Slugs

We went for a long walk last night, in the rain, and spent the whole time dodging slugs on the sidewalk. If you've not spent a lot of time in the northwest, you may not be familiar with these little gems of the insect world. (Wait - are they insects? Grubs? Snails-without-shells? Particularly peculiar worms? I don't really know!) They are brown (or greenish) and long and fat and ugly, and seem to consist mostly of slime. They don't so much crawl, as ooze their way across the sidewalk.

(When I first moved to Alaska I had never even heard of the things, yet by the end of that first year I was 'intimately' familiar with them. I had a garden, you see. Lettuces and such. The sort that have loose leafy parts. Enough said. Slugs on the sidewalk are revolting enough - but in the dinner salad, having somehow escaped the washing part, well... words are insufficient.)

So today we are being slugs ourselves, of a different sort. We can't decide what to do in the rain. We have conflicting theories of the likelihood of a successful acquisition of a parking place at the zoo today - Mark thinks that since nearly everyone who might ever want to go to the zoo was actually there last week, they are surely being 'slugs' THIS week and staying home. Furthermore, all those fair weather zoo-goers wouldn't be tempted by cloudy skies. My theory is that all those people who were wandering around the parking lot with us last week and creating the traffic jams we were in and who were ultimately stymied in their attempt, will have to 'attempt' it again this week if only because a desire to see the zoo isn't something that goes away easily. Slugs or not, these people were denied last week and by golly are not going to be denied again.

Hmmmmm. What'll it be?