Absolute Poppycock

I love the Memphis Zoo.  We’ve done so many cool things there over the years.  Ice skating, zoo camp, Zoo Boo, swimming in the fountain, seeing the panda and polar bears.  Abigail threw her first temper tantrum in the zoo just before she turned two.  Two summers ago, while the girls were at zoo camp, I set up a portable office in the Teton Trek lodge near the grizzly bears and worked looking out the window at the geyser fountain.  It is an amazing place!  My parent used to go there fifty years ago when they were freshmen in college.  Some of their first dates were walking through the animals’ enclosures.  Three generations of my family have enjoyed outings there.  I am amazed at how the zoo keeps getting better and better and offering more and more learning and fun!

In August, when Gracie, Abigail, and I were in Memphis for our last Cousin Camp week of the summer, we stopped by Bryant’s for some yummy biscuits and then headed over to the zoo.  The girls played in the fountain for a while and then my sister joined us after work.  She suggested that we stop by and feed the giraffes.

We paid a few dollars for some lettuce leaves and the girls timidly fed the two giraffes.

It was a very, very hot day and there weren’t too many people at the zoo, so the giraffe feeding station was pretty deserted.  Once the girls finished with their pieces, the trainers kept handing them more and more and giving the girls tips for different way to feed the giraffes.

The girls got braver and braver and by the end were letting the giraffes take the greens straight from their mouths just like the trainer showed them.

That much closeness to a giraffe wasn’t exactly up Gracie’s alley, so she passed on the mouth to mouth food exchange.  She was definitely up for cooling off in the geyser by the Teton Trek lodge, though!

I can’t wait to see what the zoo has in store for the future.  A  Zembezi River exhibit for the hippos and flamingos is coming soon and a nature trail with a raised boardwalk is in the works, too.  What a great place to spend the day (or a lot of days!)!

My dad loved macro photography. I remember the Christmas before he got sick that I went to visit my mother and him at their home outside of New Orleans. One morning, he told me to call walk down the long driveway and said about halfway down I’d see a tiny little pine tree sprouting up between the cracks in the concrete. I headed out with my camera and got a shot of the seedling…it was less than a quarter of an inch tall. I showed the picture to my dad and he smiled. “You know the thing I love about macro pictures?” I didn’t answer and he continued….”When you look through the camera for a macro picture, you see things that the rest of the world misses…” I think that sums up my dad – he often saw things that the rest of the world missed. Sometimes, I think that was a source of anxiety to him, but at least in the world of photography, it was a source of joy for him. I love taking pictures with my macro lens, but I never seem to take it out that often. So,I’ve decided that a least once a week, I’m going to put my lens on my camera and head out, searching for things that other people might miss.

I have two pictures for today.  I took the first one in our front yard this morning.  It’s a droplet of water on a branch of the permission tree.  I was shooting in manual mode and forget to change my exposure when I moved from the front of the tree to the back.  It was really overcast outside so the picture ended up being very under-exposed.  When I pulled it into Lightroom and tried to edit the exposure, I clicked something and the purple hues became more visible.  I liked the way it looked so I kept it that way!

The next one is from the beach.  The girls and I headed out there for beach clean-up as part of our church’s Great Day of Service.  The girls were really productive picking up trash.  After a while, they wanted to stop walking and play on the sand.  While they did that, I sat and looked at the microscopic world going on around me.  I saw this little guy hopping around.  To give you a perspective, he is about 1/100th of the size of my little toe.  I am pretty sure that he is a sand flea.  He is sitting on grains of sand.  Pretty cool.  I wish the picture were a little sharper, but macro photography, like anything else, is a skill that improves with practice!  Maybe by this time next year, I’ll have some awesome macro shots!

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