Saturday, February 12, 2011

Birthday celebrations 2011

But first, just a quick reminder: my birthday bracelet giveaway ends in less than 24 hours! Go to the post and leave a comment if you want a chance to win. :3

We had the brunt of our celebration today. I wanted to go down into Niagara Falls to a bead store and go to the Niagara Aquarium for my birthday. Things didn't turn out quite as we'd expected, but it was a lot of fun!

After a rather fruitless search, we discovered that the bead store I'd found online doesn't actually sell beads anymore. This happens from time to time, and it was a little disappointing, but I knew that we were still going to the aquarium and the day was not ruined! We just had a laugh at it and continued our journey.

Although the Niagara Aquarium is a small one, it has a lot of great exhibits.

























Aren't his scales simply gorgeous?


















In fact, I really enjoyed all the colors and textures throughout the museum.

















I'm just like a little kid, you know. XD Give me cute things or shiny things, and I am happy as heck! These turtles were adorable.



























 We love crabs. :D































 
Although it was very dark in the tank, we could see how beautifully this guy could move. So graceful. And that rich red color!





















An unexpected but very pleasant surprise was the tiny poison-dart frog exhibit. I love these little guys, so I spent a lot of time walking around and around the tank. They are colored just like jewels...






There was a great little exhibit on West Coast Amerindians.



Look, scrimshaw!


Speaking of scrimshaw, this section was devoted to the unfortunate effects of hunting sea animals for their meat and body parts. Here was a display on turtle hunting. Very beautiful things in there, but very sad.


 As we were leaving, I saw this huge bin of tumbled stones. Like I said, I'm just like a kid and can't resist shiny things. XD I grabbed a little baggy full and intend to wire-wrap these in the near future. My favorite are the spotted stones. They look just like the poison dart frogs, don't they??



Then my fiance took me to a winery on the Niagara Wine Trail to make up for the bead store. :3 However, I'll post those pictures tomorrow because this post is already pretty long. Hope you're all having a great weekend, too! <3

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4 comments:

Higgins Design Studio said...

Looks like the day turned out beautifully, despite the store not selling beads any longer.
Happy Birthday!

Cindy

Crystal said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Crystal said...

Sounds like you had a fun day even if you couldn't find the bead you wanted. I had to delete my first comment because posting on my ipad,sometimes words get misspelled, and I don't like to appear ignorant :-)

My Life Under the Bus said...

Oh we love the aquarium and try to go once or twice a year ( and I have about 50 bags of rocks) my kids are convinced they will find a giant diamond in there one day!

Happy Birthday!