I'm Pretty Sure I Saw Every Animal in the San Diego Zoo

And that's a low count, because I saw most of them twice, some of them three times, and a few of them four or more times because we could not figure out a single workable path to see everything the most efficiently and we kept finding ourselves in Africa Rocks. I swear to all the gods that if a zoo would ever just draw me a nice map of the shortest walking path through all their sites, I would make that zoo my entire personality.

Anyway, here's our first pass through Africa!

Here's the California Condor. My partner had to write a report about the California Condor way back in elementary school, and he should look that teacher up and thank her because he still remembers the whole thing. DDT was so bad!

Fun fact: a couple of weeks after this zoo visit, my partner, the older kid, and I went on another trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon--we've packed in so much travel this summer, yay! Anyway, while we were at the Grand Canyon, the kid and I were SURE we saw a California Condor flying overhead, and we were so excited. Unfortunately, upon further examination of my photos, we decided that what we actually saw was most likely... a turkey vulture. 

Ah, well. A real Grand Canyon turkey vulture is also a good get!

I don't really love zoos as a rule, although thanks to my kid who loves zoos THE MOST I feel like I have been to every zoo in every city we've ever visited, but honestly? I kind of loved the San Diego Zoo. It has so many animals, and most of them genuinely seemed happy as clams, calm and content or busy doing animal stuff. 

There were also so many really terrific animals, like California condors and giant pandas and capybaras!

There was an entire herd of capybaras just bopping around doing their own capybara business, and I was obsessed:

I feel like we passed maybe 3-5 different flamingo habitats, though. It's like everywhere they had some empty space, they just put some flamingos in it. That's a decorating hack for you!

There IS a non-zero chance that there are not 3-5 separate flamingo enclosures and it was just me circling the sole flamingo habitat five times, though. I kept getting so lost and somehow I always kept finding myself back at Africa Rocks!

Every time I see a cheetah now, it reminds me of the time the kids and I missed by just a couple of days being at the Indianapolis Zoo when a cheetah escaped. I couldn't find a news source that reported all the details I heard, but the local story is that the zoo had just introduced two new cheetahs (from the San Diego Zoo, of all places!) into their cheetah habitat, which is below the level of the walkways and relies solely on high walls to keep the cheetahs inside. 

That was fine for the resident cheetahs, but apparently one of these new guys, after getting the lay of the land, simply hopped up the wall and settled in for a snooze in some bushes next to the walkway. A visitor actually alerted the zoo staff but their alert was more along the lines of "It's so sweet that the cheetahs get to roam free! Are we allowed to pet them if they come up to us?"

The staffer was apparently all, "Um, tell me more...", upon which they were led to and shown the contentedly snoozing cheetah, upon which they issued a zoo-wide lockdown until dude was put back in his area and now the high walls also have a high fence on top of them.

But that's just the story that I heard! Anyway, look for me in the news as the first person to have their face eaten off by a cheetah if I ever see one snoozing in some bushes in a zoo, because I'm convinced that they're gentle. They have dog friends! They walk on leashes!

I'm sorry to say that this jaguar did not look particularly happy. I've read that a lot of big cats don't do well in zoos, but I've also read that if an animal is ever in an unsuitable zoo environment long enough to develop a coping behavior like pacing, then even if it's later given an environment that theoretically meets all its behavioral and sensory needs, it will still exhibit those coping behaviors. So you can't really just walk up and evaluate an animal's habitat without knowing its history. 

Anyway, stop poaching jaguars and turning their habitat into farmland, I guess, and then they can all live in the rainforest and hunt those adorable capybaras like they're supposed to!

The koalas were also doing absolutely fuck-all with their day, but honestly they seemed thrilled about it:

The Asian leopard also seemed happy hanging out on its catwalk:

Found a dinosaur tree! I love myself a cycad:

Back at Africa Rocks for the umpteenth time, this bee-eater got itself a mealworm:

I loved the level of educational signage here. I've been to a couple of zoos that didn't even have the Latin name of each animal posted--gasp, right? Extra annoyingly, the first time that happened I had actually arrived armed with a giant stack of DIY animal info cards that I'd laminated and ring-bound and planned for the kids to use for one of those giant, all-day homeschool projects we used to do... except that the whole thing relied on each animal having its Latin name. So much for binomial nomenclature as the backbone of scientific classification, I guess!

This zoo had alllll its scientific names locked down, and had other cool signage telling us stuff like how they chose the plants for some exhibits and what animals lived in Southern California 12,000 years ago:

You can't escape those flamingos!

I really wanted to scritch this Galapagos tortoise under its chin:

I've never seen a Komodo dragon so busy! It kept moving between investigating the big kid--

--and energetically tearing apart a pig carcass:

At the hippo habitat, three literal grown-ups were having the biggest fight about how many hippos there were. There actually are two hippos in this below photo, but every time a hippo would pop its head up out of the water it would also look kind of like that and then some of the grown-ups would try to count that as two hippos while another grown-up said there was only one hippo but couldn't explain why it looked like two hippos, and then another hippo would pop its head up and mess their count up even more, etc.

The kid was all, "Some people never learned about refraction and it shows."

Another thing I liked about the San Diego Zoo is that our basic admission ticket included stuff that you'd have to pay extra for at another zoo. Earlier in the day we took a double-decker bus tour around the zoo, which was honestly kind of meh but it was nice to sit down for a while. Late in the afternoon, though, the big kid and I finally got on the aerial tram, and omg that's where we spent the rest of our entire day. It was SO GOOD!

Not only did we finally get a hint of a breeze--as well as that glorious sensation of sitting down omg yay--

--but it turns out that seeing the zoo habitats from above is delightful beyond words. Here's the panda!

Looks like he wants to get back in his travel crate and go home for the night, lol:

I think these are mountain lions? I'm not even sure if you could see this perch of theirs from the ground:

I have decent zoo stamina, but after we'd been at the zoo for approximately nine hours (it was open for eleven!) I was staggering, and the overpriced zoo ice cream was starting to look better and better. Since we'd seen all the animals by that time (and all the African animals about four times), we decided that if we were going to have overpriced ice cream, we might as well have overpriced ice cream from a gourmet ice cream shop in San Diego proper, so we left the zoo and did just that:

Tomorrow, we go to the waterfront to see the historic ships!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures
• Day 3: San Diego Zoo

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

If You Want To LARP Little House You Should Just Do It

Actively homeschooling outside Laura's house in 2014!

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I didn't love it, but it gets 5 Stars from me because it's about Laura Ingalls Wilder. You evaluate your books the way you want, and I'll evaluate my books the way I want!

There’s a weird friction right off the bat in this book in which McClure states that she wants to immerse herself in the world of the Little House books, but enacts this desire partly by visiting the historical home sites of the author Laura Ingalls Wilder, and using that as the framing device of her narrative. It’s no surprise, then, that the friction never dissolves and McClure never really achieves the kind of closure she seems to seek, because the Little House books are fiction, and cannot be transcribed onto these factual places the way McClure seemed to want. It’s true that Wilder was extremely skilled at description, and that many (most?) of her descriptions are based on what she observed in her own life, but that doesn’t make the books biographies. And McClure kept choosing the most fact-based, “intellectual” and biographical activities like site tours and pioneer skills and feeling disappointed and disenchanted that they didn’t get her back into Laura’s “world,” rarely indulging in the thematic world-building activities like cosplay and LARPing, even though I think she’d have LOVED cosplay and LARPing if she’d just let herself relax. It’s kind of like the way she wanted to be a fan of the books didn’t mesh with the way she thought she “should” be a fan?

LARPing in a prairie bonnet at the Ingalls homestead in 2014

It would have been interesting if McClure had researched more about the types of fans that the Little House books attract, although just in her travels she did manage to suss out two types I’m also very familiar with: fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers and fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers. Those kinds of fandom are very analytically interesting, and I would have loved to have seen an analysis of why they each chose to pin their own ideals onto Laura. Spoiler alert: it’s nothing Laura did! Like yes, for the Doomsday preppers, at least, Laura’s later Libertarian leanings would probably appeal, but the preppers are fans not because of that, but because they fetishize the Manifest Destiny type of pioneer fiction that makes homesteading look easy. But umm, guys? It looks easy because it’s written for CHILDREN. That’s why all those weekend warrior preppers that so unnerved McClure kept going on and on about “canning” butter--”canning” butter (which I keep putting in irony quotes because if you actually eat “canned” butter you will get food poisoning) is a canning-adjacent craft project the same way that Fox News is a news-adjacent propaganda channel. It’s brainless and ineffective but it’s easy and looks great, and since the fundamentalist Christian Doomsday preppers are essentially just playing pretend, that’s all they need.

Homeschool field trip to Laura's Missouri house. Everything inside was so wee!

The Little House fandom among fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers is a little harder to unpack, but ultimately it, too, requires no close reading of the literature, but instead a vibes-heavy version of it, the same way that most contemporary fiction and films set in the Medieval period reflect very little actual historical fact or detail, but a whole lot of “Medieval” vibes. Also see: “Amish” romance. The Little House books read through a fundamentalist Christian homeschool lens are all about patriarchy, heteronormative gender roles, nationalism, and the outward manifestation of virtue evident in obedience and hardship. Pioneer-era skills are seen not as the complicated, labor-intensive work that they were but instead as proof of “simplicity,” “simple living,” “simple times,” and whatever other euphemisms they can think of to dog whistle anti-intellectualism. That’s why a homeschooling parent, as evidenced in McClure’s brief interview with one, generally has trouble vocalizing their intent in studying the Little House books, the point of them in their homeschool curriculum, or even the bare bones reasoning for why they make a good immersive unit study for children--it’s rarely more complicated than that they want to role-play Little Gender Roles on the Prairie with their kids.

a genuine hay twist to see us through the Long Winter!

Tangent to the book review, but speaking as the type of homeschooler who had the kids building backyard trebuchets and not the type of homeschooler who named them after Bible characters, the Little House books DO make an excellent, immersive unit study for any age of homeschooler, and an excellent lens through which to study US history and geography. It’s still prairie bonnets and butter churns, but with context and reference books! You do tend to do a lot of activities *with* the Christian survivalists, but you are not *of* them, you know?

I’m sorry, but I’m not buying McClure’s eventual conclusion/explanation that her obsession with Little House is her way of processing the trauma of her mother’s death. Like, her mom wasn’t even that into Little House? I understand that it’s more about how little Wendy felt back then when her mom was alive, but even that wasn’t about her mom; it was about how unashamed little Wendy was in her fandom, and how unabashedly she enacted the role of fan. Like, Wendy, daydreaming self-insert Mary Sue LHOTP fanfic is a deeeeep dive, Girl! If only you’d had LiveJournal back then, you’d have been on top of the world!

McClure didn't love her faux covered wagon camping experience, but I had a ball during mine!

Rather than watching her walk awkwardly and indecisively through the world of Little House, fighting herself every step of the way, I’d rather have seen McClure spend that time trying to process the cringe nature of fandom, and pushing through the discomfort of being objectively not cool in order to enjoy something. Hey, I’ve been there! I was pretty embarrassed at my first Star Trek convention, even though I was enjoying all the activities and everyone else was happy and welcoming and unaffected. I just couldn’t get myself to turn off my own self-judgment and lean into the fun. That’s the kind of thing that I saw with McClure’s descriptions of her visits to the various tourist sites, when she was spending just as much time watching and evaluating fellow fans as she was interesting herself in the site. Girl, just be a fan and enjoy yourself! Put on the prairie bonnet and make a corncob doll! Put your hay twist out on the front room bookshelf where it belongs!

my little homeschooler making a cornhusk doll way back in 2011

Link me to your Little House Time Travel AU fanfic on A03 and I’ll leave you Kudos!

P.S. View all my reviews, particularly Prairie Fires and Caroline.

P.P.S. Want a couple of examples of properly educational ways that the Little House books can be used in homeschooling? Here's a reading comprehension activity for young kids using Little House in the Big Woods. Making taffy lets you do some Farmer Boy LARPing while building the practical life skills of cooking and following instructions. Use a map like this as inspiration to help kids draw and label their own line maps of Laura's travels. My favorite way to homeschool books, though, is to read them together and talk about them a lot and dive deeper into what the kids find interesting, building lots of historical, geographical, and literary context along the way.

P.P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Day #2 in Southern California: I Did Not Die in the Desert, But It Was Definitely a Possibility

If you wanted to die due to your own stupidity, the desert would actually be a great place to do it!

Also the mountains, if you're a stumbly type of person.

Fortunately the mountains weren't being particularly stumbly on this day, the day that we woke up early and drove up Palomar Mountain, leaving behind a misty, foggy morning at sea level and ending up in clear skies and views all the way to the misty, fog-covered Pacific Ocean. 

I felt super lucky that exactly one day of our trip overlapped with the summer dates of Palomar Observatory's guided tours, in my opinion an absolutely unmissable $5-per-person experience. But first, the visitor center!

Shout-out to strong female role model Margaret Burbidge!

You KNOW you want to know about all the potentially hazardous asteroids out there, as well as how close they're always coming to hitting us!

How many of these impact craters can you say you've visited? I've seen Berringer and Chicxulub!

I thought this display was super interesting--Palomar Observatory is still in heavy use, and this graphic shows the parts of the light spectrum that it can observe. All its projects, then, are stuff that fits within that specific spectrum--and there are so many projects!

A nice thing about showing up in time for the first tour of the day--and arriving pretty early for that, as well, ahem--is that we had the place nearly to ourselves, and there was nobody in the way of all my beautiful observatory views on the walk over to see it up close!

Selfie with Palomar!

I don't recall who was holding my proper camera for me while I was in selfie mode, but later I found this in my photo roll:

I am devastated to have to tell you that I did not see a SINGLE RATTLESNAKE ON MY ENTIRE TRIP! Later that day in the desert I was sure that every step I took would be the one that would bring me within rattling distance of a rattlesnake, but there was ne'er a rattle to be had, sigh...

And yes, I did take a new photo of Palomar Observatory at every step. It's just so pretty!

I don't know what I was really expecting for my $5 guided tour of Palomar Observatory, but it was honestly not getting to go INSIDE the observatory itself to get a close-up view of the telescope!

It's too big to actually see all in one frame, so my photos are just bits and pieces of the whole:

There's a giant mirror in there, a cage that an astronomer can sit in (but never does), and the machinery that moves the telescope.

Here you can kind of see the track that the dome rotates upon. There are physical marks all around the inside to align it properly:

We even got to go upstairs and walk on a catwalk circling the inside of the dome to see the telescope even closer:

Probably my most favorite photo of myself ever. I look so happy, lol!

During the tour, there were some guys who just KEPT asking questions about where one could conceivably go to see the telescope open up after dark. Such and such hiking trail, maybe? Or parking at this one particular campsite and walking onto the observatory grounds? Every time, the docent would be like, "There is NO way for the public to see the telescope in action. The observatory grounds close at dusk, there's no close vantage point from public land, etc., etc." Afterwards, walking back to the car, we were all, "Sooo... those old guys are going to try to sneak back into the observatory tonight, right?"

Although to be fair, omg I would LOVE to see the observatory doors open. That would have to be about 1000 times more magical than seeing them closed, and look how magical they look closed!

The beauty of having an activity that ends mid-morning is that you then still pretty much have the ENTIRE DAY to do more sightseeing! So even though the next place I wanted to go was another hour-plus away from the top of Palomar Mountain, we still arrived at the town nearest to it in time for an early lunch.

And then, it was off to see the giant sculptures of Galleta Meadows!

The sculptures are interspersed among the desert landscape north and south of the town of Borrego Springs, and when I was originally planning this part of the trip I thought we'd probably park the car somewhere central-ish--because I don't think we're meant to drive our rental car across the literal desert, ahem--and then just walk around between the sculptures that interested us.

And at first, that worked out great. Stepping out of the air-conditioned car into the 115-degree desert air felt like stepping into a clothes dryer--baking hot, with a baking hot wind blowing extra baking-hot air onto my face--and I LOVED it. It felt soooo warm and comfy, like sitting wrapped in a wool blanket in front of a hot fire on a cold night. All my muscles relaxed immediately, the tension that I constantly carry in my shoulders just immediately gone. I literally announced, "I LOVE it here. Omg I want to buy a house right here and live in the desert forever this feels so good."

So happy as a clam, I did walk between the first few sculptures, and then posed people to take their photos and took more close-up photos of the interesting way that metal rusts and the contrast of the sculptures and the landscape, etc. There were some great clouds. The sky was delightfully blue. The kid continued in her lifelong ambition to touch cacti and then regret it:

But I dunno, after a few minutes my body was still feeling great, all warm and cozy and happy, but my mind started to increasingly become filled with doom. I was plodding through the sand on the way to another giant sculpture in the distance, not tired at all and not sweaty and actually super comfortable, but inside my head I was like, "Huh. Am I about to die? I kind of think I'm about to die."

After a while, I was like, "Hey, does anyone else here feel like they are actually genuinely about to die?", and my partner was all, "Cool, cool, I'm gonna go bring the car around, okay?"

From then on, we drove between groups of sculptures...

Okay, based on the color of my skin in this photo, I probably was a little closer to dying than not dying. 

Surely this serpent is everyone's favorite sculpture. It was definitely mine!

Its spiny undulations actually continue across the road, and it's definitely the most interactive, with lots of serpenty bits to peek around and climb under:

Excepting the serpent, my favorite sculptures were in the slightly wilder, clearly less visited section south of town. Instead of bare ground, we drove down trails bordered by all kinds of cacti:

Because if you didn't get too close to a cactus or ten, were you even in the desert?!?

The best dinosaur sculptures are also in the south section:

I was trying to make it look like the dinosaur was about to eat me, but tbh I'm not sure what I actually got.

By late afternoon, we'd only seen about half of the 100+ sculptures, but we'd definitely put enough unsanctioned off-road miles on our rental car, so we headed back to civilization, taking a different route that led through some former gold mining towns turned tourist stops.

Another important trope: if you don't find yourself drinking a flight of local hard ciders, each one more unappealing than the last (come on--GRAPEFRUIT cider?!?), in a hipster cidery off the highway, are you even on vacation in California?

Tomorrow, we go to San Diego Zoo to see the pandas!

And here's the rest of our trip!

• Day 1: Cabrillo National Monument
• Day 2: Palomar Observatory and Borrego Springs sculptures

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!