The Fourth

Most of Susan's clients are out of town for the fourth of July, and so she mostly had the day off. She managed to squeeze one client in during the morning, and then we were going to go off to Idaho Falls for the day.

This was kind of a relief for us. We are moving at the end of the month, so when I weed whacked our internet connection I decided it wasn't worth getting a new one. Then our entire computer died. So for two computer bums like Susan and I, anything to do this week is great!

Stop one was the Idaho Falls Zoo.

We spent about two hours looking at their exhibits. The weather has finally broken so it was a more Idaho like 85 degrees, so we thoroughly enjoyed our time. If you're curious, behind us there is a demoiselle crane. It looks like this:



Lowlights of the trip included the kookaburra which was not making it's rollicking laughter that you can usually hear all the way across the zoo. Also the otter exhibit was closed. Definitely lame. But mostly  the red squirrels. Why? Because red squirrels look mostly exactly like gray squirrels. Except they look awesome because they're red! So every time I see them I think, man why do we have gray squirrels and not cool squirrels.

Highlights. The goeldi's monkeys.


These little guys jumped like four feet across their cage from one tiny little branch to the next. The coolest is was when it looked like they were doing parkour zapping back and forth across five or six branches. Also there was a red panda that always looked like it was smiling. And a mama and baby lemur. The baby lemur was hanging onto the mother, as baby lemurs do, I learned from the very helpful zoo sign. Well while we watched mama lemur decided it was time for baby lemur to get going. So while baby lemur is hanging on, mama lemur is scraping baby lemur off her fur. Well she finally wins, and then baby lemur all wobbly-and-cute-baby-like takes two or three steps, looking ready to fall off the branch, and then jumps back into the fur of mama lemur who seemed happy to have baby lemur back. Lemur walking lessons. That's totally what I saw at the zoo.

Then we were off to BBQ.

The zoo is actually inside a giant park, so Susan and I drove around until we found an empty grill under some shade and set up camp. Did I forget the paper plates, utensils, spatula, and hot pad. Yes. Did we figure out how to make hot dogs on a grill anyways. Yep. We mostly just sat around and enjoyed the nice day. We started reading Fablehaven, which is okay as a book, but Susan and I went to go see the author on our first date, so we always meant to get around to reading it. About six we moved to an adjacent park where we thought we could see the Idaho Falls firework show.

We found a perfect spot, and enjoyed the rest of the evening reading and playing rummy. Then it was time for the show. Now this is the biggest firework show west of the Mississippi, in terms of most fireworks exploded, so legit. And 150,000 people go to it, which is why we stayed at a park a little ways away. So it got dark and we couldn't really see the show, and we were bummed because we figured our view just stunk. But the church next to the park started setting off their own fireworks. Over the next half hour they must have set off fifty or more. It was a small, but really nice low key show, for our really nice low key day. And we left. Turns out the big show hadn't started yet, because there was a search and rescue on the river delaying it. Oh well.