Panda Farewell Party

 

Today Travalon did something really fun - he went to a farewell party at the zoo for one of the red pandas. They had brought in a new male after the previous one died, but he and the female are not interested in making baby pandas together, so they're going to send him to another zoo and bring in a different male panda. I get it, pandas - I wouldn't want to be forced to breed with some rando either. Travalon saw a couple of our Shamrock Club buddies there, and he made some videos of the pandas eating their special cake that were so cute that my coworkers were entranced. It got too late for me to make a movie of them tonight, but hopefully tomorrow. Here are some photos. 

The farewell card. Travalon signed it for both of us.

A hornbill who lives nearby.

As usual, the aardvark slept through all the excitement.

Travalon saw this event on Facebook, but Kathbert also alerted him to it. I, of course, could not attend because I was working on campus today. During my first meeting, I was annoyed by the sound of everyone's voice. My second meeting was canceled - yay! Just before my third meeting, I remembered that one person who attends is on leave, so I ran upstairs to 1111, the big FART 5 office, to ask her replacement to join us, but she was on a Teams call, and oddly nobody else was around. There were some sesame blondies, so I helped myself to one before going downstairs and sending her a message. She did get done with her previous call and joined our meeting, which only took 15 minutes, so then I could walk at lunch with Hardingfele before HER meeting. We walked in the Allen Centennial Gardens and saw fritillaries.

Hardingfele said, "I thought fritillaries were butterflies," and I said, "They are. But these are fritillary flowers. They're both named after a Latin word for a checkerboard." Or so I read. Then we saw one of those little white cabbage butterflies, and Hardingfele said, "Look - a fritillary!" but fritillary butterflies are big and orange with a checkerboard pattern on their wings. We did enjoy all the blooming verbenas. Everything is so early this year, which is surprising because it was cold for so long. I guess all the tornados woke the flowers up? 

One semi-miraculous thing did happen today: as I was on my way to work, I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be watering my neighbor's plants, but for some reason I hadn't done it in... well, I couldn't remember. Since before Easter? It was hard to concentrate at work, but I called Travalon before he left for the panda farewell party, and he went to our neighbor's place and said the plants were still alive. He took photos and sent them to me, and I could see they were a bit stressed but nowhere near dead. Phew!!! After work I watered them well and picked off all the dead leaves. Why did I suddenly forget to water them at the same time as my own plants? My subconscious must have been trying to tell me, because lately I've been thinking about how Ma Hat once gave me a peperomia cutting that I set behind another plant so I couldn't see it, and by the time I remembered, it was withered up and dead. Or when someone I don't even know that well dumped a tiny aquarium on me that had belonged to a friend of hers who died, someone I never met, and I totally forgot she had done it for over a week, and by the time I remembered, the fish were all dead. They were just little tetras - I'll bet goldfish would have survived. They're resourceful. Both of those events happened decades ago, and I thought I was more responsible now, but even last week when I watered my plants in the plant room, and then the plants in the kitchen, and then the plants in the loft, I thought, "Is that everything? Yes!" Wrong!

Famous Hat