Gregory Koger

My old friend Peter and his wife Ariadne are in town again and we’ve spent most of the week together having a great time. We spent a lot of time just hanging out at his parents house with his sister’s kids, who are all so fun and lively. Had some great conversations and discussions as well. But we did go out a few times and made it to the Brookfield Zoo.

I’ve kind of been curious as to how I would feel about visiting a zoo, considering I’ve spent a large percentage of my life in captivity and have some idea of what it would be like for the animals. For the most part though the animals weren’t in cages or poor living conditions, and they seemed to have some room to move about, though a lot of the living spaces seemed to be made of concrete and I doubt these animals are evolutionarily adapted to walking on concrete for long periods of time… I mean, I think the zoo does some good work but I don’t know that I really like the idea of keeping these animals locked up in captivity.

Here we are helping his parents put in their garden, as we did one time when Peter’s dad was in the hospital when we were kids - and Peter is wearing a pair of shoes that he had at probably the same age, and which ultimately ended up disintegrating spectacularly in the course of gardening

Here are the two old men cooking some vegetables on the grill

Here are a few pics from the zoo:

Gorillas above, as well as a waterfall in the recreated tropical environment where they have a number of apes and monkeys. Below are some black and green poisonous frogs, which are a little hard to see in the pic but look amazing.

Here are some penguins and a sea bird:

Finally a baboon, peacock, polar bear, and some kangaroos gettin’ it on

So, we had a great time, and I’m really going to miss them and the kids, but I’m sure they’ll be back again before too much longer. And once I get off parole I’ll make my way out to Boston to visit them.

While I’m posting I may as well mention my grades from this semester - all A’s except a B in my Algebra class that doesn’t even count towards my GPA.

I should have gotten an A in Algebra too, but I missed it by like 30 points out of 1,000 total points for the class. If I would have actually done some work outside of class and studied I would have easily gotten an A - but there is no one to blame for that but myself. Too many late nights bullshitting around with my friends online Anyhow, a 4.0 GPA is generally considered to be fairly decent, I think… Not bad for my first year of college, I’d say.