Newport

Last Sunday, Elena & Patrick took us to Newport for an afternoon at the seaside, the aquarium and the pub.

The sea lions were thoroughly entrenched at the pier, barking continuously and ridiculously like they belonged in a cartoon.






At the fish & chip shop, the catch is labelled with how it was caught and by whom, which is pretty cool.


The aquarium seemed to be quite modern, with a variety of interesting art & decor.



This was carved from a single piece of Big-leaf Maple:



As always, the lion-fish were spectacular - I was surprised to get any good pictures at all though, since I wasn't using a flash and had no tripod.



This eel has cool pointy yellow nostrils:


A universal favourite was the jellyfish area, with a fairly extensive collection of the little & not-so-little guys:


They were not included in the petting tank, however:



Heaps of anemones were really stunning (and photogenic):


And check out the chiton... Yes, this species is in fact an ambush-predator - awesome!


I name this abalone James Bondfish:



Californian sea otters have the market totally cornered on "cute", and they know it.


Puffins, however, are way too tough to care about "cute".


Watching more sea lions from a different perspective was also fun:



It's an Auk.


Thankfully, someone with pretty severe OCD had arranged the gift-shop by species:


And these were just growing outside - so jealous...


We headed up to Seal rock to check out the Pacific coast (from the other side) - it's pretty rough, but gorgeous.




After that, it was off to the Rogue Brewery for beer, dinner and beer - this is the way to the bar:


The whole place smelled strongly of hops, yeast, and happy. Spectacular beers, every one.



Kindly, they supplied tasters for a small fee:




An update on the hippo: Mineral analysis of the urolith revealed pure calcium carbonate, and there were tonnes of small thrombi in the cardiac vasculature associated with extensive, acute infarction. Probably, the brain was the same, but we didn't take it out for practical reasons. Essentially we think the hippo went septic, which induced a pro-coagulable state that resulted in diffuse intravascular coagulation.

Firearms & Halloween

Mort got to go outside last week - the son of the guy who replaced our dishwasher took him out to a firing range after the job was done. He's a reserve deputy County Sheriff.

This is where people go if they want to go to an official range to let off rounds (rather than finding a quiet spot in the forest): The bays circle around a hill, so it's a pretty big compound.




And here is some of what they bring:



Left to right: Glock in .40 Smith & Wesson; .357 Magnum; Taurus Tracker 7-shot in .357 Magnum; .38 Special +P 5-shot (with laser sight).

Mort is firing a Kimber Colt 1911-style pistol in this picture:


The Glock (standard issue) and the Kimber (Xmas present) are the ones commonly carried by Deputy Tyler.



And here is the Taurus Tracker:




We were spent Halloween with Elena & Patrick - they go in for the decorations in a serious way, even filling street-adjacent rooms of the house with props and black-lights...



Mort got to learn about pumpkin-carving:




He was plainly enjoying it.



Pretty effective, eh?


Here's the outside of the house after dark, including gravestones, a fog machine, screaming skulls, and many, many more....




And in case anyone wants to know, this is what voting in the NZ elections looked like to us:

A day in a hippo (graphic)

Finally, here are some pictures from the legendary hippo necropsy extravaganza, and as previously indicated, there are hippo-parts in the following pictures. Insidey-hippo-parts, if you catch my drift. Be warned.

Since the necropsy facility at the park is 4WD-access-only, we caught a lift up with the vet (awesome guy, very generous with the beer & pizza) and his assistants. Truly, this is the best way to see a safari park, appreciate the rhino deciding not to park in the road, and get drooled on by a giraffe.



Left to right: Kristin (pathologist), Johanna (clinical path resident), me.

One never quite knows the appropriate expression to assume when posing with an ex-hippo...



The pale pink markings on the skin visible in the above and below pictures are scarring from frostbite when they had a really cold year and the pond froze. That was when they lost the previous hippo - she dived under the ice and drowned.



Hippo feet are cool.




Happiness is learning that a box-cutter is a perfect tool for getting through hippo skin.




The most time-consuming and exhausting part of the necropsy was simply reflecting the skin. There were multiple, often symmetrical subcutaneous haemorrhages (man, that felt awesome spelling that word with an 'a' again), I'm pointing at one with the knife:



Here is where we realise that pretty much everything in the cranial abdomen is in fact fused with the peritoneum... Most confusing when you're expecting to be able to get into the abdomen and find a pile of organs and suddenly there's spleen but no abdominal cavity....




There were extensive areas of petechial haemorrhage on the serosal surface of the small and large intestines - the mucosal surface was even more extensively affected.



Here you can see the three large chambers of the fore-stomach, and an area of inflammation on the large intestine & mesentery that was overlying the diseased bladder.



The tip of the bladder is necrotic, and although it hadn't perforated it wouldn't have been far away...



Here's the opened bladder - at the right side is the necrotic end, a partially constricted sac filled with a 1.2lb urolith, mostly "sand" with some firm stones. Amazingly, this hippo hadn't actually blocked. We're not sure if the constriction in the bladder is a reaction to the stone, or if it was a pre-existing structure that subsequently filled with urolith.




The heart was cool - check out the extensive trabeculae.


I'm not sure if more hippo pics will turn up later - there were several cameras sporadically in use by whoever had "clean" hands.

Portland & yarn

On Sunday Johanna packed us into the front of her ute and drove us to Portland, mostly for a yarn crawl with some sight-seeing thrown in. Here's a picture of Mt. Hood - that snow never melted over Summer.... Creepy.



And here's my elbow getting in the way of Mt. Hood while Johanna ate lunch.



The main hospital for Portland has a gondola! That's too awesome for words, but I wonder if it's really that useful for emergency services....


I think this is Ross Bridge, crossing the Willamette river, which is the one in Corvallis that flows North to empty into the Columbia. Pretty, eh?


We didn't actually get into this shop, but I suspect it's awesome. You can tell by the bomb hanging above the door (saying, "Sorry, we're open").



An extremely dangerous shop: Yarn Garden. I could spend a whole lot there, the range is enormous and they have the most gorgeous yarn I've ever seen. Even Mort appreciated it, and sincerely wanted to build a fort.



Best of all, Manfred could finally ride the llama.



This is Yarnia - an interesting place with cones of very fine yarn arranged by fibre and colour. You choose what you want, and they wind multiple strands onto a cone to achieve whatever yarn weight and colour combination you like.



Twisted was also a very cool shop, with excellent shop models for sock yarns.



After all that, I was pretty conservative and only came away with moderate swag:




We also learned that unfortunately not everything that comes from Germany is Awesome:




We ate dinner at a Cuban restaurant, Pambiche, which had brilliant food (exquisite desserts) and really nice presentation.

Nothing specific, really

Last week Mort managed to get up a hill to get a view of Corvallis. Even though it's a bit hazy (there was an awesome fog earlier in the day), you can still get an impression of what a green, tree-filled place this is.




The weather has been edging more and more into Autumn, and we're getting frosts now. In self defense, I knitted a scarf - I think the chunky cabled brioche stitch should keep out most of the cold I'm likely to cycle into around here.




On Wednesday we officially joined the Heart of the Valley Homebrewers club (even though we've been a little involved with their activities already). Below is a typical club meeting, held at the Calapooia Brew Pub. Note the pubs here have darts boards, just like on TV, and no smoking, just like home.



Earlier in the week I had the opportunity to be involved in the necropsy of a hippo - it was an amazing experience, and not one that comes up often. When I can get the photos from other people's cameras (I wasn't taking pictures, myself), I'll put them up on the blog. They might be a bit more involved than everyone wants to see, so I'll make the content clear in the title of that post. Apparently not all people get as excited as I do about things inside hippos.