Visiting San Francisco (2010) - Days 3 and 4

Day 3

We went to the Exploratorium. It’s the world’s most gigantic kid’s museum, like the one in Rockford only very different. The way my Uncle Geoff talked about it, you would have thought it had living dinosaurs or something. But instead it had something better than living dinosaurs: tons and tons and thousands of exhibits to play in!

My favorites were the musical water fountain – you stand on this thing and make a current and when your lips touch the water it makes a connection and then it will play music – and the bathroom wall, which was tiled so that when you look at it the lines in between the tiles looked bent, even though they weren’t.

I made this pendulum drawing. It might take forever if you just took a marker in your hand, but if you were using the methods they were using, it would only take half a minute. Here’s their method. They had a gigantic slab of plywood or some other wood suspended by four cables at the corners. They had a big bucket of something in the center to keep it level, and there was a big magnet on one end. They also had a marker contraption that had a hinge on the end so you could flip it up and switch markers, and it was connected to a string. You put down paper, then selected four colors of markers and put one in first, then you started to kick the slab of plywood to get it to go where you wanted it to go. They had the marker contraption down with the marker capped, so you could see what the marker was going to do with the marker uncapped. Then when you said “OK,” or used a signal like I did, they would flip the marker contraption up and take off the cap, then put the marker back down until you say it was okay. Then you repeated the process with all four colors. Lastly, you would sign your name with a marker at the bottom. Then it’s your own personalized picture.

Lunch was not that pleasant. There was chips, yogurt and a bagel. I don’t like yogurt that much. I didn’t eat the bagel – I wasn’t sure it was safe – I did eat the chips, and the yogurt was torture. We had lunch outside on the stretch of grass before the road that is right next to a pond which borders the Palace of Fine Arts.

When lunch was over, we went back in, and it was more fun than ever because after lunch was when we got the pictures.

At night, my mom, my dad and Uncle Wall-E went to a jazz club and left Uncle Geoff, Lauren and I home to dye eggs and have a good time in general. When we were there we dyed eggs, but we dyed them in a strange fashion. You would dye your egg like normal, and when you thought it was dyed well enough, you would take the egg out, wait for it to dry and then put clear nail polish on it. And when the nail polish dried, you could dump it in another color and wherever you put the nail polish the egg would still be the same color as before.

Day 4

Today was interesting. At least it didn’t have some sort of “Pick on Tabitha” kind of moment. Yes, Day 3 had such a moment. We went to the California Academy of Sciences.

The Academy of Sciences was about science, of course. It also had lots of taxidermy (I’m kind of upset about that). They were adding a new exhibit about a gigantic land animal. I’m not quite sure what it was, but whatever it was it was gigantic. Someone was building it, and that poor someone had to work right underneath its butt.

They had two big domes. One was a planetarium and the other was a tropical rain forest exhibit with actual animals of that kind. I’m going to tell you about the planetarium first. The planetarium was absolutely, positively awesome in every way that it could be awesome. It was three-dimensional without those glasses, it took you a lot of places in the universe, showed you some neat constellations, gave you the history of the sun, and was narrated by someone called “Whoopie Goldberg.” If you know her, good for you. If you don’t, I’m not sure what to tell you.

Now to the rain forest exhibit. It took you through all levels of the rain forest. First it took you through the undergrowth, then it took you through the tree level where most of the trees grow, then the level above that, and a level above that. It showed you all of the animals living there, or most of them anyway. On the very top level there was an elevator that went down to the aquarium.

One part of the aquarium was under a river that ran through part of the rain forest exhibit. The rest of it was just under floor, which is not nearly as interesting because when it was under the rain forest exhibit you could look up and see people. In the aquarium there was a gigantic Philippine reef. We visited it two times. The first time was on a scouting expedition to look at all the fish. The second time was when they were feeding the fish and you got to ask them questions.

Then we went on to the taxidermy area, making a detour through the penguins.

Then we saw Claude, the albino alligator. He lives in an enclosure full of fish and alligator snapping turtles. Surprisingly, all the turtles and fish that they put in there in the beginning are still there.

San Francisco 2010 - We Are Here

Day 1.

The plane was a complete wreck. My ears plugged and it is plugged into Day 2, but I’ve made it here relatively unharmed. I hope. The plane was kind of fun because I was sitting next to Mom and Lauren was right behind me so I got to hear what she was talking about.

When we landed first in Kansas City it was torture because both my ears got plugged and the right was the worst. When we landed in San Francisco it was a madhouse because it is kind of hard to navigate around unless you have someone who knows exactly where they are going. But we did – his name is Dave but I call him Uncle Wall-E because of his good Wall-E impression.

Dave successfully navigated us throughout the airport without getting lost, drove us to his new duplex without getting lost and successfully managed to get a car, which last time I was aware he didn’t have.

We went to the park. It was basically a gigantic dog park with a playground. There were four ice cream carts with four men pushing them all around the park. Eventually it got so hot out that I decided to hail one of the ice cream people, and we got ice cream that was safe for me and one that we thought Lauren would like.

We took a few pictures of Uncle Wall-E – not just any pictures, but “mini-people” pictures. One person is in the foreground and the others are in the background.

For dinner we went to Denise’s, who lives right above Uncle Wall-E and Uncle Geoff. We had corned beef and cabbage, and the beef was not “beef substance” – it was actual beef.
When it was time to go to bed – before Geoff got home from work – there was a tent pitched in the living room and that’s what Lauren and I crawled into and went to bed in.

Day 2.

I’m still trying to figure out if today isn’t “Pick on Tabitha” day. I mean the morning was OK, I found a beautiful shell in frigid-cold waters with a bandaid on my thumb. That was at the beach. The beach was near the Golden Gate Bridge – you had a pretty fine view of it. It was at the Presidio, an old Army fort.

When we were going to the beach, I saw a hummingbird. I took a couple of pictures, but only one had the hummingbird in focus.

At the beach I played with dogs. Lots and lots of dogs.

After that, we went down Lombard Street. It is this street that goes down almost vertically, but they had these curves and grooves in it and flowers all around it. There’s people’s houses there too. I feel sorry for those people – they have to drive into their driveway from Lombard Street, which is not the most inviting street.

We had lunch at a Pakistani restaurant. They had “five to six” spicy-rating slow-burn chicken. I conquered it! And I had potato nan, a kind of potato bread.

We took the subway to see my Uncle Geoff. He works in a food store. Today he was in the cheese department – he likes that.

We rode on the cable car three times today. Twice in the afternoon and once in the evening. We went to the Cable Car Museum – it’s a museum all about (what else) cable cars. It has all of these old cable cars and they even show you the actual cables running the cable cars while they are running.

Once we got home I think that’s when it morphed into Pick on Tabitha Day. I do hope it gets better.