Panda Love

I am not an animal lover. Not in the sense that I make cutesy noises whenever I see animals or feel the need to pick up someone else's cat or dog (I feel the same way about babies). I like an individual animal with a good personality who likes me back (like my beloved Tobin). I may have already mentioned all of this in an earlier post, but I'm getting to somewhere new: Somehow I am all about pandas lately. My sister pointed it out. It's kind of weird. A few months ago (and I do believe I posted on this), I found these adorable pictures of baby pandas. They were so hilariously cute that I printed them up and taped them to my Chandler's assignment notebook (um, I work in a middle school, OK?). And then there was my recent visit to the San Diego zoo, where I snapped a picture of a picture (which you can see at my Comic-Con Photos link) of a baby panda. I was looking and laughing at the picture for so long that other zoo goers came by to see what the hullabaloo was about (when I reread that sentence, it sounds really creepy. I wasn't actually howling with laughter for twenty minutes or anything, but I was snapping pictures and laughing a bit. I'm not that crazy). The final straw in the panda milkshake is my computer game, Zoo Tycoon, which I was inspired to start playing again after visiting the zoo (it is nice to sometimes take a break from The Sims). I have been playing one of the difficult challenge adventures where you have to build a zoo, make it get a five star rating, where you will then have the chance to buy a male panda for $50,000, whereupon the zoo will give you a female panda. You win once the pandas mate and have a baby. I kept talking this up to everyone I saw (ie. my husband and my sister), hence my newly proclaimed panda obsession. My sister even joked that she was going to start buying me panda themed items. Uh oh. It's not like I think about pandas at other times. Except for now, when I'm writing about them. The only other time in my life I had an animal obsession (and this was a real obsession, not like this supposed panda one) was in early junior high. For some reason, I was obsessed with cows. I had a whole cow drawing I used to do, and a song, I believe. It's sort of a blur to me now. What was that about?

And for those of you wondering, my pandas have mated twice now, and have two adorable, computer panda babies.