Today was another day off and my back hurt like hell for reasons unbeknownst to anyone. It's right between my shoulder blades and from the way I feel it in my arm muscles I'd swear it was cardiac pain only there's none of that crushing chest pain as if an elephant were sitting on your chest thing going on so I'm thinking it's just stress coming out in a really bizarre way. We went to Blank Park Zoo which wasn't anywhere near as big as I was expecting it to be, but it was still a decent zoo. Most zoos just kind of depress me anyway because it seems like every single animal is endangered. It made me sick to think that there are only 300 Siberian tigers left in the wild. That's just insane! I wonder what it's like in Africa where elephants used to roam free about the plains but now I imagine theres all sorts of habitat encroachment and other such stuff. Don't misunderstand me, I'm no expert on endangered species or wildlife preservation or anything like that. But it just made me kind of sad to see a lion sitting in a cage in Des Moines, IA.

But the giraffes were really cool--they were the only animal that we took more than a cursory glance at. I'm afraid zoos just don't do for me what they did for me when I was a kid. Heidi pointed out to me that zoos really are for kids anyway but that didn't really help too much. Plus it doesn't help that Heidi doesn't have much of an attention span for zoos either. And then there's Anna--the one minute attention span wonder. Well, she is two, so that's not exactly something to be worried about.

All in all a good day. Stopped and saw Jeff on the way home which was fun as always. It's so nice to come back to Ames and be able to call it home. Wendy's going to be coming up this weekend and we're going to take advantage of my parents as babysitters so that we can all trek out to see The Day After Tomorrow which looks pretty decent. On Sunday, we're headed back down to Des Moines for the Iowa Renaissance Faire which we went to a couple years ago and had a great time. Good thing I went to their web site--otherwise I would have likely ended up at Water Works Park!!