This one is Vegas, he’s not asleep he’s just blinking. He’s sitting in the big cage for the first time, he doesn’t like being outside the cages but at least he willingly moved to the bigger cage.

We gave our new birds names last night. We’re calling the blue one Glacier and the green and yellow one Vegas.
Glacier looks alot like Icarus and they seem to really like each other. Glacier follows Icarus everywhere. Nice for Icarus since his girlfriend (Wynnie) is such a brat.
Can you tell them apart?
Glacier is the one on the left.

Life at the Johnston-McLeod Zoo continues to thrive and grow! We are pleased to welcome Foxy our temporary guest courtesy of the Mississauga Humane Society, two new birds to the Budgie Exhibit and an Underwater Exhibit!!

Foxy is an 11 year old dog of mixed origin. She looks more like a Coyote than a dog but is as sweet as sugar. If you’re visiting the zoo; look for her in the yard chasing squirrels or eating garbage in the kitchen. She’s a sweet old girl who loves to sleep and play in the yard. She’s also has cataracts and is mostly deaf. Hopefully some kind person will want to adopt her soon. We love her and would keep her in a second but our downstairs neighbour is allergic to dogs. You can check out a picture of her and read her bio at www.mississaugahumanesociety.com.

Our two new birds, who have yet to be named, are standard budgies. They are both male, one of them is blue and black with a white head and the other is green with yellow and black wings. They have never been allowed out of their cage and are massively under-weight. We have every expectation that they will healthy happy birds in time.
They have been introduced to our current flock of four. I’ve opened their cage door but they have yet to figure out that they can actually leave. Wynnie was the first of the current flock to venture over to meet them, followed by Dax and Icarus. Marygold seems a little uncertain of these new arrivals. The two new birds are about 11 months old according to the family who gave them up. They have their full flight feathers but are unable to fly because their cage was too small. Hopefully when they start to get stronger they’ll be able to fly around the room with Marygold and Icarus. Dax is also becoming a stronger flyer, her wings are growing back slowly but she’s learning quickly and is getting stronger everyday.

Also new to the zoo are 6 fish. The aquarium came over from my parent’s house this weekend so we now have an underwater exhibit as well. These fish are kind of strange in that some of them are close to 6 years old. The aquarium is very healthy and we’ve even seen some breeding in the last couple of years. They seemed to have survived the trip and are doing well; hopefully they will continue to do so.

Our cat exhibit hasn’t grown any (unless you consider Pandora getting fatter) but we’ve definitely seen some interesting developments. We’ve always known Pandora to be aggressive with other animals, but I didn’t know she was a hunter. She’s taken to stalking the dog and attacking her. We don’t encourage this kind of behavior so in order to curb her aggressiveness we’ve supplemented her diet with my mothers house plants. Hard to chase dogs when you’re too busy throwing up palm tree. Hopefully she’s learned her lesson and will focus her energy on something less destructive.

I’ll post some pictures as soon as I can find my camera cable. Come back soon!

Forbes list of billionaires came out today. J.K Rowling made the list. Guess there is still money in wizards and dragons. Who says kids watch too much TV?

Well, we’re back home. Today we slept in a bit, Mark and Sarah where up earlier, wandering around Ottawa. We all went down to the Rideau Canal to look a the ice and snow sculptures.
Mark, Sonya and I went skating on the canal. I’ve always wanted to do that. We also had Beaver tails on the canal. A very canadian day.

In the later afternoon, we went on a tour of the Mint. Really cool. We got to hold a gold brick. Surprisingly heavy and worth $220,000 it was a rare and cool thing to do. The Mint in Ottawa creates specialty coins as well as currency for 64 other nations. They are a smaller scale production facility, producing about 10,000 coins in a 8 hour shift. The main production of canadian currency is in Winnipeg. Winnipeg produces 15,000,000 coins in a 24 hour shift. All the paper money is printed in the Bank of Canada. No tours there, and no photos in the Mint. Too bad.
The Parliament buildings where having an open house too. So we got to see the House of Commons and the Senate. Staysea and I went up the bell tower. It has Canada’s first incline elevator, that replaces the original 2 elevators that where used in series to get to the observation deck before.

Today was awesome! Tremblant is beautiful. The top of the run was actually up inside the cloud cover. Plus there must have been thousands of people there, but none of the lifts where ever that busy no more than a 5 minute wait at the bottom.

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We arrived in Ottawa last night. We’re just sitting in the Lobby waiting for John to show up so we can head out to Tremblant for some snowboarding and skiing for Sarah. It started snowing last night and still is here. I’m looking forward to a lot of snow on the hill and a decent run. I havn’t been on anything close to a real mountain yet.

Cheers.

Hey Everyone,
For my Lodging class I have to run a simulation of a hotel for a couple of months online. Its up and running now (at least for the moment) and I would totally love it if you guys would go to the site, log in and check out my hotel. I get marks for how many ‘private visits’ my hotel gets. If you’re interested you can…..
1) go to www.buildyourownbar.ca
2) enter the site and select “log-in as a guest”
3) it’ll put you onto a beach, in the bottom left corner is a box thats called the ‘island transporter’ you want to go to Glacier Lake 123.147, thats my address. You’ll automatically appear in my lobby.
On the right hand side of the screen is an orange tab, you can pull that out to read and vote on my press release, menus, sign my guest book etc. I get marks for you doing that too. My hotel is called CJ Bogarities, after my dogs of course. Come take a look!

Thanks so much everyone for helping me out with this project.

The whole thing is very slow, its not your computer breaking its just the site.

I managed to configure a email posting system for the SDF1 Blogs. It’s from Chris Martial, and it’s called pop2blog I’m really hoping that this helps out some of the other users here.

Know what a Budgie Bomb is? No? Well, if you had 4 budgies, and they where all sitting quietly minding their own business, then POW! Budgies flying everywhere, for absolutely no reason. That is a Budgie Bomb.