Friday’s main event was going to the Phoenix Zoo. Stephanie had a couple of free tickets, and she bought a zoo membership, which gave her additional free tickets, so it wasn’t really that expensive.

So all of us walked through the exhibits, and we were a lot luckier than usual. The otters were awake and playing, the lion was awake and looking at things, the fennec foxes were awake, and I was able to get a bunch of pretty good pictures.

This picture was something else entirely. I thought this was a dik-dik (tiny antelope), but we saw its mother walk over to it a minute later and start licking it. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the high-resolution shots show that this little gerenuk (giraffe-necked antelope) had been born really, really recently, probably around 10:30am since the picture was taken at 11:04am.

We decided to pay a bit extra and feed the giraffes. This was interesting, even if it led to giraffe slobber. I didn’t get insanely great pictures of this, because the giraffes have figured it all out, and are extremely quick at grabbing the food pellets from your hands.

While we were eating lunch, Pat called me. This was interesting, since I haven’t heard from him in a very long time. Then we went back to seeing animals, though we stopped after seeing the vultures, prairie dogs, orangutans, and tortoises. The vultures are kept right next to the prairie dogs. So, one of the vultures took a short flight, and about 2/3 of the prairie dogs bolted for their holes as soon as they heard a large bird flying.

Anyway, after that, we all went home. I took a short nap and finished reading a book that I’ve been trying to finish for a while. Mom and Dad came over for dinner, so we had chicken, biscuits, leftover rice and vegetables, and cookies. We also tried to figure out what the heck we’re doing tomorrow night.