An outing...and the Odd Couple

After my praise of the Cincinnati Museum Center yesterday, I decided that I needed to take the girls there.

Its official name is the Cincinnati Museum Center, but I still call it Union Terminal.
I bet Trixie has been here!

We went to two of the museums, the Children's one and the Natural History one.

Neil Armstrong's space suit is there.
(Did you know that Geoff interviewed Mr. Armstrong for a book? His first book was about a local business man who was also a friend of Mr. Armstrong's)


The Natural History Museum is full of so many cool things...caves, simulated glaciers, fossils, reconstructed skeletons of mastodons, giant sloths.
And a passenger pigeon. What a beautiful bird. Stupid humans.


And speaking of birds...
John James Audubon worked here back in 1819 as a taxidermist, with the predecessor of our current museum.
Cool!
(We Cincinnatians find any, ANY tie-in we can)

The Rotunda ceiling.
Word has it that the huge entry way has perfect acoustics, and that you can stand at one end and whisper, and a person can hear you all the way on the other side. I have never been able to do it, because it's always so loud in there.


Maxfield Keck’s bas-relief figures symbolize Commerce and Transportation.
Big, beautiful murals made of tiny pieces of ceramic. The sister pieces to these are hanging in the Greater Cincinnati Airport.





Pigeons don't know how to tell time, but they hang out on the clock anyway.

No matter where you go outside the exhibits, you can't forget you are in a train station.

These are some of the old rail entry points, where the trains came into the platforms.
And trains still come into this station, but in the back instead of the front.
You can grab an Amtrak from here.

"I'm livin' on the air in Cincinnati....
Cincinnati, W K R P."

News from the yard:

The new batch of swallowtail eggs have hatched and we have new babies to fawn over.


From the prairie...
I cannot WAIT to see this when it opens!


We have a balding cardinal:

"I'm not just the president, I'm also a client."

You know, I have seen bald cardinals in other people's yards, but never here. I was starting to get insulted.

The usual culprit is feather mites.
Eventually the feathers grow back. but not before the poor guy gets a lot of grief from the other birds.

In honor of Mary's post yesterday:
We have our own love affair going on in the yard.
A bi-species affair.
Duh duh dum!


Her: It's not going to work, Jay.
Him: Come on, baby. Ain't I sexy enough for you?

Her: You're too pushy, and my parents don't approve of you. We have such different lives.
It' s time to move on.
Him: .....Huh? Did you say something?


Her: See?!? You're looking at the feeder! All you care about is sex and food!
Him: Hey. That human put out peanuts.