We had a fun, although busy time in Baltimore. We made a trip to Va to visit my aunt, uncle, and cousins; we visited Cousin Pat and Aunt Doris; we rewired half the lights in Grandmom’s basement to put them on switches instead of pull chains; we went to the National Aquarium; and we ate seafood. (Of course.)

The visits with family were very nice. My cousins are always a lot of fun, and it made up for the extra short visit we had the week before.

I was surprised by the aquarium though. Despite the fact that we’re in Baltimore several times a year, I haven’t been to the National Aquarium since it opened. I have to admit that I think I like the Newport Aquarium better. I think newport does a better job making the big tanks look like a natural environment instead of a cement tank. But the rainforest section was nice, and we would have stayed there longer if it weren’t for the screaming school kids. Amusingly enough, while we were looking at the poison dart frogs, several groups of kids ran up said “Oh, frogs. Big deal,” and ran on. They’re POISONOUS frogs! Frogs in amazing technicolor!

They didn’t know what they were missing.

We also quite liked the dolphin show. Dolphins are amazing creatures. Seeing them, and knowing how intelligent they are, I wonder how they get caught, and what they think about being held in captivity. They seemed to have plenty of trainers though, and the program talked about all the training they dolphins do, and a good deal about ocean conservation, and, interestingly enough, they had two videos screen that showed bits about training, but also showed two brief video clips of people in boats being bitten by wild dophins, which seemed a very wise thing to do, all things considered.

We also walked around the inner harbor a bit–we spent about 5 hours downtown all told–and I was surpirsed by a couple of things. First was at how clean the area around the harbor was. Of course this is March, and wasn’t nice weather for spending a lot of time outside by the water, but they seemed pretty aggressive about keeping the place clean, which impressed me.

The other thing that surprised me was the number of happy people we saw. We had lunch at Legal Seafood, and got a seat by the window, where I watched people walking by, and for the most part, the people walking by were in groups, chatting with each other. I guess I expected on Monday at lunch time to see people rushing from one place to another, hardly paying attention to one another, but that wasn’t what I saw.

Mind you, I still have no interest in living in a city that large, but it wasn’t nearly as grim as I would have expected.

All in all, it was a very pleasant trip, and we had a very good time. And now I plan to spend the rest of my time off from work reading, as I managed to add more books to my collection.

New books: A Wolf at the Door and Other Retold Fairy Tales edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson, Byzantium by Stephen R. Lawhead, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Sister Nivedita, Favorite African Folktales edited by Nelson Mandela, Lucious Lemon Desserts, and three mysteries by Michael Jecks that I left in Baltimore for Grandmom to read.

Finally:

I finally got decent pictures of my favorite section of I 68: Lane Ends

Pictures of the aquarium and stuff we did to Grandmom’s house and some random pictures.