How many sleeps?

18 sleeps until I get on a plane and start my journey home!

Now to start the real post :P For whatever reason I feel like all the animals were going crazy today at work! Or I was just easily amused... I was changing the water for the turtles as normal and watching to make sure it didn't get too full when one of the turtles moved to stand right underneath the stream of water from the hose. He made a very beautiful turtle water fountain for all the rest of the turtles around him and he seemed to be having a great time while doing it. One of the other turtles found the only patch of grass that is in the whole enclosure and was sitting right on it in typical superman pose; maybe it felt more like he was flying that way. And one of the other turtles was walking around with a leaf on his shell all day and it just really made me laugh. I think the leaf amused me so much because it reminded me of when I would feed Virgo (my bearded dragon) and would make her a lettuce hat.

I have been helping with the rehabilitation project with the parrots lately too. What I have to do is clean them up, disinfect the walls, make them fly around (done simply by shooing them from the outside), feed them, and make sure not to interact with them in any friendly way so that they start to not like people. The project is starting to become a success because they are definitely not liking me very much! They were dive-bombing me like crazy! It never was a problem before so I didn't duck too far, but some of them actually were kicking me as they flew by! (reminded me of when Annie was trying to save that baby crow and almost ended up with stitches in her head haha) When I came in with the food they obviously knew what was going on and they all wanted a part of it. 20+ parrots can be pretty scary. I tried to get in and out as fast as I could but one of the parrots, who has been named Batman, would not leave me alone! He flew up onto my shoulder and was perched there very nicely. I thought it was cute but this was definitely not allowed in the protocol. I asked him politely to get back onto his perch and reluctantly he left my shoulder. It didn't last more than about 30 seconds before he was back on my shoulder though! I would have let him stay there but the birds were making such a scene that I was starting to draw a lot of attention to myself and had to enforce the rules. Sorry Batman.

A little later on in the day, when I was about to leave, the monkeys started a riot! The three of them are usually pretty quiet unless they start playing around; other than that they just make cute little cooing noises to you when you walk by. But today, man oh man, it sounded like the end of the world in their house! I don't know what started it but there was no one around so it must have been an internal dispute between them.

That's it for interesting work stories.

As for the rest of my stay here, my schedule goes like this:
Dec 2 - work and then leave to meet João and Tracy in the West
Dec 3 - arrive in Guaraciaba and visit Foz de Iguaçu
Dec 6/7 - get back from the west
Dec 8 - work and huge sushi dinner with Nivaldo's brothers at the Kuhnen residence
Dec 9 - work
Dec 10 - last day of work!
Dec 11-14 - Trip to Rio with João and Tracy
Dec 15/16 - open for things that we still haven't done (like Campeche islands or about 30+ more beaches)
Dec 17 - huge bbq/year end/going away party
Dec 18 - recovery and going to Costa da Lagoa with my coworkers for a final goodbye
Dec 19 - packing and plane ride home!

It is a busy couple of weeks and they are guaranteed to fly by just like the rest of my trip has!

I'm already sad to go, but I'm always excited to come back home :)