On the weekend I visited Balboa Park because I heard rumors of cherry blossoms…

And it was true! The cherry blossoms were so pretty, and I had fun with my camera’s macro setting. I tried to get a picture with a bee in it, but the bees kept flying at me instead of holding still and so I had to run away.

And there were remote control boats in the lake! I wanted to try, but it was like a big deal and they had a whole area roped off just for the boat guys.

And here are the boat guys. I like how they all have a little boat stand… you can sorta see them at this size or you can also click photo to see larger on flickr.

This sign is super cute–”Ramp is for baby ducks.” And you can sorta see their little ramp right behind that sign. I guess they can’t get up the curb without it so they have to know where their ramp is. Aww.

And of course, no trip to Balboa Park is complete without the obligatory cute dog photo. I think the guy said he was a husky/australian shepherd mix, soo cute. I also saw a teeny chihuahua baby that I couldn’t get a good picture of because my camera has no actual zoom, only “digital zoom” which doesn’t really zoom, it just pixellates! Hopefully sometime this year I can get a more serious camera

Now I want to visit the Balboa Park in San Diego, which is the famous one. But it seems like many cities in CA have their own Balboa Parks!

All the gamers out there have probably already gotten excited about/bought/played this PS3 game awhile ago, but anyone who hasn’t yet should definitely try it. I just got my hands on a copy of this recently, and it is really fun.

For me though, what makes it so fun to play is the creativity in the style and graphics. This is, of course, coming from someone who buys stuff in the grocery store almost solely on how the packaging looks, so beware! (Actually though, I’m usually right.) Anyway, the graphics in this game are so cute and handmade looking.

Plus it appeals to me because of the fact that one of the main objectives is to find and collect stickers and outfits and things like that. When you get a sticker, you can stick it on anything in the game–even your character’s own face. I accidently figured that out by stamping a picture of a shoe on my boyfriend’s character… then he started frantically searching to see if there’s a “clean my character” button, which, fortunately, there is.

There’s a whole part of the game where you can actually build whole levels (type “Little big planet” into youtube to see some of the amazing levels people have made with this game, including some funny stylized versions of Mario and more) but I haven’t really played around with that enough to figure it out yet!

In the picture above, you can see my little character, dressed up like a cat with pink sunglasses. Just like my cat in real life! And you can also sorta see my boyfriend’s character, the little purple dude with the blue helmet in the corner, stamping leaves all over the house.

Last weekend my boyfriend and I went to the Natural History Museum at Exposition Park. There was a lot to see and we didn’t get to see it all because they kicked us out when it closed at 5! We were unprepared for it to close so soon.

But anyway, we first went into the gems & minerals section because I was convinced there would be an enormous diamond which Brandon had told me about, it was there when he was a kid, inside a vault with guards. We found the vault but there was no giant diamond, but there was a lot of really cool other gems including an opal sphere that I liked. Brandon liked the emeralds because of the bright green. Then we looked at the rest of the gems. There were ones that grew under blacklights, and a huge gold section that was with a lot of cool gold rush era stuff.

Then we were about to find the bug zoo section but Brandon told me I would rather look at the american history section (he knows all about my obsession with the late 19th century). He showed me it, and I got excited and we went in. They had old cars and an old train car and an old gas pump and other stuff. I loved the old posters, but I hadn’t remembered to use my camera at that point (I’m making a conscious effort now!)

Then we looked at the North American Mammals Taxidermy hall of stuff, which is where I remembered I had a camera. My camera is terrible for taking pictures in low light, I even hold my

breath when shooting, but it still blurs everything. I want a new camera that can do it better! I love taking pictures of stuff like this in museums because when you look at the photos, it can be difficult to tell if it’s real or fake like the photo above. I like it to take a few moments to understand that it’s a museum exhibit, it should look almost real but still a little off.

Then we went upstairs to the birds, marsh and rainforest sections. And the Thomas the T Rex Lab where people were working on cleaning bones and you could watch them work. I liked the honeycomb info graphics (below). We looked at North American mammals and one of them was of a coyote eating a housecat in a backyard, so sad! The marine life exhibit had just closed, so the leftover marine life was out in the hallways and there was a big-mouth shark (?), coelacanths, and some huge disgusting eel thing. They were all really gross and formaldehyde-y. No pics because they were gross.

Then it started closing and we didn’t even get to go to the museum shop! Which was sad. But we left and it was raining, and my umbrella was in the car so we walked together in the rain.

And then we ordered pizza and watched Lost and then played Warcraft. It was a nice night