But before I get into that, it seems that my Plus Account expired, and no notice that it was about to expire. So I was confronted with a blank page, no formatting bar, no nothing.
Then it occurred to me.
So now I'm reinstated.
Wednesday we went to the Discovery Museum. It's not a large place, but it's jam-packed with displays. Dinosaurs are the main display now. They have some real fossils and some copy-fossils. Pictures and 3-D skeletal forms show the different types of dinos.
In a separate section, they have live animals. Unfortunately, some of them aren't in anything that even vaguely resembles their natural habitat. Some turtles sort of are. There's a Flemish rabbit that looks to be three feet long. I've never seen such an enormous rabbit.
There were a bunch of kids with parents or maybe summer school teachers running about the place. There was one classroom with a lot of noise coming from behind closed doors. I opened the door and almost had burst eardrums from the racket. Take a bunch of 5-6-7-8 year olds all laughing and talking at megadecibles, and you get the idea. But they were have Fun!
And then--and then! The Planetarium show. Imagine yourself out in the nowhere at night with no lights beyond, maybe, a campfire. And look up in the sky. It blows me away every time I see it. I don't need the docent's lecture on what's up there. I need to go back every once in a while because I can't see much of anything beyond Venus and the Moon around here what with all the "security" lights.
And today. Oh today! We went to see Bodies Revealed. For some reason I was thinking it was a theater setting, but it wasn't. Sure wish I'd taken my walker!!
It was displays of the human bodies from the skin to the internal organs to surgical repairs. Each body was shown at a different activity from throwing a ball to riding a bicycle to wielding a baseball bat, and other poses. There was a notation that the bodies were real, donated bodies. It looked like they were coated with a clear plastic covering to preserve them, so they took on a manufactured look.
Another display in another room showed the various aspects of the heart, veins and arteries. Plus, an EKG running along with a beating heart. I'm told that if you stay in a room like that, your own heart will begin to synchonize with the artificial beating.
Then there was the room showing the gestation period of a baby from the fertilization of the ovum to the birth. (Birth not included.)
Way over on the other side of the huge room was a place to check your blood pressure, pulse rate, weight and Body Mass Index (BMI), and blood oxygen uptake. I'm happy to tell you that I was within a healthy, normal range for all of those. Even the blood pressure was behaving.
Then, right next to that station was a table where you could handle a relpica liver and stomach. Did you know that a man's liver can weigh as much as 4.5 pounds?! And a woman's weighs in at about 3.5 pounds. There are a couple knowledgable people who can talk about health issues, and what those values in the previous paragraph mean.
.It was an altogether interesting afternoon. I think I missed a couple displays, and maybe I'll go back another day. Admission was a bit pricey, but worth it. And the day was properly finished off by a visit to the Rite Aid ice cream counter. I had a scoop of pistachio and a scoop of pecan-praline. Rena had a scoop of lemonade and a scoop of vanilla.
Bless