Zoos Aplenty!

This has been a busy week for the Weatherston Zoo Crew...in less than a week, we've gone to zoos 3 times!

The first came earlier this week, when we went to the Baltimore Zoo with our friends the Cornwall family.

As you might tell from the pictures, much craziness ensued, from butt-watching rhinos, flying down slides, turtle-riding, and cowgirling.















Snoozing like a polar bear sounded like a good idea by the end of the day.







Today, we had decided to go to the National Zoo in Washington DC. At least until Mom noticed an article in the newspaper than mentioned that at the celebration of the second birthday of Samson the elephant at the Baltimore Zoo there would be served cakes made by Charm City Cakes. As in the Charm City Cakes of Ace of Cakes fame. [Google if you've no idea what I'm talking about. It's only one of the most loved shows in our house. They make AWESOME cakes. Go look. Now. Shoo. Then come back.]

The problem then is...do we go? We had just been to the Baltimore Zoo, and still wanted to go to the National Zoo...but cake! By Duff! Cake!

So we did both.

Mom didn't tell Stevie what we were doing until we were almost there.

He then proceeded to drool. Vastly. We nigh well needed a mop to deal with it.

When we got there we quite a bit of time to kill until the gate opened. Then we rode the tram back to the part of the zoo wherein the celebration would occur. We walked (swiftly) past the animals, for of course the elephants are found in the very backmost portion of the zoo. We missed Duff himself by only a few moments - Stevie glimpsed a man on a motorcyle roar off, who we realized later must have been him. Several of the CCC girls were there, however. They were kind enough to pose in a picture with Stevie, as well as sign his zoomap.
There were a number of activities planned. The serving of the cake, of course (we were first in line). Signing a card for the guest of honor, as well as writing birthday greetings on the sidewalk with chalk (which then got drawn on by little kids coming later). We saw the cake that the zookeepers made for Samson...not something I'd want to eat, but it looked yummy for elephants.
We chose to have the chocolate cake filled with delicious peanut butter filling over the one with raspberry. Good choice, I think.



We may have gotten filmed in line...and my Dad may have gotten filmed licking his plate clean - watch for us in 3-4 months on an Ace of Cakes episode in season 9! *laughs*
We skipped the rest of the birthday bash, as we had another zoo to get to!

The National Zoo had crazy amounts of people. Almost no parking whatsoever, and a crowd of probably thousands of people.

The trees were blooming. They were extremely pretty. Looked like a huge group of white butterflies settled on a bare tree. Or popcorn. Depending on your point of view.



The prairie dogs were posing.



As were the meerkats.



The pandas were...eating. And eating. And...well, you get the idea.



And Missy was...getting pennies. Her penny collection must be worth lots by now! A couple of dollars, for sure. *grins*



All in all, a sucessful (but tiring) day.

Tomorrow we go to an art festival!

First Trip to the Science Center

Recently I blogged about the trip we made to the Science Center for Pi Day. That was not our first trip there.

The first trip we made was the week prior. It was to be a 'short' trip...we did not explore EVERY part of the building.

The very first thing I saw and was excited about as we walked up to the strange-shaped building that is the Sceince Center was the sign for the geocaching exhibit. [Aside: I LOVE geocaching...even though I do not yet have access to a GPS. ^^" I do my best by studying other people's pictures, reading their comments, and googlemaps. It doesn't work vastly well, but it's still fun. For those who do not know, geocaching is the hobby of finding hidden caches of items and such by using their GPS, then logging their visit to the cache on geocaching.com.]

I thought it was super cool that they had an exhibit, including caches hidden around the harbor that you can borrow museum GPS to find. (We haven't done that yet.) When we later went to the exhibit, I was the only kid to go through the entire maze they had, reading all the signs. (Dad came with me. ^^)

That was not, however, the first thing we did. First we watched the new Alice in Wonderland movie from Tim Burton on the IMAX. In 3d. It was pretty awesome. (My favorite character was probably the Cat. Or the Dormouse. Except for that icky eye-poking thing she does.)

After that we did some exploration of the museum.

Dad got tired and decided to rest for a bit.

On a bed of nails! Ouch!

Not really.

We went up to the roof of the Science Center, where they have a really cool telescope. They also have screens you can hold in front of your eyes so as to safely look at the sun. It filtered out light...and made the sun appear green.

We even got to look at the sun through the telescope. Needless to say, you got a lot better picture. Dad spent a long time looking through it.

I couldn't see through very well...sometimes having glasses means suffering the curse of being unable to through telescopes...microscopes...binoculars...

I like my glasses, however. I enjoy clarity in my life. *laughs*

I did manage to take a picture through the telescope.

I was feeling pretty good about my picture...until one of the guys running the telescope goes "No, no, no...that's not a good picture...this is a good picture!" He spends several minutes getting me a closeup picture of the sun...it even has some action going on toward the left side - a sun flare. Looks like a little curved thread.

As long as we were on the roof, I wanted to get a good shot of the view. Only way the view could be better is if they had built it so you could face the water.

Finally, just some other pictures I took of the interior of the building from varying heights.

I imagine that these probably will not be the last time you see blogposts about the Science Center around here...it's become a very popular place for our family!

Happy Birthday!

Today's my Grandma Elna's birthday!

I wanted to wish her a very happy birthday!

We love ya here at the zoo crew.

^_____________________^

Happy Pi Day!

3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279 50288 41971 69399 37510...

Enough of that.

Today is March 14th! 3.14.2010!

I discovered 'Pi Day' a couple of years ago, but this is the first time I've actually celebrated it.
Now, I don't like math, but I do like the concept of a math symbol-related holiday. And a reason to eat pi. I mean pie. I also enjoy making pi jokes. (Mathematician: Pi r squared. Baker: NO! Pies are round!)

Well, when we went to the Baltimore Science Center last week (which I will get around to blogging about), we noticed that today would be Pi Day, and they would be doing special events to celebrate.
Both my brother and I decided that we...had...to...go.

So we did. ^^
And it was awesome.

Now, the weather was a bit icky...but we didn't care.
The birds might have, though. They looked kind of miserable.

My brother signed up for the drawing to get into the pie-eating contest. He didn't get in. Too bad, he would have whomped on those kids! Most of them barely touched their pie, because they didn't want to get their faces dirty.

The science center was doing a lot of cool activities: there were hula hoops (Pi is important in calculating the circumference of circles, of course), pi colouring pages, making pi necklaces (three beads of a colour, then one bead of a different colour, then four beads of a different colour, etc.), reciting as much of pi as you can (Let's see...chocolate, pumpkin, apple...oh, you mean the digits?), stringing pi along the stairwell of the building, one digit at a time, like a number garland:

There was eating pi...at least, Moon Pies.

My favorite, however, was piku and piems.

-

Celebrate

Pi

Day with haiku.

-

Traditional form:

Five seven five; or Pi form:

Three then one then four.

-

Call me the

Pi

Poem Master.

-

Feel free to make up

Your own 'piems' for Pi Day.

Does it look like fun?

-

The one I made up at the building actually went like this:

The symbol is cool!

As for the food, I think that

Cheesecake is better.

-

We did spend some exploring the rest of the science center too. We went to a couple of planetarium shows and played in most of the exhibits. (They wouldn't let us go play in the Kids' Room. My plan of hijacking someone's kid to get an in was nixed by the family. *sigh* Guess I'll have to plot something else.

One thing I found that was really cool was a small area devoted to the IMAX theater. It has lookthrough spots where you can watch the IMAX projector working, which was neat, but I found the display that compared different kinds of film fascinating. The two short, skinny films are VHS and such, while the bottom filmstrip is the IMAX film.

After we got done at the science center, we drove past a really funky looking art museum-thing. (I'll put pictures up in a slideshow soon as I figure out how).

When we got home we had dinner (mm...burgers). Since Stevie was bummed about missing the pie-eating contest...which he won, despite his 20-second handicap! But only by a few seconds...seconds I had lost because I had to stop to breath through my mouth because I'd gotten whipped cream up my nose! My sinuses are still burning. Kids, do not snort whipped cream. It ain't pretty.

Then we had pie. Chocolate cream. Mm.

But we ate it with chopsticks. *shrugs* That's life at our house for ya.

This morning, I actually sent out a message to my crochet group about Pi Day...with some links that I had found. I found an awesome hat to make my brother, as well as an amigurumi pi symbol. I'm thinking birthday presents, maybe?

So, overall Pi Day was much with the fun.

I hope everyone else had a great Pi Day...and if not, there's always next year!

-

It's farewell

to

Pi Day this year.

-

May next year

be

just as much fun!

-

[Slideshow of art museum to be added as soon as possible.]

[Am also working on drafting blog posts for everything from the trips we did in Texas to the move to this point in time.]

[Apologies for the screwed up formatting - I CANNOT get it to stay right.]

Long Time, No Post.

Betcha've been wondering where I've been, ne?
I am currently writing this from the lofty heights of my new bed, in my new room of our new house on my not-so-new laptop on our new wireless internet!
There's a lot of information in that sentence in there, isn't there? :)
Well, we skedaddled out of Texas about a month ago and arrived in Maryland in time to admire the vast snowpiles that accumulated during our week of travel. We spent about a week and a half in a very nice hotel (Mariott Residence Inn...stay there on a weekday if you have a chance. The one we were at, at least, did 'social hour' dinner. Between that and breakfast, we didn't have to make our own meals at all!). Then we got our house: a tad bit smaller than the recent houses my family has had, but we'll make it work.
For the past couple days I've been sleeping in pillow and blanket piles on the floor first, then my mattress, but last night we put together my new bed (and shifted it around and around in my room because it didn't want to fit anywhere) and now I get to sleep on it! Pictures will be forthcoming later...this'll be a text-only blog this time. *laughs*
I was a little concerned about falling off in the night - I used to have a short daybed, but now I almost need rockclimbing equipment to climb onto it - but I awoke this morning still on the mattress. *whew*
I changed bedding sets to go with the bed...baby Eeyore didn't really go with black-painted wood. Now I've got black sheet, a red comforter, one black pillowcase and two silky red ones. I also got a giant black suede pillow that is super comfy to lay against while reading or playing gameboy.
It's a good thing this bed has a bunch of understorage: drawers and cupboards and such. There's not enough room for my TV cabinet! I gave it to my sister for her princess TV.
Another good thing mentioned was that our house has wireless! I no longer have to fight everyone else for internet access, which will probably equal a lot more blog posts from yours truly. I used to type up the posts in a word document, then copy it over, but this is much easier.
It was a little sad and pathetic the first day we got the router in, though. I had brought my laptop down to test it, and my dad's laptop was out, and the main computer was up...and I was chatting to my mom through facebook when we were half a room apart from one another. XD
Now I've loaded yahoo chat, and it will be useful to talk. If she wants to ask me a question, and I happen to be online, I don't have to go downstairs. Vice versa, too. If I want to ask something and she's on, I can do it from my bed.
Let's see...what else is important? Oh, yes. I went to the library last night (technically I was dropped off while the rest of my family went to a meeting)...or rather, one of the many libraries in the Anne Arundel county. There's like 16 of them total. This one was really nice - it was two stories, with kid's book downstairs and everything else up. There's a good selection of everything, and a very high checkout limit (99 items, though I won't check out THAT many). I picked up a few things with my new library card. I went through the main line, though I was fascinated by a self checkout machine. Maybe I'll try that next time!
Right now life is kind of sluggish...still trying to get everything settled. I've been doing a lot of computer, gameboy and reading. I really should start my cool crochet project I've decided on as my next big project: It's a piano keys scarf for my music-loving, piano-playing sister. Looks like great fun, and it will be the first big non-amigurumi project I've done in a long time.
I picked up a cute book of bug afghans, though...made of squares with bees and ladybugs and dragonflies, etc. We'll see what I feel like doing after I finish the scarf.

Well, I believe that covers the most pressing news in my life. Since I have continual access to the internet let's see if that will make me be a more regular blogger!

Happy New Year!

As well as Happy birthday to me today.

I'll try to do some catchup posts soon. Not today, 'cause we're going to go play in Austin!

Beep! Beep! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

Today, I decided to use our dying bananas and make banana bread.
Yum, right?
Thus begins the problems.
[Using a quick way of writing because my arms hurt to type]

The Tale of the Bread, from my point of view:

All right. Need two eggs. *look in fridge* No eggs.
*drive to store, buy carton of eggs, drive back*
All right. eggs. *crack, dump, toss shells*
Need margarine. *look in fridge...half a stick of margarine when I need a whole one*
*sigh*
*use half a stick of margarine, half a stick of butter*
Need bananas. *peel bananas...one inch-long segment of peel at a time as the peel disintegrates on me*
Mix. *turn on mixer...bananas try to go flying*
*sigh*
*mix together dry ingredients, add to wet, pour into greased pans, put in oven*
Good. Second batch.
*mix, mix, mix, using butter instead of margarine*
*pour batter into last pan, then scoop into mini-muffin pan*
*put in oven*
[Later]
*go to take bread out, phone rings...continue trying to take finished bread out, newer pan of bread tips over and spills*
*sigh*
*scoot out as much spilled batter as possible, but some sneaks down sides of oven where it is unreachable*
*sigh*
*leave as is...stinky burnt bread smell*
*pull out muffins, let cool*
[Later]
*make dinner (a stir together in pan and let cook from a box meal)...turn on oven to preheat...just as soon as I start putting pan in oven, smoke alarm goes off (from burnt bread smell), I jerk and spill water out of the pan all over the door, sending up more smoke which sets the smoke alarm off half a dozen more times*
*frantically try to clean up/fix meal/air out room/keep smoke alarm from going off*
*open all doors and windows, turn on stove fan, add water to pan and put in stinky oven...finally get alarm to stop beeping every half a minute*


*SIGH*