Pneumonochrome

One of my hobbies is reading web comics. There’s some great stuff out there. One that I enjoy more often than not is xkcd. The geek jokes alone are of epic quality. Occasionally, something he mentions in the comic intrigues me though. Today’s post is one of those times. A recent comic (the penultimate one, as of this posting) was about geohashing. I’ve heard of geocaching before, and this is kind of a geek version of that, though it lets us get our geek on and meet people, as he’s designated a time (Saturdays at 4:00 pm) for xkcd readers to visit that day’s geohash coordinates and meet up.

We might have to do that one of these weeks and see if there’s anyone else in my area that is geeky that way.

So, today we’re at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.  This is a pretty cool place, it’s like a zoo with huge animal pens.  We spent all day walking around looking at different animals and got to see a number of cool animals.  We saw Cheetahs, White Rhinos, Hippos, Lions, Tigers, Buzzards, Macaws, Andean Condors, Okapi, Giant Elands, Dik-Diks, Duikers, Meerkats, Hawks, Harpy Eagles, Eagle Owls, Bald Eagles, and we finished off the day by visiting the California Condors.  These animals have a really cool history, and were a fun way to end the day.

Messy likes to take pictures, lots of pictures, so I understand wanting pictures, especially of an animal that was almost extinct 20 years ago.  So, anyhow, we got there and there was this woman standing there with her camera in one hand, talking to the Condor in this kind of high-pitched voice that just grated on my nerves anyway, saying things like, “Come on, man, turn around.”

She was saying this because the bird was sitting on a branch 6 feet from the balcony we were on, facing to our left, with his head tucked behind his body, preening the outside of that wing, and taking his sweet time about it.

The woman kept whining at the bird, and snapping her fingers over and over and over and over until I wanted to take her camera and throw it off the balcony just to get her to shut up.

Messy, on the other hand just stood there, patiently holding her camera up, and occasionally taking a picture anyway.

Finally, after 15 or 20 minutes of the snap-whine fest, the Condor pulled his head around to the other side of his wing, and we all shot pictures really quick.  I said, “Nice, what a good picture.”

And this lady says, “I’ve been waiting for so long to get that picture!”

And the Condor takes a rather forceful dook, shooting a stream of bird dung feet behind it as soon as she had finished talking.

And Messy, without missing a beat, says to this lady, “Did you get a picture of that?”

I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud.

We are visiting San Diego right now, Benjie is with his grandparents, and we’ve got a week to relax. Today we visited Old Town, and among other things, we visited El Camp Santo, the historic cemetery there. I guess that it became quite an expansive cemetery, but the town grew inward, encroaching on it, so they moved the wall of the cemetery inward, without relocating all the graves. They discovered graves under the street and sidewalk that pass next to the city using ground penetrating radar, and have started putting markers where the are. We noticed them as we walked down the sidewalk and took some pictures. I’d post them, but we forgot to bring the cable to pull the pictures off the camera, so it’s going to have to wait until we get home. It was kind of cool to see, though.

Okay, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2. I wanted to wait for a while to make sure that all the plugins I like to use would work, and that the bugs were out of the upgrade process. It seems that both of those things have happened, so I upgraded. The only small issue I’ve got is that it seems that Flickr badges won’t display in WordPress 2.x right now. I’m not sure why, as I don’t know enough php and HTML to really figure it out at this point. However, in the process of investigating the problem a little, I discovered that my pages don’t validate when Flickr badges are there anyway, so I won’t be posting flickr badges here any more.

For the pictures from my and Messy’s California vacation over spring break, visit my Flickr Gallery on the site and select the “California Vacation” Set.

FYI, there is a link to my Flickr gallery on my side bar under “Cool Sites.” Granted, this may be a little presumptuous, but I still think it’s a cool site. So there.

We went to church at one of the two branches in Addis Ababa today. My word, these people are soft spoken. I didn’t hear a word that was said, and I was sometimes only a couple of feet from the translator. They must think we are the loudest people in the world.

After church we visited the “Missionaries of Hope/Mother Theresa home for the sick and dying destitute.�? Oh, my. It was like a concentrated version of the worst cases we saw in the village. One man was as thin as I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. His arms were maybe 1.5 inches in diameter, and his legs at the thigh were no more than 2.5 inches. We saw a room full of mothers who were critically ill being treated in a room with no working lights at all, children with disabilities (including the worst case of hydroencephalitis I’ve ever seen), everything you could imagine in buildings that looked like they’d just been gutted out and then moved into.

They said people were brought to them by Police, hospitals (when their family abandoned them), friends and relatives, etc. Sick people stay only until they are well, then are back on the streets (most of the time) because they just don’t have room for people who aren’t sick. I don’t feel nearly so bad about my job over the course of the last week now. The conditions are poor at best, and they have a clinic that serves a population of about 600-700 people with 2 doctors. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to complain about case loads in American. After that, we visited a Franciscan Sisters of the Heart of Christ orphanage. The conditions here were much better. The children were in good health, clean, and seemed happy overall. The two sisters who run the orphanage were SO good with the children and SO happy in what they were doing. It was refreshing to see children in fairly good shape for once, and to be able to smile and talk with them instead of just checking for triage marks and beckoning them in or sending them away.

After that we went back to the Sheraton, checked out, ate, said good-byes to the group members who weren’t leaving yet, and headed for the airport. When we got there, Dr. Burton found he didn’t have his ticket, so the rest of us checked in and waited. After about an hour he was re-issued a ticket, and now we’re waiting to board the plane and start the 25 to 30 hour journey home. It will be a relief to get back home, see my wife again, and get back to a much less stressful job.