Oh, a couple days ago, Lis and I went to the zoo

The Stone Zoo in Stoneham is an okay zoo as zoos go. If you come to Boston, the Boston zoos aren't a major attraction. I mean, I've been to really, really good zoos, and the Zoo New England zoos aren't them. The animals look healthy and happy, but there aren't particularly many exotic ones.

So it's a small zoo. But I liked it. There were jaguars, and a Canadian lynx, and cougars, and snow leopards. There were spider monkeys and a capybara, and flying foxes -- bats with six foot wingspans. There was an adorable gray fox, and a small pack of Mexican wolves. And here a llama, there a llama, and another little llama. A fuzzy llama, a funny llama, llama, llama, and a duck. And a pheasant. And teeny little sixteen-inch-tall deer.

So I guess it's a pretty good zoo, after all. We spent two hours there walking around and looking at animals and quite enjoyed ourselves.

Oh, and they try to sort of group animals by ecosystem, so the snow leopard was next to the Himalayan Mountain Goats, and stuff like that.

But my POINT is, was it really wise to put the coyote enclosure right next to the roadrunner?

About knitting, and just doing stuff in general

So, two posts back, I mentioned that I'm teaching myself to knit. And classics_cat said to not get discouraged since EVERYONE's first attempts at knitting suck.

It's not to worry.

See, I've got a theory. In fact, this is one of those things that I WISH people would quote me about. I mean, I come up with all these cool Laws of Nature, and name them after myself, and nobody USES them:

Xiphias's Law Of Pizza: The best pizza in the world is the stuff made at the shop right around the corner from where you grew up.

Xiphias's Law of Epistemology: That which exists is possible. (This came about after a Usenet debate in which some people mentioned that their Finnish saunas got up to 230 degrees F (110 C) and that, while you couldn't stay in TOO long, it was REALLY refreshing. Other people claimed that it was entirely impossible for people to survive when the temperature was over the boiling point of water, because the people would boil. The first group of people replied that they did it regularly, but this failed to convince the second group of people. It was for this reason that I discovered that it had to be codified -- if people do it, then people CAN do it. This seems to be a fairly difficult concept to grasp on Usenet.)

And my THIRD law: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

'Cause, see, if you can do something well, it's not a challenge to do it. ANYONE can do something they can do well. But if it's worth doing, it's worth doing even if you can only do it poorly.

The rule "Anything worth doing is worth doing well" is a useful rule. For big projects. But it's not terribly useful on an individual level. On the individual level, it's more important to remember that it's the DOING that's important, not the WELL.

A knitting observation.

Wow. The Continental method is vastly more efficient than the American/English method. I mean, TONS more efficient.

That makes it kind of less fun. . .