Body Worlds

So we went to see Body Worlds this weekend - I scored a voucher that got us in for $17.50 instead of paying the full price of $22.00 a person. It still wasn't worth it to me.

Everyone is giving rave reviews of the exhibit, but frankly I thought it wasn't all that exciting. I gave it a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

I think the Buffalo Museum of Science did a good job of keeping the crowds spread out and I think that everyone at the exhibit was really well-behaved - kids included. The staff there was wonderful... not like the crotchety old biddies at the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

I do believe that the amount of work involved to prepare the bodies for the exhibit is extraordinary, but I guess I didn't find it as fascinating as everyone else. I've been to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and I thought that was a hundred times better.

In my opinion, Body Worlds needs to work on a better lighting system so that visitors don't always have a spotlight blinding them wherever they are looking and they need to give a bigger picture on a majority of the displays - a slice of a 300-lb person or a slice of a lung just isn't enough for me... I think they could have made it a lot more interesting with a small piece of background. I also think I would have really enjoyed it more if they had a section explaining how they actually did the plastination - then maybe I would have had more of an appreciation for what I was looking at.

I know most people who've seen the exhibit will probably disagree with me, but I guess different strokes for different folks...

It's a Small World After All...

I guess my chickens love everybody and everybody loves my chickens... Believe it or not, one of the stupid Garden-Eating-Rabbits is just off camera. I feel like I'm living in Disney World.

Oh! And I got two more eggs today :)

Egg-cellent!

I got the first egg from my chickens today!

It's on the small side, but still perfectly shaped and a beautiful dark brown color. It was even laid in one of the nesting boxes. I have such good chickens :)

Because the egg was laid while I was at work I can't be sure which chicken laid it, but I suspect that it was Pumpkin - one of my Red Stars. For the past week or so, she's been very submissive and clingy. She would follow me wherever I went when I was outside - once she tried to follow me back into the house... I could be wrong, but she's the one I suspect.

I knew something was up when I got home from work and saw their pen - there was a ton of wood shavings from the coop out there and evidence of an abnormal amount of scratching on the ground.. And in the coop, I keep my cleaning bucket and scraper hanging on the wall - they were on the ground. It appears to have been an exciting time for all the chickens while the first egg was being laid :) It makes me even more want to find a way to get the Chicken Cam working outside so I can see what the heck they are up to when I am at work.

And the funniest thing is the fact that just today, one of my co-workers was asking me if I had gotten any eggs from my chickens yet. Go figure.

First :(

We all like to be first in stuff. First prize at the fair. First place in a race. First or top of your class. Well lucky me - I get to live in the county that is first in the annual ranking of highest taxed counties. Oh joy. My money problems are bad enough - I don't need any help.

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I record a lot of stuff on TV - usually movies that I want to see eventually. Often, quite a while passes before I actually sit down and watch the show. That was the case with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've never read the book, but loving most things sci-fi, I wanted to see it. The SciFi (now SyFy) channel had it on a while ago (months ago?) and I finally got around to watching it.

I can say that I will probably never read the book - I didn't really like the movie... the whole story/plot was just a bit too weird for me. However, there was one part of the movie that grabbed my imagination: At one point a really cool gun was used - if you were hit by the gun's beam, you would see the point-of-view of the shooter. Wouldn't it be great if something like that existed in real life? Not only to have other people to see my point-of-view, but for me to see theirs as well. Can you imagine how different the world would be if everyone had one of those guns? I wonder if it would be better or worse? As much as I would like to say it would make the world a better place, I could see it going either way...

And I knew that the voice of Marvin was Alan Rickman. The IMDb is one the internet's greatest inventions - I use it all the time. I sleep better at night because I don't stay awake wondering about stuff that shouldn't be keeping me awake :)

Gorged

What a great weekend! The weather was perfect and I spent it doing fun things with fun people :)

Saturday I went geocaching with someone who had never gone before. It was a lot of fun hiking and exploring, but it would have been even better had we found a cache. We looked for three of them, but came up empty handed on all of the them.

I'm worried that the problem might be my GPS. This was the first time I used it for geocaching, and I find it hard to believe that it wouldn't lead us to at least one of the caches. But the clues on the cache pages weren't matching up to where we were looking either, which is what is making me wonder. I don't want to log a DNF saying that the container wasn't there if we weren't even looking in the right place, so I want to go looking for another cache and see what my GPS does there. Either that, or borrow my brother-in-law's GPS and see if they match up on a location. I'm just hoping it was just a bad day of caching and the problem isn't with the GPS.

Again, we had fun hiking - but I was really disappointed that I wasn't able to share the fun of actually finding a cache with someone who was caching for the first time :( Hopefully we will have better luck next time.

Sunday was spent hiking in the Niagara Gorge. We went down at the Devil's Hole entrance, so the only bad part of the day was traversing the 410 steps down and then back up again... It was so totally worth the agony tho' :) It was a picture perfect day - too bad I didn't remember to bring my polarizing filter... too many of the pictures I took were washed out, but I still managed a bunch of decent ones.

It's so much better seeing the beauty of the Niagara River up close, instead of from along the rim of the gorge :)

With no rain the past couple of weeks, the trails were nice and dry!

That being said, I didn't think I would see many of these guys - but they were all over the place. This is a red-banded millipede, which is the largest millipede in our area - they can get up to 4" long.

How can you beat this on a September Sunday afternoon?

I put this together using six separate pictures. It's down by The Whirlpool. I thought it turned out pretty good :) If you double click on the picture, you should get a bigger version.

We hiked from Devil's Hole upstream to a little past the Whirlpool. Next time we are going to start at the Whirlpool entrance and head upstream from there.