Ruth And Dana Go To The Zoo!

After finals were done, Dana and I decided to go to the Hogle Zoo to see the "fantastical animals."

This is a Bornean Orangutan. He's a pretty cute bump-on-a-log.


Here are the free-range zoo animals. They have all the advantages of zoo animals but none of their weaknesses! They can't go quite as many places as the zoo-keepers, but almost.


Dana and the boring old elephant. All he did the whole time was stuff his face! (The Elephant, not Dana)


The animal voted "Most Interesting" on our trip was this baby orangutan. Yes, she's hanging by one arm. Eating bushes. With her toes. She liked chasing the peacock who had decided to move into their enclosure.


Here is the big daddy eating bushes. He's more civilized though, he's using his hands.


The giraffe house was pretty cool. It had an upper level. So instead of looking up at the giraffes, we got to look down on them...HA! Cool perspective. I liked the giraffe shaped garage doors

This is an artsy giraffe photo: Giraffe-y Sillouhette

Dana was enraptured by the gourmandizing giant tortoise. The tortoise really loved that grass platter.


We thought these Colobus Monkeys were pretty cute. They looked very wise...and sad.


Here is the majestic Western Lowland Gorilla. It spent most of the time determined not to let us see its face. We showed him!


We named this one the "Kramer Lemur." 'Nuff said.

No, the zoo did not have a house cat on display, this is some kind of Persian hunting cat...

This tortoise loved the camera, totally posed for me.


The Golden Lion Tamarins liked Dana's camera, they were very curious!

This orangutan didn't quite realize how very slippery her fur was...and then she started eating her feet. Yum!

This is the first porcupine I've every seen in real life, and they gave us a show! Someone thought it would be funny to put the meerkats in the same enclosure as the porcupines, and the meerkats decided to harass the porcupines. Here is a great video of the porcupine's defense dance!


By the end of the day we were very tired, like this fulfilled sloth. Happy day.

Greetings from the Great Vistas of the Land of Canyons!

(Buck Canyon and the White Rim, Canyonlands NP)

Recently we spent a day in Canyonlands National Park with a friend of ours. We visited the Island in the Sky region (the Northern half of the park).

It really was a land covered in canyons, mesas, buttes, and vistas.

This canyon looks like a dinosaur foot print. It is called Monument Basin:

Ruth and I had a great time. The weather was beautiful, and not very hot.

This was one thing I really wanted to see. It is called Upheaval Dome. Geologists are not sure weather this is a salt dome that has risen and the soft sandstone layers have eroded off, or if it is a meteor crater. Evidence seems to suggest both possibilities. It was impressive.

This is Mesa Arch with Ruth on top. The thing to note is that this arch sits on the edge of a thousand foot drop. How fun...

An odd landscape, a desert and snow capped peaks:

It was a good day and we had a lot of fun. The views were great and the weather was wonderful. This was a place that had a lot of character and very interesting landscapes.

A Random Post

Every year the Life SCience Museum on campus has a photo competition, and this year we decided to enter.

Ruth had 2 photos:


Dana had 3 photos:


and this one got an Honorable Mention and a ribbon



And here is a fun video of our cockroaches. Aren't they cute...

Hair, party, and defying gravity

So, we know it has been a while since we've posted... Here is a little of what we've been up to...

On the first day of spring I decided it was warm enough for me to cut my hair and donate it to Locks of Love. I was right. It was warm that day and it hasn't been warm since. So here is my hair before... and here is my hair after...

The good pictures from the front will be posted when we write about our trip to Canyonlands National Park.

On the 29th of March, Dana and I drove up to West Jordan to my Grandpa's Birthday party! We had a good time visiting and singing together. Grantpa has great lung capacity, he blew out all his candles on the first go. He even agreed to take a picture with us :-). We love you, Grantpa!

Other than that, we've just been doing our classes etc etc... Things are wrapping up which is nice. It turns out I'm only 3 classes away from getting an editing minor, so we get to think about if that is worth staying for... Dana's big paper of Mantids got accepted (with revisions) to a fancy shmanzy journal! Yay! So after finals are done, he gets to start working on that again.

My niece, Anna, has been trying to crawl, and has perfected the crawl-scoot but not yet the normal crawl. However, I thought it was worthwhile to consider her other abilities. After all, if she has learned to defy gravity,
does she really need to crawl?