So to finish up our 4th of July weekend, Mr. Cleaver and I headed to Lincoln Park for the Green City Market and the Lincoln Park Zoo on the 5th (and yes I know there's still Sunday, but that was dedicated to the Men's Wimbleton Final). Having finally gotten the memory card for my shiny new Pentax K200D, I thought this would be a great opportunity to take it out for a spin.

This is the one picture I took at the Market:

But before you worry about not getting a chance to use my camera much, I took over 650 pictures at the Zoo. Don't worry I won't make you look at them all. (I edited it down to 40 on my computer in any case).

Because we were going directly from the market to the zoo, we didn't want to purchase a whole lot of stuff and couldn't really get anything perishable. We did pick up some rosemary and a half-pint of raspberries, the latter of which served to perk up that overly dry birthday cake.

We picked a perfect day to go the zoo: the weather was gorgoreous and nearly all the animals were awake an active.

The trainers came out and played with the seals:

[wp_caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="357" caption="Della the Grey Seal"][/wp_caption]

The big cats were alert, if not on the prowl:

[wp_caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="334" caption="Tiger Tiger Burning Bright"][/wp_caption]

The chimps people watched:

[wp_caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Keo the Chimp"][/wp_caption]

And the polar bears swam:

and swam:

(I took about 100 photos of the polar bears alone - I though it would make a good subject for my "In Motion" photos for the swap.)

It was also a great day for knocking stuff off our Chicago-to-do list: we hit the Green City Market and we rode the carousel at zoo and as you may or may not know, my love for carousels knows no bounds.

We've got about 6 or so things left on the list, which is good, because we've finally set a moving date : the week of August 18!

If you're interested in seeing more of our day at the zoo, you can check out my flickr set here.