“No elephants are dead, not even a dead hare or rabbit,” said H.D. Ratnayake, deputy director of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife Department. “I think animals can sense disaster. They have a sixth sense. They know when things are happening.”

Weird. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. The bunnies always seemed to know when an earthquake was coming.

Interesting disaster photos on Flickr here and here. I liked sumank’s comment of one photos he took of the sea: “The sea that caused it all. Now, calm, like a dog caught stealing.”

* * * * *

“Cookie Mumper.” This is how Darcy says Cookie Monster, which has become her favorite thing in the whole damn world, thanks to a holiday gift from a friend (note Bill, we’ve been hearing the chicken dance and “har har har, WOW!” in our sleep every day since Christmas). She really loves it. Her way of saying Cookie Monster is so cute I don’t correct her, and in fact I’ve been encouraging the incorrect version. But I’m just glad the girls didn’t fall in love with this thing. It looks kind of like a bloated unmentionable with zits on it.

The girls and I drove to SLO the long way today to give daddy a little time to get some things done at home. Like mommy, he gets a little cranky when it’s been days without even getting a chance to check email or do important stuff like pay bills. The twins pretty much demand 100% of his attention when they’re awake, which means I must literally remove them from the house for him to get ANYTHING done. Anyway, we had a very nice and relaxing drive through one of my favorite areas, Carpenter’s Canyon. The lamas were even out, which the girls were thrilled to see. I drove around to a winery to take a few pictures, where a guy came out and joked that taking pictures was $10 each…unless I wanted to “take a gopher, in which case I’ll pay you.” I laughed and asked him if he was having a gopher problem and he said he certainly was…”this must have been the beach at some point because the ground is really sandy, and they love that. Everybody else has nice clay soil except me.”

Kynsi Winery

The girls were getting restless so I pressed on to San Luis. We had a look at the engorged creek downtown, which with a solid week of rain is within an inch of running over the bank in some places.

I also noticed, as we walked around, that there’s a lot of change going on downtown. A lot of businesses have up and left, and there were a few new signs popping up here and there about new tenants. I was sad to see the stationery store go a few months ago, but I have to admit when I saw that the camera store was moving into that big ‘ol space I was kind of jazzed. I wish they would get more digital stuff. Not that I have any money for any of that stuff. I’m kind of hoping for this for a certain birthday I have coming up…it’s The Big 3-0. UGH. Anyway, that lens looks like loads of fun. Speaking of photography…ladies, please feast your eyes on this photographer. He should be on the other side of the camera more often, don’t you think?

Apropos of nothing, I found the following quote while Googling that vomiting image I posted a while back. Look at the first quote.