On Monday I took August and Déla to the Seattle Aquarium. Since it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day there was no school. I also had gotten to a point where I could take a few hours in the morning to simply spend time with them rather than franticly try to get caught up on work. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot that I need to catch up on, but I thought it would be better to spend some time with my children rather than simply plot them in front of the television for the morning.
August has always love the aquarium more than the zoo. We live just over a mile from the zoo, so it is much easier for us to go there, though that does only happen a few times a year at best. Still, we are members, and have been for a few years. It’s cheaper overall than you might think, and the Seattle zoo and aquarium have a level of family membership that gives equal admittance, so it’s like getting two memberships for the price of one.
Yeah, I know, I’m rambling…
Anyway…
So I take the kids to see the fish, and we have a great time. As soon as Laura put our youngest down for morning nap, we headed out. The goal was to arrive right as the place opened, but as most people with multiple children know, it’s not always easy getting out on time. We did, however, arrive a little bit after opening, and there was still plenty of street parking within walking distance. Because it was a holiday, the traffic was light and parking free.
I’ll spare you much of the details as much of it will be boring if you’re not into aquariums or familiar with Seattle’s offering. We got in about 9:45 and left a little after 11, right as the crowds were really beginning to arrive. It was great fun being able to simply hang out with these two for a few hours. Afterwards we went along the waterfront and got hot chocolate (well, I got coffee) and talked about what we saw and enjoyed at the aquarium. Back home in time for lunch, and I spent the rest of the afternoon working and taking care of other stuff around the house.
Other than catching up on my CES writing and the “gajillions” of reviews that are overdue I’ve been working on ripping the rest of my CD collection to MP3. It’s a lot slower than you might think, as I am only doing certain bands as a whole, somewhat randomly going through my collection. I started out with David Bowie, which is a considerable collection, even though it is rather spotty. I’ve done a decent job of having everything released over the last 15 years, but the 70’s and 80’s output is rather thin with my collection running at about 50% of his output for the period. Still, it was a couple of gigabytes worth of music, and enough to put me over the top as to what will fit in my Zune. Now I have to manually synchronize my player with what I want.
After Bowie, I put in all of my Elton John (everything of his until 1976), MXPX (which is sadly lacking in anything that could be considered completeness), The Pursuit of Happiness (if anybody has the band’s third and fourth albums I’d be more than happy to take them off of your hands), Bauhaus (everything until their last studio album from last year), Ricky Martin (don’t judge me), and Oingo Boingo. I was going to rip The Clash, but seem to have misplaced the first disc of “London Calling” so I need to hunt for that.