Aquarium

We got to go to to the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium. It was fun because we got to see our friends Dave, Tia, and Taylor and Katie. Not that we had to go to the aquarium to see them. (They aren't fish.)

Taylor and Katie:

FROGS! The aquarium had a huge rainforest room just for amphibians and reptiles. 

I could probably have watched this turtle all day.

We saw some really cute penguins. They kept zooming right by the glass so James got a bunch of pictures like this one:

I think this is a sea anemone. I know we saw one with some clown fish, but I am not 100% sure about this thing. It's pretty cool though.

This guy is weird and cool. If he weren't trapped in a tank, he would be veeeeeery creeeeeeeeeeepy.

This octopus is crawling up the side of the tank. Me: "How can it DO that?" James: "Uh, have you ever heard of suckers?"

The jellyfish room!!!! I'm pretty sure James should be a nature photographer for a living.

And of course the best part, the shark tunnel.

Sharks look a lot different from underneath.

Dave and Tia:

I think this is a life sized replica of shark jaws. You can see how scared we are.

Death Valley Trip

While I was at my family's Halloween party, James was having a nice weekend in the hot and starry desert of Death Valley.

James took the above picture with a 30-second exposure, and had someone shine a cell phone light on them for a few seconds of it. Pretty neato, I thought.

These blokes were at the lowest spot of land in North America!

This place is called the Devil's Golf Course. It's a bunch of twisty mounds of mud and salt precipitate. While they were exploring down there, somebody actually found a golf ball that someone had hit out there!

Relaxing....

Miles and miles of uniform hexagonal mud cakes.

Oh and also these sliding rocks all over the place.

Geologists were confused by these moving rocks many years ago. They would find a bunch of heavy boulders sitting around the desert with long trails behind them. Nobody knew how the rocks moved but they obviously did because of the tracks they left. Finally somebody put a time lapse camera in the valley during the winter, and caught the rocks in the act. Down in that very flat valley, water would freeze around the rocks and then strong winds would blow whole sheets of ice, along with the rocks, across the ground.

And here's a very fine specimen. If you ever go to Death Valley, you should find one of your own.

I really like how this picture looks. The sand almost looks like snow.

A very fun field trip! James is most excited about the deltaic fan behind him in this picture. 

Halloween Party

I had fun going to my family's annual Halloween party. The costumes were super great this year! I didn't take any pictures so I had to steal all these from my dad.

First, my brother Josh was SUCH  a great David Tennant. That's the actor who plays the 10th Doctor Who. James and I got super into that show and are now waiting for the latest season.

Look at that hair.

(Picture of real David Tennant)

My other brother Spencer has gotten ridiculously good at solving Rubik's Cubes this year. He can solve them in under a minute. His fastest time is about 16 seconds. So for Halloween he was Mats Valk, the world record holder for Rubik's Cube. (5.55 seconds.)

My Mom is a complete pro at making cupcakes. They are high class bakery style. Now I have no clue why or how, but she decided about 1-2 days before the Halloween party that she was going to make this costume from scratch. It's pretty much incredible that she could pull this much together with that little time/materials/planning. It only lasted for the first few minutes of the party, as it's mostly held together by a combination of thread, safety pins and duct tape. I was completely amazed that actually worked. :D The rest of the time she wore her cupcake apron.

And my costume. I wanted a punny costume for whatever reason, and was worried I'd have to resort to cereal killer. But then inspiration struck. I borrowed James' camouflage coat, hat, and ethernet cords. My family had some binoculars and CDs for me to use. And here it is...Internet Explorer. 

I was both proud and embarrassed by this idea. Such is the way of puns. Also, you can't see from this picture but I had a keyboard strapped to my back like a rifle. It was pretty great.

The rest of the costumes were good too. These two are Ebola:

(Here is a picture of the Ebola virus--pretty well done I think)

And one of my best friends from high school, Lauren, and her dad going as Yzma and Kronk. This is so spectacular. She even dyed her skin purple. Also, you can't quite tell but her hair is pulled back around a water bottle to make her hair stick out like Yzma's.

(I just love comparing costumes with the real thing ok?)

I like this one a lot. This is Spencer's friend Treyton as the Ginger Bread Man.

The party was loads of fun. Sadly James didn't get to go. Although who knows why I write "sadly." He isn't a big fan of large gatherings of people he doesn't know, so going on a camping trip with his geology friends seemed like a great alternative to him. And for me, well, if James had come to the party his plan was to wear that ridiculous Amazon horse head mask, so although I missed him I'm personally not regretting his absence from the party either. The next post is about his trip! ;)

Pumpkin Carving

This year's pumpkin carving took about 5 minutes. We just bought one of those little sugar pumpkins, mostly as a decoration, and then decided to carve it. James didn't want to think of a design, and I didn't want to cut it out, so we were a great team. I drew the very extraordinarily artistic design and then James felt manly using his pocket knife to cut it out.

And the finished product is.....

Dawww. We put it outside on the porch with a candle in it. Sadly, I didn't even think to take a picture of it. It didn't last very long and soon shriveled up. On the bright side though, we saved these seeds so we could later bake them in some yummy sauce, and they were delicious!

Oh the Things You Can Do...

On the 19th-20th of September James went on a field trip to Great Basin National Park. He left while I was at school, so I had some great plans to clean up and be productive when I got home.

But when I got home, I saw this on the door...

When I went inside, the whole house was clean and I saw sticky notes everywhere!!!!

"You can watch something."

"You can read something."

"You can sit and relax."

 "You can cook something tasty!"

 "You can cool off."

 "You can take a nap."

 "You can take a refreshing shower."

 "You can look at yourself and see" "How beautiful you are!"

Well, needless to say this made my day and I then spent the rest of the time reading, watching shows, and relaxing!!! James is pretty much the best guy I could ever ask for. :)

Meanwhile, back at the geology ranch, James was in The Great Basin. This was for his Groundwater geology class. I think it's actually called "Groundwater" not "Hydrogeology"... but whatever.

Note: James uploaded all of the below pictures plus many many others to his imgur page, geojames.imgur.com. So if you want to see more then just go there. :)

These pictures are of some really cool caves in the National Park.

Some geologists looking at a well.

They had this device that was attached to a cable with wires in it, and whenever the wires touched water the device would beep. So they put it into the well and used it to tell how deep it was.

Some exotic Nevada landscapes:

I super love this picture:

Also this picture:

James is getting really great at star photography:

The best geologist ever in the world! (Sorry James E. Talmage)