Monkeying around

This morning I was due to meet Eddie from Maintenance to start tweeking the Christmas animal shape lights. I went to our arranged meet point and waited. After a while I started pacing, not through impatience as such but to keep myself warm as although it wasn't really cold, standing around for half an hour soon had me feeling chilly. To amuse myself I practiced the steps for a waltz, which was fine as being not long after the zoo had opened it was still quiet visitor wise.
One of the groundsmen passed by and I got him to contact Eddie, who was apologetic but he had been detained on another job, so we arranged to meet later.

Back in the warmth of the studio I started working on the pipefish painting and as the text had arrived back from the Education Office for the red-bellied lemurs I also set about compiling the ID document for that. The text needed adjusting a couple of times to fit into the space and there was also a small adjustment on the wording. I am still waiting for the animal section to come and ok the illustration, but it'll have to wait for a  bit as Lynsey, who is to check it, has a lot going on in her section at the mo. It's not a problem as the animals aren't officially on show yet, although they can sometimes been seen when they are in the ring-tailed lemur indoor area during the' mixing' stages. The process of integrating new animals to established animals is a long, carefully monitored procedure with the animals being given plenty of time to get used to each other before they become fully integrated.

During the morning Eddie called the studio to change our meet time to an earlier one as he would be free to to the lights sooner than he expected. So just before lunch I donned my warm coat and hat and went to meet him. As I waited I watched blackbirds and robins picking through the fallen leaves looking for tasty morsels of insects or crumbs dropped by the public. The lorikeets were in a big aviary close by and their noisy chatter filled the air.

Eddie brought the 'cherry-picker', a small motorised platform with an arm that can be raised and maneuvered into position high off the ground. He needed this to get at the monkey shape lights in the tree I had met him by. There were 4 monkey's that needed adjusting, two had to be re-hung in better positions (one was wrongly hung upside-down) and the rest needed their shapes pulling/bending back into the form they are supposed to be and/or having the light tubing cable-tied to the aluminium frame to create the form of the animal. As they are a few years old now some of the cable-ties had come off over time so the finer shape of a face or foot would be lost. We finished the tweeking of these 4 monkeys in about half an hour by which time it was lunch.

I took these two photos in a previous year of two of the monkey shapes lit up in the dark, the first one still had some 'tweeking ' to do on the light tubing around its back legs and feet. The shapes are pretty near to life size as we could get.

The afternoon was spent working on the pipefish painting and popping up to The Heap of Trouble exhibit with Anna, to remove a sign or two.  I have almost finished the pipefish, I'm leaving it overnight to see what it looks like with fresh eyes tomorrow, I think it still needs a bit of work and I'm not entirely sure about it as I've had to do some guesswork on the tail structure as my reference photo's can't pick up that detail and it's too dark and the fish are too small in the tank to see properly. So Hopefully when I show Jonny tomorrow, if he's available, he can let me know if I need to do more work.