely to have no other rabbit to talk to anymore. And we saw a totally crazy chicken covered in very hair-like feathers. Totally crazy.