This year is new.

Lights Before Christmas typically runs through New Year’s Eve, but they decided to do an encore this weekend…I know they were advertising it pretty heavily on Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t know how much regular advertising they did…but I know the encore was mentioned in a Blade article yesterday about the Lights’ record-setting attendance this year – 179,267 visitors.

We invited my dad and my brother to go with us last night, even though it was pretty cold (wind chill = 9 degrees) outside. It was super-crowded when we went mid-December, so I expected at least short lines. I bought our tickets online so we could avoid those lines, but we walked right into the zoo and enjoyed the Zoo without much company. My dad hadn’t been to the Zoo in a long time – probably since we last went as a family, which would have been quite a few years ago. I can’t wait to take him back in the summer so he can see more animals…though the aquarium being closed for 2 more years seems crazy to everyone.

We took him through the new Tembo Trail, but just like everything else, it kind of sucks in the winter. Here’s some elephant ENRICHMENT!:

Here are some pictures of different animal light displays…many of which are VERY FAMILIAR to those of us from the Toledo Zoo area:

I enjoy Bats! Bats! Bats!:

My dad said I looked like I was going ice fishing, and I’m not sure what that even means, because it was freaking cold. Should a person going to the Lights encore NOT look like they could go ice fishing at any second? I don’t know. We did some ducking into buildings to warm up and so that my dad could stroke the beautiful woodwork in the reptile house. We also went into the Museum building to see the trains. The trains (and the train people) are probably primarily the same ones from when I was little:

Here’s a picture that sort of shows how big the train setup is…the sign says that it takes the train people 100+ hours to set everything up. It’s so fancy:

(Additionally, It’s also sad that the new train stuff they can buy seems to all be ads for shitty shit like a little storefront of a Walmart Supercenter or Menards.)

I wanted to take a picture of all the “Dancing Trees” lit up when one of their songs ended, but my camera battery died…but that’s ok. That would have been over the top. I rather like this picture of a few trees elsewhere in the Zoo:

Here’s the big tree – the one that was in the Top 10 most amazing Christmas trees in the USA – with 3 (or 30, depending on who I’m talking to, but really it’s 3) miles of lights on it:

When we visited in December, it was crazy crowded everywhere around the big tree – you just had to wait for the herd to shuffle past it on the trail and only the most obnoxious people (not us) posed pictures with it in the background since everyone was packed in like sardines on the walkway and around the Conservatory lily pool (this was not helped by the Aquarium area being closed)…but this time, we had the tree to ourselves for a while, so I took some pictures. First a dark photo of my very favorite boys men:

And a picture of me and Brian near some orbs:

Which brings us up to date, I think.

I didn’t run the Midnight Special because when I went out there and picked up my shirt, I almost slipped in the parking lot…and then when I was sitting in my car waiting for it to be time to run, I saw somebody else actually fall…I kept thinking about the Wabash-Cannonball and dark and questionably-maintained it is and talked myself into coming home. I had been up for 24 hours at that point, because I’m a night shift spazzoid, so I came home and went to sleep for 3 hours before I had to be in to work my holiday…so it was probably for the best. Whatever, what a sissy.

It seems like every year I have to resolve to take better care of myself, because by this time in the winter, I’m a sunlight-deprived, carb-compensating, non-sleeping, but still slothy mess…and that’s where we are at again this year. If somehow I could show you a graph of my steps/day from fitbit over the last few years, the dip in activity in the late fall is SUPER-OBVIOUS…Going into the new year, I felt SUPER-DOOMY and resigned to a life of grossy gross fatness.

However, I’ve been eating Paleo the last few days (but caved like a PMSy spaz earlier today and had some ice cream) and using my SAD light, and I feel loads better (but that could be from having a human schedule again, post-holiday) and more optimistic. I forgot how sleepy I was the first while of eating paleo…it’s kind of nice. It starts pretty immediately and was super great when recovering from night shift. And, even though it had only been 2-3 days of strict paleo, I felt prettttty gross after eating the ice cream…so back to the cave, with a bolstered ‘tude, for me. I need to find some more recipes that sound both delicious and doable for us…or eat lots of eggs, I suppose.

I’ve been really into logic problems again lately. Try some! www.logic-puzzles.org has free online ones, or there’s at least one iPad app (Puzzle Baron Logic Puzzles). As promised, I am taking a Facebook vacation, which though I’m mostly cut off from the outside world, is pretty nice.