Zoo Autographs
Taking a break from the mountains of actual work that I have been actively avoiding at my data entry/internet specialist job, I updated some of the left sidebar content to include the links for the author Anthony Doerr, and his collection of short stories "The Shell Collector." I admit that I haven't even finished the first story yet; still, I'm very interested in the book so far, both in terms of the content and the artful use of writing style.
Last night, my girlfriend and I - as part of a present that she received from her mother - went to the Big City zoo to see a concert by Suzanne Vega. It was somewhat of a funny gift because her mother says that her daughter (my girlfriend), as a moody teenager, drove her crazy by constantly playing Vega's songs. Although we enjoyed the concert, and saw a lot of animals before the show (including a chimpanzee that slides on its feet in a kind of dance whenever it moves around), the most interesting part of the night occured when we stayed afterwards to get an autograph from Suzanne Vega. Normally, neither of us is the type of person to get autographs, but we thought it might be a fun thing to do since one of the security guards we were standing next to casually mentioned to another concert-goer that the line for autographs was forming up at the bottom of the stage. The real point of the whole evening was making sure that my girlfriend enjoyed herself.
As for the guard at the autograph line, he told some funny/scary stories about being an official zoo security guard at large public events: From chasing a drunk concert crasher around the zoo who, unknowingly, jumped into the grizzly bear enclosure just to escape paying for a ticket, to the five and ten-year-old who - on separate occasions - wandered into the elephant pen and started playing in and around the elephant's legs. Regarding the teenagers who, on another occasion, were dangling their feet inside the tiger enclosure just above the moat - "if they'd have accidently fallen in, the tiger would have eaten them before they even hit the ground."