Megan, are you an animal person? This place is gorgeous and fabulous and I've wanted to go for ages: Best Friends Animal Sanctuary

Best Friends Animal Sanctuary is located at Angel Canyon, a 33,000-acre ranch in the majestic red-rock country of southern Utah, just outside the town of Kanab. The sanctuary is at the heart of the famous Golden Circle of national parks, close to Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon's North Rim, Bryce Canyon, and Lake Powell.

Hmph. I went to go get my 2pm massage, except they have me down for 3! Luckily, it's only 10 minutes away, so I just came home. But still!

Brenda, that sanctuary looks wonderful.

Cass should check this out: [link]

I think it's safe to say I am not an animal person.

But those photos make me even happier we picked Southern Utah as our destination.

This is the basic problem though. There's tons to see and do so we could spend weeks driving around--what to do when you just have a week or so?

A diamond-shoe kind of problem, but still.

My mom and I were just discussing our trip to Florida this April, and when she mentioned that we might be able to take a few extra days to drive back to NJ from there, I put in my bid to stop by Washington, DC, on the way back for two days. It's only a few hours from her house (she's in southern NJ), so we could spend two days in the city and only have to stay at a hotel one evening, still getting back home before bedtime.

We're stopping in Savannah on the way down, since that's somewhere Mom's always wanted to visit. We're spending a week at my brother's vacation house just north of Clearwater. Probably won't do much more than hang, swim, maybe go to the beach if the weather's nice and possibly do some shopping (my sister and BIL spent the past weekend there and recommended shopping in a little town called Dunedin, which has lots of little boutiques).

I love this girl's expression....

Face of the Day

US President George W. Bush (C) leans over to talk with a girl (R) after Bush participated in a lesson for young children on the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day during a tour of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC, 21 January 2008.

I would definitely pick a few destinations and spend some quality time at each, rather than trying to rush through and do the whole shebang. You can always plan a follow-up trip.

The SO & I spent days at Arches alone, and that was without doing the Delicate Arch hike. But we're slow, putter around the park, types. We like to spend day one driving through and making some preliminary stops and short hikes. Then the rest of the trip we have priorities picked for which stops we want to make and which longer hikes we want to do. But the SO is a photography hobbyist, so we spend a lot of time lingering at certain stops to get the right time of day, light, shadows, lack of other tourists, etc.

Also we've got the luxury of living in the area. We can always come back.

Yummmm, today's lunch was meat loaf (nice and moist and meaty!), mashed potatoes, and corn from the cafeteria, with some yogurt and granola for dessert (I put away the Oreo creme pie I had in my hand and grabbed the yogurt instead!).

I'm full.

I think these are cool, even if this blogger doesn't:

Skull speakers will not make you seem dangerous

If your desk is located inside a pirate ship, these "Goth Style Speakers," shaped like skulls with knives through them, are sure to look just perfect with all of your other decorations. If you live in a normal-looking house or apartment, well, these will look ridiculous.

I mean come on, I can understand being super into the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but to such a degree that you'd want a set of tacky skull-shaped speakers? That doesn't make a lick of sense. These things even light up from the inside when they're being used, making them even more embarrassing-looking. Trust me, you don't want these.

OK, maybe they're 'tacky' in that they're not realistic enough?

Plus the fact they light up inside just cries out for miniature fog machines to be installed inside... Oh, and maybe little mini laser light shows could come out of each eye synced to the beat....

Fuckity.

I just edited the wrong budget portion of the year end report to our major donor. I had the previous quarter's open for reference and comparison, and I edited that one instead of the current quarter.

I can easily copy the data over to the correct quarter, but I don't have easily at hand the data I need to restore the previous quarter. I've got a hard copy around here somewhere, but I think I'll just have to find it and reenter all that later. It's long ago submitted, so it's just an internal document at this point, but still.

Grump.