My wild nerd happy weekends

You may ask yourself, in your spare thoughts, what exactly does a jobless 20-something do on a weekend?  Well, usually, very little. In fact, my weekends look an awful lot like weekdays, and occasionally this causes me to be puzzled as to why the post office is closed for no apparent reason.  Not this month, though!  Thanks to family and friends, and I had quite an adventurous month of weekends.

Two weekends ago I went with my friend Laura (I left the synonym cousin in Hawaii...just to keep things from getting confused) to hang out with one of my brothers.  We went to the aquarium, which I truly enjoy, every time.  The deep sea exhibit was open again, and they had sea turtles and sun fish! And they were huge!  There is something about an aquarium that brings at the dancing, hopping, squealing 5 year old out of me.  In one of the larger tanks, there were murres ( a bird that looks similar to a penguin, but can fly, and is NOT a penguin...but try explaining that to every person who walks by a tank without reading the conveniently placed placards) diving in and darting around the water like they were flying, teasing the fish and nibbling for scraps after feeding time.  They left little silver trails of bubbles in their wake.  Watching all those trails of bubbles is probably what kept me standing there overly long.  

We also explored the nearby shops and considered attempting a laser room.  The laser room is set up like in the spy movies, and for a few dollars you can attempt to stealth your way past the lasers up to 3 times. Instead, we went home, and played cards late into the night.  The next day, my cousin dropped by for a visit, so of course, we had to teach her the game from the night before, because some of us (mainly, me) had lost the night before, in a way that could have been referred to as a massacre(my tallied points from the 3rd round still couldn't beat their tallied points from the second round).  My cousin played on my team, and helped me win some dignity back before it was time to hit the road.

Then the most recent weekend, I drove up and met my friend, Rachel, who was in San Francisco for a weekend. This is where you might be getting your hopes up that the theme of my trips might change, but you might also be rather disappointed in that.

We had a great time of it.  The first day we went to the California academy of sciences. (And this would be where your hopes for a less nerdy report might plummet)  There was sooooooo much there to absorb.  I just feel the need to state this: they have rolling, grassy hills for their roof.  Yep, it's true. Where a roof should be, instead there is what appears, at first, to be a nice little dog park. Minus dogs.  It is all in the effort to lower energy use, as well as lower pollution caused by roofing materials in rain water.  Personally, I just thought it was cool, until I read that the job that required the most man hours for keeping it in good order is weeding. Count me out!  Unless I can have a weedy roof, there will be no garden on my roof.  Then inside the building there was a ginormous bio-dome filled with a rain forest.  I'm serious: humidity, plants, trees, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, butterflies, and less pleasant bugs.  Thankfully, the unpleasant ones were kept on their side of the glass. I got to see piranhas and electric eels .on.the.same.day! Who is jealous now?

The next day we went to the Exploratorium.  Wow!  They only charge $15 an adult, and I think the reason it is so cheap is that they think it is a children's museum.  They are so very mistaken, which is probably why they kept letting in all these little kids who kept cutting me in line while I waited for my turn to play with the never-ending slinky conveyor belt.  All of those weird science experiments Mom rarely let us do(mainly because we lacked such wonderful resources), Bill Nye style, are stored in this very building.  I got to play with dry ice, and make water float, and vibrate cornstarch, and beat a drum to make the platform underneath me vibrate, and make smoke signals, and drink from a musical drinking fountain, and then from a toilet, and sit in a giant chair, and see my reflection in a giant bubble, and play with lasers, and switch my ears, and run out of time and leave before I finished.  Ah, well, it just gives me a reason to nerd out another weekend I guess.  I just want to say, if you're nerdy like me, you're in San Francisco and you see an ad for the exploratorium, and it looks too childish... do it anyway!  I would tell you to bring a child along so you don't look out of place, but then you'd have to take turns with the kid.  Besides, I saw plenty of other childless adults impatiently waiting for their turns, too.  Take it from me, don't let the people with offspring have all the fun.  And in between, Rachel and I enjoyed some shopping, some Indian food, some TLC shows, and the fact that we could get so excited about nerdy things without the person we came with pretending they didn't know us.

So maybe my weekends are more nerd-happy than they are wild, but hey, I did say I drank out a toilet, didn't I?

It tasted better than Rosedale water, that's for sure!

Thanks for reading.