Dear world,

Here’s what’s new in Liz’s slice of the Twin Cities lately.

Things are getting very busy at the Zoo. Animals are having babies. I’m writing new outlines for the bear encounter, the bear overnights, and our ocean overnights. I’m trying to give programs cohesive themes and obvious and sticky conservation messages. Zoo Camp starts soon and we’ll be overrun with children, all the time, learning about stingrays and camels and biodiversity hotspots and raising pigs. Our Big Bugs exhibit opens soon. I am learning how to submit service requests. I am a pro at entering receipts into budget documents. I can now recognize and differentiate between our three eight-year-old grizzly bears.

I am now the Volunteer Coordinator for the local chapter of Sierra Club’s Inner City Outings group. If you live in the area and want to be a trip leader for us, you just let me know.

There are tiny, impossibly bright green leaves on all of the trees, and things coming up left and right in our backyard garden. Today it has been thunderstorming all day, and I am afraid of some of the tinier seedlings getting washed away. Gardening makes me amazed that anything alive grows ever. There are flooding rains, days of nonstop beating sun, high winds, rabbits, parasites. I don’t know how anything makes it, ever, but somehow things keep growing anyway. This doesn’t mean I am not constantly stressed that everything we’ve planted is just going to die. So far, so good, but it’s scary.

I went climbing at the gym here for the first time, and went to my first Minnesota Twins game, and baked a shit ton of samosas. Karen and I went bowling, and a bunch of us played bocce ball in the park.

Today in the storm, I drank several mugs of coffee, and wrote letters. Karen baked scones.

There is a mug here on the counter. It’s pale yellow and holds the green embossed design of a single fir branch.