Ahhh! Raptors!

Day #9 journal

Monday, July 18, 2016

Today in art of acting, we were given our first acting assignment: an open scene. How our scenes worked was that we were all given the same lines, and we had to act out those same lines differently depending on what kind of scene we chose to act out. We also had to write about it, listing the objective, action, and obstacle of the scene and tell a little bit about what its setting is. April and I are working together and didn't perform our scenes today, but I just know that ours is going to be a lot of fun to work on.

In Performing World Music, we are starting to really make progress in playing our song, Rose Rhythm. For now, the only difficult part about playing it is trying to keep a constant rhythm without slowing down or speeding up too fast.

I like my next class, Photographic Literacy because it's the class that I feel the last amount of pressure in. In all the other classes we have a lot of assignments piled up that are a little stressful to complete at times, but in Photographic Literacy, we simply get to take pictures and discuss the good things about them and what can be improved.

Today starts my first day of my first elective: Water, Wildlife and Wilderness. I've been waiting since the first day of Gear Up for this class because I really appreciate nature and animals, and I love to hike in the woods. The start of the class wasn't really much because it was all introductions, of course. But I did like learning a little bit about my lovely instructor, Geri Philpott. From her presentation, I learned that she is a part of UK's Natural Resources and Environmental Science (NRES) program, which is a interdisciplinary, environmental science degree.

The best part of this elective, though, was the fact that we got to me some live Raptors! We were able to see all of these owls because most of them were injured in some way, but were rescued.

This first raptor we saw was a A Red Tail Hawk Owl named Kentucky. He is an owl that's been trained for
twelve years.

The next owl we saw was an Eastern Screech owl named Valentine. One of his wings was injured from being hit by a car, but he was rescued a few years ago.

The last two owls were a Barred Owl who went by the name Luna and a Great Horned Owl named Howard. Luna was a little shy at first, but eventually cooperated when she got comfortable. Howard is an owl known to eat other raptors' eggs and eat other birds much bigger than himself. I described these two owls together since I wasn't able to take a picture of them separate.

The last thing we did today was go to the Lexington Legends baseball game. The sweet part about this was that we got one of the best places to sit at in the stadium: the Pepsi Party Deck. There, we ate dinner, which was hot dogs, chips, cookies and some drinks. During the game, I hung out with my friends Cody, April, Leanna, and Samuel. We weren't really interested in watching the game so instead we played our own game, Hangman: Sponge Bob References Addition. We played this for a majority of the game until we decided to just walk around and explore different parts of the stadium while singing classical Disney songs. At the end of the game, I checked the score and the Legends ended up losing 2 to 4, but they did however, get 11 strike-outs. I was expecting for there to be fireworks at the end like last year, but there weren't any, I'm assuming, because it wasn't a Friday.