It is late Monday night as I write this, having just returned from a rather exhausting rehearsal for Vox Musica, and I think I am still reeling ever so slightly from the whirlwind that has been this weekend. But it has been a very *good* kind of whirlwind.

We kicked the weekend off by spending a few hours on Saturday looking at cadavers. Or rather, I received two tickets to the Bodies Revealed exhibit going on downtown, so after a swing by the local bagel place for breakfast (because you cannot go wrong with chocolate chip bagels for a weekend morning!), we managed to get ourselves only slightly lost when trying to find the place. Turns out Google Maps is only useful if you type in the correct street name. Oops.

It’s really quite an amazing exhibit. They let people in a few at a time, so it was never too crowded inside. The exhibit is divided up into ‘rooms’ that focus on specific organ systems, or areas of the body. For example, there was a whole room dedicated to respiration, and anyone who is a smoker, or who thinks smoking isn’t all that bad for you should really get up close and personal with the lungs, because smokers lungs are just *nasty*. There was a room dedicated to the skeleton, and one where the focus was the nerves, and one where it was all about the muscles, but my very favorite part of the exhibit was the room that focused on the circulatory system. Somehow they had removed completely intact circulatory systems (some were just a specific part, like the heart, or the liver; some were entire sections of the body), and they were fascinating and also so incredibly beautiful. There was an entire leg, and an entire arm, and also an entire body, just of blood vessels and nothing else. Amazing!

It was very quiet in the exhibit, because you pretty much just go from display case to display case, reading all about all the various systems and parts of the body, and peering at the few whole cadavers carefully displayed in various positions throughout the space. And people were surprisingly respectful of the exhibits – especially of the whole cadavers. Maybe it’s just that the type of person who finds this kind of thing fascinating enough to go see it is just far less likely to be making stupid jokes or letting their kids run around, but even the kids were very quiet and respectful; and if they weren’t, the parents were right there to bring them right back into line.

There was an audio tour, where people could rent a little wand they held up to their ear, but we didn’t bother with those, because reading was fine enough. It was sort of like our own little crash course in gross anatomy. Definitely one of the best Christmas presents I’ve received!

We left the exhibit and drove immediately head-first into traffic trying to escape out of the city, although this was mainly due to my poor judgment of trying to exit the city by passing by the very large shopping mall that was nearby. Ugh. Then it was off to Napa, with a short detour to get some coffee and a little snack because we’d had a late breakfast and no lunch because we were too busy looking at dead body parts. Despite even more traffic along the way, we managed to get there mostly on time, which was good because we were there to celebrate my older sister’s 40th birthday.

I don’t usually have an issue with my age, because getting older is just part of life, and I have never bothered with the whole stupid ‘hide my age’ thing that a lot of women seem to think is necessary. But my older sister’s age always hits me, every time. I suspect the reason I don’t have an issue with getting older is merely because she hits it one year before I do, so by the time it’s my turn, I’m just over it. Heh. Anyway. She’s now 40 – or actually will be tomorrow – and to celebrate that she’s been working really hard the past year and managed to lose over 40 pounds, and she looks really , really good. So my younger sister and I got her a gift certificate to a clothes store, so she can score some new stuff for her new body.

It was a fun party. They invited a bunch of people she’s known – some for over 20 years – and it was kind of amazing to see some of these people I haven’t seen in over ten years, and catch up on what they’ve been doing in the meantime. There was lots of food, and lots of chatter, and a small swarm of little kids who all kept each other quite amused upstairs in the nephews’ rooms until it was time for ice cream cake. And eventually it got late and we realized we needed to drive home because Sunday was going to be another very long and busy day…but that is a story for another day.