averted oven-related disaster, deer, and birds
Today I learned that the reason the oven did us in yesterday was that we had a puddle of olive oil in the bottom from bad french fry baking technique. It wasn't too hard to scrub off, which was really nice, given our previous experience with the oven's self-cleaning cycle, for which we had an evacuation plan.
We plan our evacuations carefully so that they are at least entertaining, so despite not needing to leave, we went to the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch and learned that ostrich egg laying season (in Arizona at least) is pretty much January through the middle of July, unless it rains, but it apparently rains a lot more in Tucson in the summer than it does up in Pinal County, where the ranch is, so eggs are few and far between this time of year. Also, if you actually meet a bunch of ostriches with food on your person, it becomes very apparent that ostriches are actually a snake with a beak mounted on the body of a big wild animal. There's a reason that in the ostrich feeding area, you dump the food into a funnel that drops it through the fence into small troughs, which are then pecked to death by the snakes.
The ranch also has deer that eat the same horse food as the ostriches, and they are much less frightening. They'll eat politely out of your hand unless the one with the horns whacks them out of the way, in which case, they make peeping noises.
Besides animals that eat horse food, the ranch fairly recently acquired a walk-in aviary with a bunch of lorikeets in it. The signs all warned that they bite, but in fact, they seem really content to perch on your hands and lick up the nectar in the little plastic cups the people hand you when you give them $5 to feed their animals for them. Having a bunch of dove-sized parakeet-y things screeching merrily and perched all over me, including on my hat, which they chewed up a little, totally made up for the fact that they only had one ostrich egg to sell us at the store.
In other news, I learned that in 1970, you could fit four people in three airplane seats as demonstrated in the movie Airport, which just by existing, almost required that someone make Airplane!.
We plan our evacuations carefully so that they are at least entertaining, so despite not needing to leave, we went to the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch and learned that ostrich egg laying season (in Arizona at least) is pretty much January through the middle of July, unless it rains, but it apparently rains a lot more in Tucson in the summer than it does up in Pinal County, where the ranch is, so eggs are few and far between this time of year. Also, if you actually meet a bunch of ostriches with food on your person, it becomes very apparent that ostriches are actually a snake with a beak mounted on the body of a big wild animal. There's a reason that in the ostrich feeding area, you dump the food into a funnel that drops it through the fence into small troughs, which are then pecked to death by the snakes.
The ranch also has deer that eat the same horse food as the ostriches, and they are much less frightening. They'll eat politely out of your hand unless the one with the horns whacks them out of the way, in which case, they make peeping noises.
Besides animals that eat horse food, the ranch fairly recently acquired a walk-in aviary with a bunch of lorikeets in it. The signs all warned that they bite, but in fact, they seem really content to perch on your hands and lick up the nectar in the little plastic cups the people hand you when you give them $5 to feed their animals for them. Having a bunch of dove-sized parakeet-y things screeching merrily and perched all over me, including on my hat, which they chewed up a little, totally made up for the fact that they only had one ostrich egg to sell us at the store.
In other news, I learned that in 1970, you could fit four people in three airplane seats as demonstrated in the movie Airport, which just by existing, almost required that someone make Airplane!.
posted by missmolly at 9:08 PM
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