Friday, March 21, 2014

Weekend Excursions

 Last week, I was able to go on two wonderful weekend excursions. The first one was to visit the Rochester Zoo, in Rochester NY. This was done on Sat March 15, 2014. The day was chilled, and was mixed rain and snow. Especially exciting was the chance to see young lions. They had just celebrated earlier in the month, their one year Birthday. Alas, we entered the zoo with only about 15 minutes of their outdoor time for the day.  The outdoor enclosure is shared by the youths, and  after them, comes the adult time. So, we ran all the way to the far end of the zoo where the lions are showcased, and spent some time watching the youngsters at play. For such a large animal, they can move pretty quietly on the snow.  I will not bore you with all the minute by minute things we saw, so instead, I will just share some of the photos as well as video clips. Along with myself on this excursion, was my girlfriend Carol, and her youngest daughter Emily.













  Now, it was time for the youngsters to go inside and allow the adults to come out to frolic in the great outdoors. While we waited for the exchange to occur, we visited some goats, as well as watched the elephant do a walk about.



   Now, the adults came out to play. After the youngsters went inside, one of the handlers had gone out and hid some treats for the lions to search and find. This feeds some of their basic instincts, of hunting, as well as getting them to move about and keep exercising.



















Mother and daughter below
























Below are the three weekend excursionists, from left to right, Carol, Emily, and Myself ( Jim )












I know, it is hard to tell with the photo below, but it actually is a South African Penguin. And they do not really like the cold so they were staying inside on the day we visited.




Thus ended out first day and excursion.

Sunday, March 16, 2014 we decided to go to Corning NY, and visit the Corning Glass Museum.  I took some long videos and since were so long, the longest running just over 19 minutes, I uploaded them to youtube, and added the links at the bottom.





The next five photos are a series of the processes that are needed to make a milk bottle. Molten glass is put into the first mold, and then on to the next and so on until the final mold.





The photo below is the result from the Flameworking demo. Below that, is a photo of a horse that was done at another time.






















Here are the links to the youtube videos of the demonstrations.