Thursday November 14th 2024

The big event of the last few days was a trip to Disney’s Animal Kingdom on Wednesday. The park is decked out for Christmas and the Merry Menagerie has returned. The Merry Menagerie are a set of big puppets that interact with each other and the park guests. Accompanied by a fiddler playing Christmas music the puppets of animals from the earth’s poles along with their marionettes greet people in front of the Tree of Life. They are fun to watch. Unfortunately, still pictures don’t do the interaction justice.

The park was busy for a mid week day. There were crowds along all the walkways, but the wait times for the various rides weren’t too bad. I only waited about thirty minutes for my favorite ride in the park, the Kilimanjaro Safari. The park’s most in demand ride, Avatar Flight of Passage, had a wait time of seventy minutes which is about average.

The animals were out and about today. The giraffes and zebras were in particularly high numbers on the safari, the only animals I missed seeing were the lions. They weren’t on their rocks as usual. It was a very windy day and many animals were enjoying the sun in sheltered locations. The gorillas were taking the sun against the rocks on the far side of their enclosure. The adults were catching up on their sleep while the young ones were getting into trouble.

On my way home from Animal Kingdom I stopped at Lowes for more base camp improvement project supplies. I am currently working on the headboard for the bed frame I completed a week or so ago. I have all the parts cut and stained with some assembly completed. I still have to trim the vertical pieces and add a cap board. A little stain touch up followed by two or three coats of polyurethane will finish the job.

The next project will be my kitchen/dinning room table and chairs. I decided not to build the table from scratch. Amazon had an unfinished round drop leaf table at a reasonable price as well as a couple of unfinished dinning room type chairs. I went with unfinished for two reasons. First, it is next it impossible to really know the color and look from the online pictures. The computer desk I bought finished from Amazon turned out alright, but it didn’t look much like its pictures. Second, if I finish them with the same stain I use on other projects there is a better chance the things will match.