Whew! What a week!

It started off pleasantly enough: Daniel and I took a quick weekend trip down to San Diego last weekend. We spent Sunday at the Wild Animal Park with Daniel's parents and grandmother. The highlight was the gorilla exhibit, starring one particularly plucky young gorilla who just didn't know when to give up. He would be off somewhere quietly by himself, and then suddenly he would hoot, beat on his chest, and charge off at one of the bigger gorillas. They would wrestle for a while, and the bigger gorilla would put him in his place, and he'd wander off to a corner for a minute or two. And then he'd be at it again. You could practically hear him thinking, "Maybe this time I'll get to be the alpha male!" (Well, not quite - he never went anywhere near the group's resident silverback, who was sitting at the other end of the enclosure, looking at the younger gorillas and quite clearly thinking, "Huh. Kids these days...")

The gorillas are so scarily human-like it's a little embarrassing. There are even signs by the gorilla enclosure asking people not to make prolonged eye-contact with the gorillas, because it's rude to stare.

I was also quite amused by two smaller monkeys. (I don't know the species - they had longish black fur with very shaggy white tails, white stripes down the back, and some white markings around the head. Another park visitor referred to them as "skunk monkeys", which does a pretty good job of describing what they looked like, but I don't think that's the official name.) They were perched on a log that jutted out over a pond, mesmerized by their own reflections in the water. Narcissus among the apes.

We saw quite a number of other animals, but I the primates were the best for my money. (We didn't get to see any big cats, though. Big cats are usually fun.)

Then Monday it was back to work. Tuesday I started coming down with an evil cold. I managed to get through work and my Introduction to RoboHelp class on Tuesday night by dint of swilling down enormous quantities of gunpowder tea, but it wasn't fun. Wednesday was even less fun - although I did pick a bunch of mint from the back yard and toss it into the teapot with the gunpowder tea, making a really yummy pot of Moroccan mint tea. I'm going to have to plant some more herbs in the back yard.

I think I'm going to start drinking more tea as well, particularly green tea. I can brew up a pot, pour it into my stainless steel thermos, and take it to work with me, and it will keep hot all day. It's milder than coffee and more flavorful than water and healthier than soda.

But, anyway, today was the first day all week that I've actually felt reasonably human. I'm not totally over my cold, but I'm feeling a lot more lively and coherent. Which was good, because I had to meet with subject matter experts at work, and it rather sucks when you get a few precious moments of an experts time and then turn into a blithering idiot because your sinuses are stopped up and you haven't had a proper night's sleep.

And my boss announced today that he's retiring at the end of February.

Not entirely unexpected. He is about the right age to be thinking about retiring. Most of us expected him to retire soonish - not quite this soon, but maybe in a year or two.

I'm just thinking, "Noooo! You can't retire! I like working for you!" My boss, in my humble opinion, rocks. I do not know whether his ultimate successor will rock. (His temporary successor, a coworker of mine, definitely rocks, but maybe not quite so much. Like, if my boss is Melissa Etheridge on the rockingness scale, she's at least Alanis Morrisette. The trick is not to end up working for Britney Spears.)

I don't believe I just compared my boss to Melissa Etheridge.

Anyway, probably no point in worrying about it. One of the biggest reasons why I like my boss is that he is unlike my graduate advisor in precisely the right ways. That's probably not so rare.

And now, in honor of my still-lingering cold, I'm going to go curl up with a book and a hot drink.