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Happy Halloween!

Tycho!

Just some pics of Tycho I took earlier today.












Yes, yes I did buy him little doggie bat/devil wings.

Our Zoo is Worth Keeping

Summer Reading List....

Stolen from Liv's Blog:

The "Big Read" thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ for fun!



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (parts of it…. In college for class… does that count?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare --why are these lumped together? No, seriously, why? I’ve read some.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (ugh. HATE this book)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Read it, but didn’t like it. So. Very. Creepy.)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (“Angels and Demons” was much better!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, I’m clearly above average. Cool.

Black-footed Ferrets Give Birth

The black footed ferret, an endangered species, native to the North American Prairie, gave birth at the National Zoo on June 20th.

From the National Zoo's Website:

The National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center (CRC), in Front Royal, Virginia, has been breeding endangered black-footed ferrets for 20 years to bring them back from the brink of extinction. This year, 21 females were bred at CRC, four by artificial insemination and 17 by natural pairings.

So far, four ferrets have given birth to litters, including Georgia, the ferret featured on our web cam. She gave birth to a kit, resulting from artificial insemination, on June 20. Look for the newborn on the cam. It does not yet have the dark markings of its mother.

CRC staff were not sure which ferrets were pregnant. Ferrets are induced ovulators, which means they do not ovulate until they breed. When we artificially inseminate them, we give them a hormone injection the day before to induce ovulation. Ovulation usually results in a pregnancy or a pseudo (false) pregnancy. As with giant pandas, their hormone levels change as if they were pregnant, whether or not they are. Also, their appetite will increase, they will gain weight, and show other changes in behavior.

The National Zoo has even put a webcam up HERE.

Meet the Mutt and other events

Ironically, my last post was about "designer dogs." Well, if you haven't heard, Rob and I have one. A dog, not necessarily designer, though. We were told he's a yorkie-poo, but I think that they're full of it. He's definately got terrier in him. Maybe a little schnauzer. Possibly poodle, but who knows?!? We're ok with that, though. He's our little mutt!


He came with the name Buddy, but that's not really his name. Anytime you end up calling your dog "puppy, puppy, puppy" it's b/c he doesn't really like his name (same goes for cats, and you end up calling them "kitty"). Well, Rob and I were talking the other day, and Tycho Brahe came up. Yes, we are such big nerds that 400 year old astronomers come up in conversation. We decided Tycho is a perfect name for him! So, little Buddy's name is Tycho "Hoover" Barkhe (pronouned Bark-ey). Yes, we are such dorks. "Hoover" b/c he snuffles the carpet in hopes of "vacuuming" up any food we may have dropped.

Pictures of Tycho are in my flickr set here (click on the photo to get taken to my flickr photos):




Rob and I also went to the zoo on Weds and saw the cutest thing ever! Baby Peacocks! Yes, baby peacocks are friggin' adorable! See for yourself! If you click on the photo, you can see more pictures from our zoo trip, and yes, more adorable baby peacocks!



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