hidden_variable

Snowflake Challenge #15: Talk about an unexpected joyous moment you experienced last year.

It took me a while to decide what to say for this one. We all know that global events did not spark much joy last year, so let’s not talk about that. In my personal life, I was lucky enough to experience a number of good work and family events, but for the most part they were at least somewhat planned and expected. Fandom-wise, Yuletide definitely provided some moments of joy, both expected and not, but I’ve already written about that. So I decided to continue my Snowflake tradition of silly animal-related pictures. Yes, it’s now eligible to be called a “tradition,” since I will have done it twice after I finish this post. So, two moments of joy:

1. My favorite traffic alert of all time. Now, a traffic alert is not normally something that brings me joy, unexpected or otherwise. As a person who hates driving, I’ve somehow managed to end up living in one of the most car-oriented cities in the world–yay, dramatic irony! But seeing this particular alert pop up one morning while checking my work commute really made my day:





2. Meeting a sloth. My family moved recently, and we discovered that near our new place there is a wildlife rescue center with an eclectic selection of animals: monkeys, porcupines, foxes, macaws, owls, eagles... Most of the critters either were found injured in the wild or were exotic pets that people were keeping illegally or could no longer take care of. However, they also have a two-toed sloth who is there as part of a captive breeding program. This was big news for my daughter, S, who just turned 7 and is absolutely obsessed with sloths. We discovered that the center offers a “sloth experience” in which a small group of people can go inside the sloth enclosure and be introduced to the sloth, so we immediately decided to do this with S.

The sloth, whose name is Sid, was very chill throughout the experience. Most of the time he was asleep, but he perked up a bit when our wildlife center guide offered him a snack, as shown here:





Also for some reason there were two large sulcata tortoises hanging out in Sid’s enclosure—our guide wasn’t really able to explain this, other than saying they just liked being there. S referred to this gathering as the Slow Club.





The tortoises were in fact much more energetic than Sid during our visit. They both walked over to investigate our feet, and then had a brief skirmish with each other over a celery stalk.


Remembering the examples from my snowflake post last year, I decided to test my phone’s identification capabilities on some pictures of Sid. It seemed fairly confused about his species: I got several variations on this:





Here it did rather better, although it still didn’t quite have the right sloth variety. But my favorite part was its choice for “similar web images.”





I mean, you’re not wrong, Siri.