Happy 4th of July!  I'm not sure what, if anything, I'm doing to celebrate but I'm making note of the holiday anyway.

I've been having major internet connection issues on my main computer since I got home from vacation and have spent an annoyingly long amount of time messing with it to virtually no avail.  Kim's laptop is still able to connect so I'm continuing to borrow that for the time being as I'm banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my computer is refusing to cooperate.  I've looked up all kinds of troubleshooting options but none of them have worked and some of them seem to have made things worse.  I don't know...  That computer is pretty old.  It might be time to bite the bullet and get a new one.  But in the meantime I'm continuing to mess with it.

I just want to write down a couple more things about the trip before I completely forget.  On Saturday we ended up going to a petting zoo, which is something I haven't done in a really, really long time.  It was actually a lot of fun.   We were able to buy little baskets filled with lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and apples to feed the animals and it's always fun to do that.  They had a decent variety of critters, too, including pigs, rabbits, goats, llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, chickens, horses, a cow, and an emu.  I've never pet an emu before but it was pretty cool.  Kim managed to befriend it pretty well as it let her put her arm around it for quite a long time while I took some pictures.  The big llama also tried to kiss her right on the lips at one point.  I fed the cow and that was pretty cool.  I was a little intimidated right at first because it's a big creature and there's a big mouth coming towards your hand.  At one point the cow licked my hand and that was an interesting sensation.  I also thought it was pretty neat how gentle the goats were.  I walked in the pen with a brush and was able to brush every single one of those guys and they all took it really calmly.  I think I like goats more than I realize.  I also want to give a special shout-out to the pigs and bunnies for just being cute.

Then late at night back at the room we had a not-as-fun encounter with a much less cute type of animal:  Teenagers.  At first I thought someone was going by with an especially loud motorcycle at 12:45 AM, but the noise kept going and going and finally we went out to look and realized there was a group of young dudes revving the motor on their car.  It must have needed a muffler or something, because this thing was loud as hell.  Kim yelled down to them asking them to keep it down and of course they had to be ultra classy with their responses shouting back "suck my dick" and generally being obnoxious.  I'm sorry, but if you're making super loud noises in the middle of the night in a public place, you're objectively the asshole in the situation.  There's really no getting around that.  I thought about calling the cops on them, but the internet said they were closed after, like 10 PM, which seems kind of crazy to me.  There was a phone number listed but it just went to some automated menu that I didn't really want to deal with and I didn't think this was something that warranted calling 911.  They actually did quiet down after our exchange with them, so maybe it somehow registered with them that they were being jerks.

Anyway, that about wraps things up for now I guess.  I'm gonna try not to get too frustrated with the internet issues and try to enjoy the holiday.