crime, zoo, tornado

So last Saturday at my newspaper class, we focused on Crime Reporting, and I heard just about enough from our special speaker to know I'm never going anywhere near the crime beat, should I ever work for a newspaper.

Our activity for the morning was a surprise: a rather unrealistic crime scene that we had to investigate and report on. There was a body, a suspect, some witnesses, and a police officer. These were all at varying degrees of helpfulness and cooperativeness. :-) Thank you very very much to Brian for being straightforward and actually nice. I didn't do too well at taking in the surroundings - there was supposedly this baseball on the conference table near the body and I didn't even notice it at all. I was probably too busy trying to decide if the victim's sweater was pink or orange and if there were any noticeable wounds, since the officer wouldn't tell me where he'd been shot. His sweater, upon closer investigation, was burnt orange and there were no "wounds." Darn - it would've been much more fun if they'd spilled monkey blood on the dude. Agggghh! You see, this is why I'm never going on the crime beat!!!!!!

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After class I went to the zoo with my family. It was so busy, and actually I didn't really want to go in the first place. There was this really cute red panda that was fun. It doesn't really look like a panda, though.


And there were four little lion cubs that were pretty cute. Other than that, I would've preferred to have been taking a nap. My sister and I wandered into the pachyderm building, which stinks. Literally. Why it smells so bad, I don't know. Anyways, while inside we finally found a water fountain that works. Obviously this is good since the majority of zoo water fountains never work, probably never have worked, and even more likely, probably never will. So I go to take a drink, at it tastes terrible. Why do I have to pass up a good cold drink because I'm breathing in nasty pachyderm building smell? So I hold my nose and try it.

Word to the wise: one might easily drown trying that particular stunt!!!!!

On the way out we snapped a picture of this sign - found on a pole in the parking lot. :-)


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Last night at church it was pouring down rain and there was ample thunder and lightning, to the distress of the Confirmands. We were almost done with our small group time when the tornado sirens went off and everyone freaked out. In seconds everyone had dropped their stuff and proceeded to run full tilt down the concourse, screaming and wailing. Watch out, that's a metal pole there! Oh goodness. Quite safely holed up underground in the choir room and totally ignoring the angry adults trying to make them hush (and looking mildly ridiculous themselves, if I do say so myself), they all huddled together with their cell phones, a desperate lifeline into the outside world. Obviously their health and safety depended on being able to contact friends, relatives and distantly related weather people. Ha! They quickly discovered one minor problem: we were so far underground there was no service. That's it, we're all gonna die.

Miraculously, we all survived that life-threatening situation.

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After we got home we watched a little bit of this reality show called Here come the newlyweds, or something like that. We tuned in just in time to see the seven guys being blindfolded. Here's how the game went: Wife #1 went down the line and kissed each guy on the cheek, one by one. Then Wife #2 went, and so on and so forth. At the end, each guy had to guess which number his wife was. It actually didn't really matter if they got it right or not, they only added more money to the final jackpot for every guy that correctly guessed which kiss was given by his wife. It's a funny game, if rather immoral. I didn't expect the accuracy level to be so high, but six out of the seven couples got it right. :-)

Next week, the couples get tango lessons from Dancing with the Stars pros Tony and Elena. :-)