Blair Drummond Safari Park

Went to the Safari park with Em and Travis; half of the park you drive through (like a safari). The rhino was not shy when he wished to cross the road! And saw the sea lion presentation, was nice in that it was very education oriented. For example, the trainer asked the sea lion what are it's natural predators? And the sea lion swims around with one flipper up, looking like a shark :) Even when balancing a ball (very trick oriented thing to do), the point was to demonstrate how they use their whiskers to balance it. The facility does a great job combining an entertainment driven show with education.

Lots of travel posts: Doune Castle

Lots of updates to add to the blog - more to come! Have had an amazing time, so to start with I will continue with my adventures with Emily and Travis. First up, a visit to Doune castle (where they are currently filming outlander, and where monty python holy grail was mostly filmed). They even gave us some complimentary coconut shells to use, Emily did a proper monty python horse ride up to the castle ^_^

Fire Festival 2015

Another wonderful year at the fire festival to celebrate the transition to summer :) Must say I like this tradition more so than the St. Andrews one...in St. Andrews students stay up all night, and sunrise on May 1st take a skinny dip in the ocean to welcome summer and erase all their academic sins. I much prefer the fire festival!

St Andrews is a cat town

St. Andrews is entirely a cat town. Different cats, I believe all with loving homes, seem to have territories in different parts of town. I particularly enjoy a fuzzy black kitty who lives in the courtyard by the psychology and religion buildings. He is very friendly, and joins me for lunch (though does not seem to approve of my veggie fare). Unfortunately, don't have a great picture of my buddy, my phone camera did not do him justice! And of course the most famous St. Andrews cat was Hamish McHamish, who roamed the centre of town. He passed away, and St. Andrews has put up a memorial statue for him in town. Definitely cat people.

On that note, while back home I hear of snow storms, we have had Scottish summer over here. Blue skies, I spent the day sitting in the sun and re-reading papers in preparation for the looming Viva. The cats are loving the sun as well; hemmingway liked curling up in the sun; however with the appearance of the camera he did cover up, trying to bat the camera away. No paparazzi please!

Relaxin' and watch some tv

After turning in my thesis, it has been nice to relax a bit. Still have plenty to do, but have been taking some time for fun. I was curled up with comet last night watching tv, and she really seemed to be watching with me. So I decided to try out some of the Cat TV videos they have on youtube. Comet loved it! Needless to say, this is how we spent the next hour :) She started curled up in my arms, but as time went by she crawled closer and closer to the screen until she was ontop of the laptop.

Equinox eclipse

This morning was really amazing; not only is it the spring equinox, with a total eclipse, with a supermoon, but we were also lucky enough to live where we could see it with 95% coverage. So cool!

Submitted!!!

Finally, the thesis is complete. 330 pages, 85,000 words. It is submitted, and out of my hands now. And now I am off to enjoy a long weekend completely free of any work...it's been awhile :)