Pasithea

*sigh* Bad me! I wanted to animate on Saturday but decided to make a ton of sushi and have people over for lunch and then I fell asleep because I'd been up until 4AM the previous night and I slept for like 14hours and woke up on sunday. :/

So I was going to animate again on Sunday but it was so pretty out I thought we should go hiking instead and I figured I could do animation later in the evening.


It was a beautiful day. We went to Grant Park which the online parks guide describe as hot, barren, mostly vertical and largely unused.

They were mostly right. In the 6hours we were hiking, I think we ecountered maybe 20 people the whole time. Some of the trails also just sort of disappeared as they indeed had very little use. But as for barren? It was BEAUTIFUL! We went slow and took time to take in all the details. I think we encountered at least 30 different types of wild flowers and we found lots and lots of interesting animal prints and ruts.

We were guessing the ruts were from wild pigs... And what do you know, we were right. Scarry! We saw a big black wild sow. (She was obviously still nursing but we didn't see any piglets) EEEE! Did I ever mention I'm Oikaphobic? Pigs scare me. Especially wild pigs. At least that answered the question of what the mountain lions were eating. Oh. Did I mention that this park had warning signs about all the mountain lions? O_O

So, we hiked up and up and up to 2300 feet and back down to 1200 feet again. We climbed to the top of the tallest hill near our route and sat for a while. Very good view of the Lick Observatory from there. It was neat. I found a rattlesnake den. I didn't see/hear any rattlesnakes but I've encountered enough in the past to know a rattlesnake den when I see one. Didn't bother it, obviously.

It was a lot of hiking 'n' I'm not in such good shape these days so we were looking pretty dead for the last couple of miles or so but... Geepers, not quite this dead.... We were buzzed by these huge black birds with white underwings and red heads, coming within about 10 feet of us at one point. Stacey thought they might be California Condors but I thought they were too small (Although don't get me wrong, these things were enormous, like a 5 foot wingspan!!!!) and that they'd be mentioned as a feature of the park if they were CA condors.

A little google searching today makes me pretty sure they were Turkey Vultures (which look incredibly similar to California Condors, except that they only have about a 6foot wingspan instead of a 9foot wingspan. Eep. Still humongous though. I didn't think we looked that dead! O_O I also didn't think vultures would look quite so pretty. You always see scary creepy pictures of them on the ground and such but in flight they're pretty beautiful. Black and white with a brilliant red head. ... I wonder if that has any thing to do with black, white, and red being the colours used for death shrouds in native american cultures. Hmm.

Geepers. I'm random. Anyhow, to finish up and get back to work, had a GREAT day but got a bad sunburn cause someone decided that sunscreen was just needless weight in our pack and we finished the day off with a trip to Todai and ate like pigs and probably put right back on every pound we too off while hiking. O_O Cie la vie.