Ooops, missed Wednesday and it's already Monday!

Not quite got back into the swing of posting a blog after each day I work at the zoo, so I will try and catch up today.

Wednesday last week was pretty much quiet job-wise. After spending a goodly portion of the morning on the computer typing wordy stuff I spent a good portion of the afternoon in a Guest Service Training session arranged which all members of staff have attended over the past week. This ties in with the Guest Charter the zoo has recently implemented. After that I had a look at the photos of the squid mural and started mapping out the rejoining of the tentacles and thinking about the practicalities of getting the job done.

Before the building work

After the building work

Monday 11th

This morning has been all about the squid. I have been up to Bug World to measure the line of the old wall to get the length of the body for the squid as the mural has been brought forward into the room and making the body quite a bit shorter.  I will need to extend the body back, which is really a complete repaint of said body. I have been talking to the Maintenance Dept regarding a scaffold platform being made available and looking at paints and trying to match colours using a book of swatches. 

Body before building work

Body after the building work

This afternoon I popped over to the Forest of Birds aviary to add a sign that got left off one of the ID displays when I replaced a few of them last week. The birds in the warm aviary house were active and noisy with various melodic calls and songs filling the air. And sadly, as is usual, a high proportion of the people who walk in go through without stopping and really seeing all that there is in there; so many little treasures of feathers. They leave muttering that there was nothing to see when there are at least 18 species and numerous individuals all around them.

It's now quite busy with people outside, being half term the number of visitors has gone up this week, despite the drizzly grey cold weather which is good to see. 

Back with the squid; I settled on my colour choices for the mural and wall and sent my order to Maintenance. In Bug World I used a piece  of string, cut to the length of the squid body, and marked where it would go round the walls back from the new head position. I also traced the tail fluke to save time drawing it on the wall later. More discussions with Benn from the Estates Dept, Mark from Bug World and Eddie from Maintenance regarding what needs still to be done to the walls and tanks to finish that side of the job off before I can start my work on the actual mural.

Hoping the paints will be delivered tomorrow so I can get the work underway. The builders said they hoped to be finished sometime in the morning, if all goes well, I should be able to start drawing up the alterations after that and maybe even slap some paint on.