Content warning: pet death (fish). Our goldfish pond is beautiful but is spectacularly badly designed to hold actual goldfish. Particularly it's got these lovely rocks sloping into the water that make exactly the sort of base a raccoon wants to fish from. We've kept a net over the pond all summer to keep our fish safe and bunny_hugger hates it. We keep trying to think of ways around it. bunny_hugger found what seemed like a great idea. They're little hexagonal plastic meshes that float just at the water's edge. They're about a foot across, each, and they can clip or be wired together to form a blanket around the pond's edge that a raccoon should find too weird and too bothersome to deal with. bunny_hugger spent several hours a day for a week plus clipping together hexagons and tethering them by fishing line to the ground outside the pond so they wouldn't float away. And, with a great feeling of satisfaction, she took the net off the pond and put it away, until fall when the dropping leaves would demand it be returned. It was beautiful; from any distance away the mesh became almost invisible, looking like reflections of leaves or something inconsequential as that. The second night the pond was thus protected a raccoon grabbed and ate at least two fish. We found the remains of two, anyway. One of them was Gemini, one of our two largest fish and one of the two survivors of the original batch of thirteen we had seeded our pond with back in 2013. In a year that has been mostly devastation to us why do we need more of it? Here, back to Michigan's Adventure some. Our first trip to the petting zoo since 2019! (If it opened last year we didn't see it.) Goats and llamas just chilling. Goat giving one of those poses that an artist could not ever do because it would never look real. Bunnies! Three rabbits huddle up away from the sun and the attention. The Flemish giant in the middle had the largest dewlap we've ever seen. Getting a bit of grooming in on the Flemish giant. Giant sits up enough to yawn and then lies down again. Relatable. Trivia: Gus Grissom and John Glenn each simulated about a hundred Mercury-Redstone flights in preparing for the MR-4 launch, Grissom's suborbital flight. Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander. NASA SP-4201. Currently Reading: Return To Earth , Buzz Aldrin, Wayne Warga. Ah, I don't feel the least bit uncomfortably seen reading Aldrin describe his post-Apollo depression and his inability to function and how hard he became to be around and everything. PS: Reading the Comics, July 16, 2022: Brevity is the Soul of Wit Edition with what might be my shortest weekly roundup ever.