Wednesday

Wednesday was EMP/SciFi Museum and Pac Sci day. We skipped the EMP, since we'd both been through it before and were much more interested in the SF museum. The SF museum was awesome, especially the Jim Henson exhibit. But the rest was very nice - like a lot of stuff we saw this week, small but good quality. Lots of books, lots of Star Trek, no very recent stuff. There were no pictures inside, though, so.

After that, lunch was at Steamer's, where we split a delightful pile of fried seafood goodness. Fish and clams, noms.

I'd never been to Pac Sci, so it was a treat. I love science museums. It was crawling with munchkins, and I was a little tired, so I wasn't munchkin dealing very well - we kept getting run over and stepped on - but other than that, it was awesome. The highlights here were seeing a corn snake get its once-every-two-weeks feeding and the butterfly house and the dinosaurs. We were done with Pac Sci earlier than we expected, so we got some terribly indulgent chocolates and cold drinks on the waterfront. We bussed home, made pork steaks and roasted potatoes for dinner, and watched Dark City, and knitted.

Thursday

The first thing on in the morning was a tour of Safeco Field. This has originally been my idea, but then I grew a little skeptical. Neither of us are baseball people, but we do like getting to go places that the general public doesn't normally. So we got on the bus and headed over and got off in the International District and hoofed it over to the stadium and were way early, so we wandered around the block and looked for the stadium train station and then wandered back and took pictures of the moose.

This tour ended up being one of the best things we did all week. The guide was a retired teacher, and very patient and funny without trying too hard. The stadium is an awesome building, whether or not you're interested in baseball, and really beautiful. And we did get to go lots of places in the stadium that mere mortals don't normally, plus a few they do: first up into the stands to talk about the field and stadium a bit, then a pass by some more art, then upstairs for an amazing view, then back towards the field to talk about the roof, then into one of the club boxes (nicer than my house, let me tell you), then to the press box and the box next to the press box, then to the visitor's clubhouse, then into the Diamond Club (club for crazy high rollers that I'll never get to go near again, and yes, it was very nice, but I didn't get good pics), and then holy crap we got to go down onto the field (well, the dirt next to it.)

Seriously, it was totally, totally cool, even if you're not a baseball person. The kids on the tour who were baseball fans were beside themselves with joy ("Where does Ichiro sit?")

So after the tour, we trotted over to the train station to try to take the train back into Westlake, since neither of us had been on the light rail yet. After finding out that the trains weren't running in the tunnel and having a conversation about my Orca card with the most dense Sound Transit employee I've ever dealt with, we caught a bus into the tunnel. We had lunch at the downtown McD's (quick, cheap), and headed off to the Underground Tour, which was pretty decent though the guide was pretty new. (Tip to people with little kids: if your kids are too young to get the innuendo about the sewing circles, and young enough to get scared when the guides talk about ghosts in the underground, they're too young for the UT). We caught the bus home, got Qdoba for dinner with Dan and Ari, and headed off to Ginger's Rainbow meeting (and it was nice to see what that was all about.) We got out pretty late, got in the tiny car, went home, and fell over.

Friday

The plan for Friday had been a tour of a chocolate factory and then the Woodland Park Zoo. However, when we called on Thursday for reservations for the tour on Friday, thinking we weren't going to have any trouble... they were sold out until 2pm on Monday. Whoops.

This ended up working out okay, though, as we just spent all day at the zoo. :) My made-of-awesome zoo membership got me in for free and Ginger in for half price, and we got parked and got our tickets and wandered into the zoo. One of the coolest things we saw all day was the peacock shown to the left, who was free ranging and so mild that, well, you can see how close he let me stand to take pictures of him. He was gorgeous.

We spent the morning checking out exhibits, including people feeding giraffes, tapirs, elephants, and monkeys. We ate our picnic lunch pretty early, so we could start attending talks. The penguin talk was pretty uninformative, but then we headed over to the lion enclosure for a lion and wild dog talk, where we were in for a treat.

There are crows around the lion exhibit, you see, and most of the time, the lions leave the crows alone, which means the crows get complacent, and then the female lion grabs herself a crow. She had just done so when we got down there, and was carrying it across the enclosure by one wing, gathering a huge crowd. ("She's going to give it to him! [the male lion]" "No, she's keeping it for herself!" "It's still alive!") The zookeeper got there, took a look at the crowd, and said "Nothing I say to them is going to be more interesting than that, so, no talk." Ginger and I said "Ohho! You can talk to us!" and got a private fifteen minute talk with the zookeeper about the lions and the wild dogs (far beyond "How long do they live?" and into "I was reading a paper last week about the genetic changes in the dogs...") So. cool. Yes, we're geeks, so what?

Next up was the elephant talk, which was fun if noisy, and last up was the raptor talk, which was interesting, and with a keeper who obviously loves his birds. We wandered around to more exhibits. The river otters at Woodland Zoo were also asleep, as had been the river otters we'd been seeing all week. and once we'd gotten through everything, got back in the tiny car and headed for home by way of Crossroads, where we used my gift certificates for cupcakes, and hit Half Priced books, and Old Navy for a pair of $2 flip flops for me, since my beloved Chacos were rapidly giving up the ghost after over 4 years of faithful service.

Once home, we did the whole "What do you want to eat?" "I dunno, what do you want to eat?" thing until we finally decided on Chinese take-out, on the theory that it'd be nice to have leftovers for Sunday night, when I was supposed to be leaving. So we ate Chinese and watched Jurassic Park, which I hadn't seen in eons and which was more fun than I remembered it being.

Saturday

So, Northwest Trek's thing, in addition to normal zoo type exhibits, is a tram ride through a 440 acre area where animals get to roam free. All of the species are ones that might normally occur in the Northwestern United States. This was also one of the coolest things we did all week. :) Baby bison! Moose Elk (to your left)! Very big goats! Caribou within 2 feet of the tram (that I failed to get a picture of.) It was seriously cool and great big fun, and if you live in the area, you should go. The animal exhibits themselves were excellent, too, though we spent much of the afternoon playing "Where's Waldo?" with sleeping animals (and then there was the wolf playing "one with the log"). The cougars put on a good show. The river otters were asleep (we managed to visit 4 institutions with animals during the week, and every time, the river otters were asleep.) We went to a fascinating talk with a skunk, and another with a opossum, and got to pepper the bird keeper with questions.

Once back home, we had pot roast that ironman4do had started in the crockpot that morning, and mashed potatoes and steamed carrots. We did a Cold Stone run and wandered Half Price books again, and then Ari went home, and rest of us fell over.

Sunday

Sunday morning we had breakfast at Ruby's with nder, where Ginger and I split some terrific cinnamon roll French toast. Then he headed off for swimming and work. We hit Target (cheap duffel bag for me, since I was leaving with more stuff than I came with) and Ben Franklin's, and headed home so I could pack. We headed back out to grab Burger King for lunch, then back home where we knitted and watched The Chronicles of Riddick. We ate our Chinese leftovers in the middle of it. And then... I started getting phone calls from Jet Blue that my flight out was delayed.