Michael and I recently established a Wednesday "Date Night," since he works all night on the weekends. Our recent adventure was to go to the Hogle Zoo, where we had tons of fun. It's a small enough zoo that you can basically look at everything without completely exhausting yourself. We went to Chic-Fil-A for lunch, which was really tasty, and took some goofy photos to prove it.


Michael by this giant elephant statue (maybe I should say elephantine elephant statue, but that just seems redundant).

Me being rather immature next to backside of the elephantine statue.

The elephant trunk actually made a rather comfortable lounge chair.

It's funny how much Michael is built like an adult, male gorilla and this is the picture to prove it. (I mean that as a compliment, Michael - adult male gorillas can bench like 600 hundred lbs.).

There was a baby elephant at the zoo that I had to visit no less than three times. I also had to visit the rhinos twice, but they were being rather boring, just sleeping at the far end of the pen. I actually did mistake one of them for a giant boulder. I looked at the sign on the enclosure and said, "Hey! I thought there were supposed to be TWO rhinos." Then, I noticed the boulder the one rhino was leaning on had ears. I also noticed that all of my pictures from the zoo were of Michael and I, not of any animals. I hypothesize that I subconsciously did not take pictures of the animals, because I did not want to bother them any more than they were already being bothered by everyone gawking at them. I guess my subconscious is just considerate like that. :) They also had this exhibit called "Nature's Nightmares" where they had all these crazy, cool animals, like bird-eating spiders, bats, leeches and - you guessed it - Norwegian rats. They weren't much bigger than Norman, but I do admit Norman is a little cuter (after all, he is a fancy rat - that is his official breed). These rats were brown with long, scaly tails that might bother the more squeamish viewers, but they ended up being one of our favorite exhibits we saw at the zoo. Which we thought was ironic, since we could just go home and look at Norman for free.