Yesterday was a grand way to celebrate my 60th birthday. We started the day at the California Science Center at their Pompeii Exhibit. If you are in the Southern California area while it is here I highly recommend it. It has some very cool artifacts including Roman deities everywhere including a set of Lares & Penates that had an Isis Fortuna statue. Very petite and something I would love to have a copy of. For someone whose specialty in Junior Classical League competitions was Roman History and Daily Life it was pure heaven. (I had a first place, 2 2nds and a 3rd place when I was competing in All State competitions. Yeah, I’ve always been a proud nerd and geek.)

It ends with a simulation of the eruption complete with quaking floor and ash cloud and smoke in the room and then you enter a room that will hurt your heart at the same time it inspires some awe. It’s a room with plaster casts of the bodies as they lay and the photos to show the family or friends that were crowded around them including a pregnant woman and a child and another woman.

I’m so glad we went.

Then we went to visit Endeavour in its temporary home. Now they have it horizontal but eventually it will be on its upright position with all the other planes and space craft they have around them.

By then we were starved and headed over to lunch across the rose gardens that stand in for the Jeffersonian on Bones and Washington DC on NCIS and JAG. They have a new café with reasonably priced food and we both went for our old favourites, grilled cheese sandwiches and they make really good ones. They also had some really big salads and burgers. My culinary theory is order the grilled cheese, if they don’t mess that up the other food is probably good too but if the can’t make a decent grilled cheese, go away!

We had tickets for the butterfly exhibit. I have to go back! It was a very short half hour in my idea of heaven. You are surrounded by delicate stained glass beings of ultimate beauty. I felt like I held my breath for a half hour. It was truly magical. I got pictures of a lot of them but the Sulfur and the Zebra Swallowtail eluded my camera lens. I really, really wanted that Zebra but it was not to be. I guess that means I have to go back, shucky darn!

Of course we had to see the Dinosaur Hall and the Gemstone Hall and that was about where the gas ran out especially since we had to take trains and the Orange Line and them walk the ½ mile home.

I’m still pretty tired and I think it’s one museum at a time now that I’m 60. When I was 10 doing both museums was easy peasy and I was raring to go, now that I can use the Senior discount, I have to admit I have limits. That sucks! But I had a stupendously wonderful day!