saturday penguins + a vege pizza, add beef

the other day while walking to the bookshop, i was quick enough that the lollipop ladies were just finishing up outside of the primary school (usually they are gone by the time i get there). if you don't know what lollipop ladies are, their job is to stand on the pedestrian crossing outside of schools to stop cars for the little kids. they have a big stop sign and a whistle. sounds like a cute, old lady-type job, right? well, they were just leaving as i went to cross at the crossing and i smiled and said 'hello'. her reply? 'don't get hit by a car now. they don't always stop'.
that's not all, a few weeks ago i got there while they were still working. one of the ladies actually yelled at me for 'not waiting for the whistle'. my bad, i forgot that the whistle is the only thing stopping the car from hitting us!

on monday at work a man came in and asked for a vege delight with beef on it. like, really? okay, maybe he enjoys the taste of the the vege pizza toppings with a bit of beef but that just sounds so ridiculous. i do get it a lot though; vege delight with pepperoni or bacon. the point of a vegetarian pizza is that it doesn't have meat on it. it's not a vege delight, it's just not. you're ridiculous. 

it has now been two years since i started dating my amazing boyfriend bren. to celebrate, i organised for us to 'go to sea world for the day'. i don't really know why that's in inverted commas, i mean we did go to sea world for the day... but i had secretly planned for us to do one of the animal adventure programs on offer - the penguin antarctic adventure. in the package, we spent time 'behind the scenes' at the penguin enclosure before actually stepping onto the ice with the penguins. 
unfortunately, i couldn't just take him to the meeting place and bam, surprise! we're going on the ice: he needed to sign waivers saying that we wouldn't sue sea world if the penguins became violent and killed/seriously maimed us, sort of killing the big surprise. also, we had to check in with sea world at least an hour prior to the adventure. so i told him as we arrived (and i'm fairly sure he has been suspicious of me for a while. he knew that i was up to something). 
basically, it was the best experience of my life. to have these beautiful, inquisitive little penguins waddle up to us and to be able to pat them was so surreal.
since the gentoo penguins are going into breeding season soon, they were making their nests out of stones so to make our visit interesting, we took in a box of stones to give to them. more often than not, when a penguin took a stone from my hand it would try to take the glove as well. at one point, bren thought there was something falling out of his pocket but there was actually a penguin pecking his bottom! i just can't stop thinking about it. i want to do it again, i want to stay in there with them. to think that the workers there are in with them every single day... man, i'm jealous. 

bren and i on the penguin antarctic adventure at sea world

ps, as well as today being bren's and my anniversary, it's also the day the hogwarts train leaves kings cross station. if i'm not posting frequently, it's because at hogwarts, muggle devices don't work, therefore i have no internet. i'll have to send my blog posts via owl to someone who can post them for me ;)