Weirdest and cutest thing I’ve seen all day
120-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo:
‘When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,’ Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.
I’m ashamed to say that when I first saw the photo, I thought it was a Photoshop job because I hadn’t noted the fact that it’s a baby hippo and a very old (and therefore very large) tortoise. Poor tortoiseâat his age he was probably enjoying just pottering around slowing and eating lettuce, and now he’s being pestered by a hippo.
[via Boing Boing]
Epiphany
Yesterday was Epiphany (or so the hubby tells me, and he knows about these things), which meant that the Christmas decorations were supposed to come down. I always find it a rather sad a dreary time. Taking decorations down is much less fun than putting them up, and everything looks so drab in contrast.
The worst job was getting the fairy lights off our rite of passage tree. I thought when I got them out of the box in their super-compressed state that the chances of getting them back into the same box were vanishingly small. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but fairy lights behave like DNA. In the box, they are in their supercoiled, chromosomal form. As soon as you unwind them, they explode into a tangle of wires; unlike DNA, this is a strictly one-way process.
I made a half-hearted attempt to form loose coils, but realised this was a losing battle and resorted to cramming the whole lot in a huge plastic bag. That’s going to be fun next year.
