San Diego Zoo and the best Italian meal I've ever had

I was a kid whose television entertainment was heavily weighted toward PBS: Sesame Street, Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, Reading Rainbow, Wishbone, 3-2-1 Contact, you name it. And when I think of the animal-education segments on those shows, it seemed like the San Diego Zoo was always featured as the go-to organization for experts. So when I got the chance to spend time in San Diego, visiting that famed zoo was near the top of my list of must-do activities.

And boy, is it a zoo. You can definitely spend most or all of a day exploring it, especially if the weather is nice and your companions are up for walking and have long attention spans. Our weather was pretty crummy: the temperature didn't get above 61°F, and it stayed gray and overcast all day. I was cold enough to contemplate buying a sweatshirt in the gift shop, but I ended up toughing it out.

The Zoo is definitely built to take full advantage of San Diego's (usually) nice weather: all exhibits were outdoors. Having visited the Indianapolis Zoo many times over the years, which encloses many of its exhibits indoors (i.e., Deserts Building, Oceans Building) to enable year-round visitation, this definitely struck me as different. Even all of the restaurants and cafes were outdoors, which on a chilly day when you're looking to get warm was a little inconvenient.

I also noticed that the Zoo features primarily land (and air) animals, with very few water-centric creature exhibits. I wonder why? Could it be because of the area's naturally dry climate, or perhaps because of its proximity to water-focused SeaWorld?

One exhibit I found particularly interesting blended exotic and domestic animals. The Zoo has at least two cheetahs, and each of them has a domestic dog buddy—an "animal ambassador"—in the exhibit with them. They've found that when raised together from a young age, cheetahs and dogs can bond very well, and the dogs help to keep the cheetahs calm. They all looked pretty chill to me!

I think this was also the first time I've seen a peacock displaying its tail in full glory. He seemed like he might have been a little confused, though, because he spent most of his time flirting with the wall behind him, then fending off the native ducks between us. Confused or not, he made quite a statement.

The giant pandas were definitely the headlining act of this show. They're the only ones in captivity in the United States, so I did really enjoy seeing them. They had two males out for us to see, and a female off-exhibit because they were monitoring her to see if she's pregnant.

These two pandas were much smaller than I pictured. When I hear "giant panda," I picture a bear about the size of a grizzly bear or polar bear. But these were much, much smaller (and I do think they're full-grown), and looked like they'd be small enough to just about sit on your lap.

One of the pandas was sleeping, but the second guy looked like he was enjoying watching us as much as we enjoyed watching him. That, or he was so oblivious to visitors anymore that he was just chilling and enjoying his bamboo.

We called it a day around 4:30, dragged our tired feet back to the car, and warmed up. For dinner, we ventured into San Diego's Little Italy. When I make it back to San Diego again, this is an area that I really want to spend more time exploring.

The area felt truly authentic, especially owing to the old men calling across the street to each other in Italian. We read in a blog post on Design*Sponge that you could pretty much choose any Italian restaurant on India Street and get a great meal. So we consulted our Yelp apps, looked at some menus, and picked one that looked good, Trattoria Fantastica. And let me tell you, this was the best Italian meal I have ever had. No joke. And I'm a girl who loves her Italian food, and always has. I had the Contadina, and my friend, Sarah Lynn, had the Lasagna. All through dinner, we kept pausing in our conversation to say things like, "Oh my god, this is so good!" We both cleaned our plates.

After dinner, we walked down the street a bit and saw some great-looking local shops that had closed for the evening, and we wished we'd discovered them earlier. I'll just have to go back!

The finale for the great day and evening—which happened to also be my birthday—was a treat of gelato right next door to the restaurant. Oh so good.

The weather in San Diego may not have been ideal, but I had a fantastic time and enjoyed exploring the area. I can't wait to go back and see more of California.

San Diego on Dwellable

Feline family

I will never, ever, ever understand how some people can unceremoniously dump an animal and absolve themselves of further responsibility by just driving off. It makes me absolutely sick.

That's probably the strongest sentence I've ever used to start a post here, but it makes me pretty angry.

I understand that having animals can become quite expensive (which is just one of the reasons Buster is still "my" dog and I haven't yet gotten a dog that is solely my own). I understand that they require attention and space, and if you're not entirely enthused about them, they can feel like a burden. I get it.

But to go to the effort of driving an animal somewhere, kicking it out of the car, then driving off to forget about it... it's disgusting.

When you live in a more isolated area, dumping of animals seems to become more noticeable. For one, with fewer houses nearby, fewer domesticated animals randomly wander onto your property.

And if a mother cat with four kittens appear all at one time, you know they've been dumped.

My aunt and uncle recently had these five cats dumped at their house. Luckily for the cats, they're people who like cats and were willing to give them shelter and food. The kittens, when they arrived, were just a few weeks old; they were barely off their mother's milk.

I'm not interested in having a cat right now (I'm much more a dog person), but if I were, I'd take one of these little guys.

To the people who dumped them, I give you one word:

Karma.

135/365 Mouse in the house

I've reached a milestone that I didn't realize existed: I've encountered my first mouse inside the house.

I'd rather have continued living in peace without reaching this milestone, but I suppose it's bound to happen, right?

I found the evidence first in the drawer under my oven where I store baking pans, of all places. I went to pull out a baking sheet and found scraps of shredded paper towel that I knew hadn't been there a few days earlier!

So, after a thorough washing of all those pans, the hunt was on! First task: buy traps. I chose the old-fashioned spring-trap method primarily because I didn't want it to eat poison then curl up and die somewhere where I couldn't remove it -- which inevitably would have made the entire house smell for days. Yuck.

Bait: peanut butter.

I set two traps to start, hoping that I was hunting just one mouse and not multiples. [I know from personal experience, having had pet mice as a kid, that when girl mouse meets boy mouse and they fall in love, babies come by the dozen -- and very quickly!]

After the first night, I checked the traps and soon learned that I had a crafty mouse on my hands: the traps were licked clean, peanut butter gone, and the traps still set.

Darn it!

I reloaded the bait, set a third trap, went to work, and found a repeat of the same scene when I got home. Three clean traps, all still set.

Darn it again!

This continued through the next morning. At this point, I felt as though I was just giving the mouse a nice meal of high-quality protein. What I hoped was that he'd start getting sloppy. Get lazy, don't be so careful, and be a little less gentle when prying that peanut butter off the bait paddle. After work on the third day, I stopped at Lowe's and got two new kinds of traps. Perhaps it just required a different weapon? Perhaps my cheap traps from Dollar General weren't sensitive enough?

What happened next was exactly what I expected: I got home from my Lowe's run, and wouldn't you know it but one of my original traps had finally worked. He got sloppy. Success!

I've left some baited traps set in the kitchen just to make sure there wasn't more than one, and the coast looks clear. I now have seven mouse traps -- of three different designs -- ready to go for the next time.

Camera: Canon 40D with 60mm macro lens and 430EX Speedlite, 1/125s, f/4 at ISO 320

129/365 Playing squirrels

My yard is a playground for squirrels. While watching these two, I learned that the trees are close enough that they can jump from one to the next without touching the ground.

I started watching them through one window on the north side of my house. I grabbed my camera, waiting for them to chase each other back to my visible side of the tree, but they disappeared. It wasn't until I saw their shadows that I realized they had made it to a tree two away from where they were.

How cool would it be to have the trees be your playground like that? To not have to return to the ground unless you needed to, and to have the confidence to leap from one (small!) branch to the next.

They looked like they were having great fun, but I wished they'd hang out a little closer so I could photograph them some more!

Camera: Canon 40D with 70-300mm IS lens, 1/250s, f/8 at ISO 100 at about 12:00 p.m.

126/365 Koi in a frozen pond

This shot makes me think of those scenes in natural-disaster movies where people are trying to a) run from a thundering avalanche, b) escape the lava flow from an erupting volcano, or maybe c) gather a few last gulps of air before their car sinks under water.

Maybe I've watched one too many action movies?

I was photographing a pond when I happened to look down and see this school of vibrant koi near the surface of the unfrozen water. The color took me by complete surprise. (I think I actually said "oh!" audibly. Good thing no one was nearby!) I love finding reserves of bright color in the winter!

Camera: Canon 40D, 1/125s, f/8 at ISO 100 at about 12:45 p.m.

62/365 Growing baby birds

Much to the chagrin of Mama Bird, I peeked in on these newly hatched baby birds that are nesting in Mom and Dad's grapevine.

Mama B couldn't have chosen a better photo-accessible site for me if we'd chatted beforehand. I was able to peer in at the nest without touching any of the plant around it. She never stopped squawking at me from a few feet away, so I made my photo as fast as I could, then left them alone.

Until they can fly, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that the babies stay in the nest and away from the jaws of the Great White Hunter.

Camera: Canon 40D with 60mm macro lens, 1/125s, f/4 at ISO 125 at about 6:00 p.m.

39/365 Greener grass

Though I've never owned goats myself, I've always found them to be humorous animals. This is mostly due to their curious, intelligent, explorative nature.

It seems like whenever I pass a farm that has goats, there is always at least one animal standing on top of its shelter. They're known for being very skilled escape artists; if there is a weak spot in your fence, they'll find it and get out.

Some of them, like the one pictured here, are quite cute. I passed this guy on a walk, and he came right up to the fence to say hello. He quickly discovered that the grass on my side of the fence looked preferable to what he had, so he promptly stuck his head through a hole and got down on his knees to chow down.

It wasn't the head-through-the-fence that struck me, but the kneeling that made me laugh. Clever! I hope his lunch was worth the effort.

Camera: Canon PowerShot SD1000 at about 11:00 a.m.

180/365 Meet Roman

Meet Roman.

A regal name for a sweet dog who has been lovingly deemed the "anti-terrier" by his owners/parents/pack leaders.

Roman is the four-legged child of my aunt and uncle in Michigan, and I met Roman for the first time last weekend when they donated their treadmill to my young-start-up cause.

A Cairn Terrier, Roman was quiet, well behaved, and admirably stayed out of everyone's way as we were moving heavy objects from location to location. He preferred to observe the action from a few feet away.

I had my camera with me, so you know there's no way I could resist photographing him. When it came to capturing him in the sunshine, his dark fur, nose, and eyes presented a completely opposite situation than when I photograph Buster in the same light. You see why, yes?

Camera: Canon 40D, 1/250s, f/5.6 at ISO 100 in direct sunlight at about 1:00 p.m.