I bless the rains down in Africa

I think that everyone needs a bit of excitement on the everyday level, and I think one of the most effective ways to do this is to make certain days special. Yesterday, as deemed by Katelyn and me, was Safari Day.

Safari Day started with a trip up to Salt Lake to visit the Hogle Zoo. So, my whole apartment (pictured below: me, Jenica, Emily, and Katelyn), and Katelyn's man friend Alex, all drove up to Salt Lake and spent the afternoon exploring the Hogle Zoo. It was the perfect weather for such an excursion, and we felt very comfortable temperature-wise walking around the zoo. Some of the animals were particularly active: the elephants were eating hay they stashed in their tusks, and we got to see the elephants take water through their noses and redeposit it in their mouths. I hadn't actually ever seen that before! There were way cute baby giraffes, and I steered clear of the chimpanzees (reference chimpanzee post). I started getting a headache about mid-afternoon, but it wasn't too bad.


It was such a fun day! I spent time reading a bunch of the animal plaques, which were pretty interesting, but because of my refined editing skills, I noticed several editorial errors. There was the inconsistent use of the serial (or Oxford) comma (that's the comma placed before the conjunction at the end of a list. It's usually optional, but I like it), incorrect usages of the colon, and inconsistency in capitalization and other sorts of punctuation errors. Alex commented, "Charlotte, if they had you working for them, they'd avoid people like you." So true, so true.


We headed home from the zoo about 5:30, dropped Emily at her house in Salt Lake, and stopped by Chipotle for dinner. I dozed on the way home, and then when we got back to Provo, we got our blankets and pillows and headed up to campus for the Indoor-Outdoor movie in the Wilkinson Center ballroom. The picture below features Katelyn and I waiting for the movie to start. (The people at the desk told me when I bought the tickets that the movie started at 7, when really the doors opened at 7 and the movie started at 8. Oh well.) This year they showed "The Lion King," (hence the Safari Day--this was all inspired by this movie showing). Tickets were only a dollar, and we brought our blankets and pillows to make ourselves comfortable on the ballroom floor. They had free pizza and popcorn, and we saw a bunch of new movie previews (including "Walle," "Indiana Jones," and--my most looked forward to--"Twilight"), and then they turned down the house lights, turned up the volume really loud, and the "Ahhhhhhhh sven yaaaaaa wada heeeee seda mohhhhh" began "The Lion King," one of my favorite Disney movies. It was so much fun to see that movie again and to laugh at all the clever Disney wit (hahahahaha). I laughed the whole time, plus I could easily quote most of the script and could sing along with all the songs--it was amazing.


So, Safari Day was a huge success. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon and evening, what more relaxing, enjoyable, and nostalgic experience could you have?? You should have a Safari Day sometime--it's just great!