Mr F and I celebrated our anniversary with jelly fish, moon fish, sea horses, sea otters, sharks, coral, etcetera at The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach.
Celebrations always include food. Ours, at the end of the day, came with a sunset view of the ocean, a bottle of Italian vino, too much loud music, and good things to eat.
sunset dinner
This sea otter was 'playing' with the kids
All the seals, sea otters and sharks at the Long Beach Aquarium were rescue animals each one with a dreadful story of being caught in nets, or having swallowed something plastic.
It’s a sobering reminder that our plastic bottles and plastic bags are still ending up in the ocean.
The Guinness Book of World Records named the plastic bag the most ubiquitous consumer product of 2009, as it is produced on a worldwide scale by the trillions, just to be thrown away.
FYI I’ve written posts about
- the “plastic soup” of trash floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
- plastic bags (only 5% are recycled in California)
- eating ocean friendly seafood .
I include a slide show of my photos, which were all taken with my little point and shoot camera, and have not been “photoshopped” in any way.
This is what lies beneath.
If you haven’t been to an aquarium recently, you should go. Don’t know where to find one? According to ZooChat, there are over 50 in North America.
Ocean Institute Dana Point California
Doheny State Beach Visitor Center Dana Point California
Birch Aquarium at Scripps La Jolla California
Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific Long Beach California
Roundhouse Lab and Aquarium Manhattan Beach California
UCLA Ocean Discovery Center Monica Beach California
Monterey Bay Aquarium Monterey Bay California
Morro Bay Aquarium Morro Bay California
Sea World of California San Diego California
Aquarium of the Bay San Francisco California
Steinhart Aquarium San Francisco California
Cabrillo Marine Aquarium San Pedro California
The Marine Mammal Care Center at Fort MacArthur San Pedro California
Santa Barbara Sea Center Santa Barbara California
Seymour Marine Discovery Centre Santa Cruz California
Ocean Discovery Centre Santa Monica California
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom (formerly Marine World) Vallejo California
A view of a white spotted bamboo shark growing in it's egg with a hatch date of December
A special thank you to WordPress. I spent a couple of nights working on this post, pressed PUBLISH, and it disappeared. Poof! Re-writes are always improvements.
Wondering Rose 
WordPress just sent me a very nice medal, because this is my 300th Post.
Congrats! I just got my 70th. I have a long ways to go…
Thanks Darla. I had no idea that I’d written so many.
300th post and 40th anniversary and 3 kinds of sea nettles! Mazeltov.
Hey that’s a nice one Mahalia. This is a good month for numbers.
Those sea nettles were fascinating the way they just float up and down up and down. I ran my battery down taking photos of them. Did you see the Moon Jellies?
Hi dearrosie,
Wow, what a fantastic place to celebrate, surrounded by Natures Beauty, and really nice photos, loved the slide show.
It’s nice to hear WordPress send you a medal well done.
Hi Mags,
WordPress seems to do something new every week. This week its medals. But what’s the point of a medal if you can’t share it with your readers? I tried to copy it…
I’m very glad to hear that you enjoyed my slide show. Have you been to an aquarium recently? I imagine Australia must have many fine Aquariums.
Oh Yes we have a lot of Aquariums, just like you there are plenty around, because I am in Queensland a lot show beautiful coral reefs as well.
Congrats ! What a lovely place for a celebration !
Once upon a time we DID live without plastic. Why can’t we do that again ?
Hi Sybil,
It was such a perfect place to celebrate life.
Plastic! I remember how excited we were when plastic wrap came to our town and after cutting an avocado they didn’t go brown.
I take my lunch to work every day in glass dishes. It’s heavier and breakable, but I’ve been doing it for years.
More than anything, I’m overjoyed that the sea are “rescues”. Sometimes we humans do thing properly. 😀
All these milestones! We’re going to have to help you come off the fabulous cloud slowly…what’s the opposite to bangs disease?
Enjoy you bunches, Rosie.
Hi Amy,
We were fortunate that our anniversary was on a Monday because it wasn’t very busy at the aquarium. Apparently one can barely walk in there on the weekends.
It does make one feel good to see what they are doing in the aquarium, and I hope they can continue to get funding because it’s so expensive to operate, for instance, it costs about $35,000 a year to feed one sea otter.
“In order to stay warm sea otters eat 25 to 30% of their body weight each day and convert food into heat with their high metabolism. An adult male sea otter eats as much as 15 lbs of food a day.”
I came off the cloud when I returned to work the next day. I wanted to wake up and find myself in the Amazon or Antarctica
Although i believe that to celebrate something, place does n’t really matter. But when celebration takes place in this kind of place, with all the natural scenic beauty surrounding; then few more reasons for celebration are going to be added in the list for sure. Beautiful pictures.
Hi Arindam,
I don’t think many folks celebrate their wedding anniversaries at the aquarium. If we told them do you think they would’ve given us a medal too?
Gorgeous photos, Rosie!
Thanks Darla, but I feel I didn’t do anything. All the complements should go to the creatures who put on such a beautiful show for us
Thank you for the list. I will have to send my daughter this list so she and our grandson plan to go. These are beautiful photos; love the slide show. Really your post went away poof and you had to re-create it? Double Thank you for sharing.
Hi Georgette,
I must say I was surprised to see how many aquariums we have over here in California. Yes do encourage your daughter to take your grandson.
I’m glad you liked the slide show.
Thankfully the photos didn’t disappear, but I lost a couple of days worth of re-writes. Even though I was tired from work on Thursday night and had decided I was going to bed early and I kept saying “that’s it! I’m going to bed now”, I’d see something else I wanted to change/add, so it was late when I pressed “Publish”. You can imagine that I wasn’t a happy blogger to lose all that work. Next morning when I was calm, I was able to find a first draft when I’d just downloaded the photos and had given it a different subject.
Much Mazel on the milestone. Stunning photos. (That little bald-headed child breaks my heart).
Thanks Cindy. The little bald headed child was almost ghost-like he was so pale.
What a good idea to visit an aquarium. Thanks for sharing those lovely pictures (and by the way it’s always irritating to lose any kind of work, even if it improves by the second take).
Hi Otto
You are one of the best photographers I know, and it’s so awfully kind of you to complement me on my photos.
In the blogging world we don’t have time for writing, let alone re-writes, and I was mad/infuriated/frustrated to lose all those hours of *work* so it was a pleasant surprise when I realized that the finished product was an improvement.
We have some nice aquariums here in Texas, too, although not so many as in California. Your photos were great – in some months, the moon jellies are my constant companions at “the office”. Also, the cabbageheads. And always there are the blue herons and the egrets. There are some advantages to working on the docks!
Congratulations on everything, especially your anniversary. As for the 300th post, etc, I’ve never heard from WordPress that I know of, but then I turn off every new option as soon as it’s birthed. Who knows what important things I’m missing? 😉
Hi Linda,
I would imagine that Texas would have a good selection of aquariums. I’ve been to the one in Dallas. I can’t remember the name, but it was in a central location and also very nice.
The more I hear about your lovely job, the more envious I get. I also want to spend my working hours outside on the docks being able to watch moon jellies, cabbage heads, blue herons and egrets… Think of me having to stand inside in a stuffy store listening to the same four Christmas CD’s, plus every now and then someone will thoughtfully leave me a gift of a smelly fart 🙂
Thanks for the anniversary congrats. I wrote a little etheree [poem] for the occasion that you may have missed:
Wow — 300 posts AND an anniversary ?? Give yourself a hand!! Love your shout-out to aquariums .. and a plea for less plastic. Did you know that Rwanda has outlawed plastic bags for years now — you can’t even bring them in the country because they’ll take them away from you at the airport.
How progressive is that??! Great post, great photos, Rosie!!!
Hello Betty,
Thanks for the (((clapping))) greetings.
I would imagine you must have double that number of posts by now?
I didn’t know that little landlocked Rwanda in the middle of Africa had outlawed plastic bags, and I had no idea that a country would be so serious about banning them that they’d search suitcases at the airport. Thank you for sharing that encouraging piece of news. Do you hear that President Obama?
Congratulations on the 300th post, Rosie! Many more to go, and equally good ones, I am sure.
Do shark eggs really show the tiny creature inside? How very marvellous. I’d love to see such an egg someday. That boy with shaven head and a mask made me stop the slideshow and keep looking at him.
Your choice of an outing on your anniversary was such a beautiful one. And that sunset!
Salaam Priya
Thank you for the encouraging comment re my blogging milestone. I hope I don’t let you down.
I’m so glad you noticed the shark eggs. (I think I explained it in the ‘lost’ post…) The fish “keepers” [what does one call the folks who look after and feed the fish?] take a fertilized egg, and carefully cut out a piece of the shell which they replace with a piece of clear hard plastic to make a little viewing window so we can watch the creature growing inside.
The little boy with the mask was so sick and so pale you could almost see through his skin. Poor kid.
I’m really happy that you could enjoy our sunset dinner vicariously with us.
You Californians are lucky to have so many fabulous aquariums. We can’t do enough in this world to protect what’s at our ocean floor. Your photos are wonderful. I wish I wouldn’t die from panic and be able to scuba dive – since that isn’t going to ever happen, double thanks for the slideshow.
PS: Kudos on 300 posts. I’m must be about quantity and not quality – I see I’m at my 1200th post today!
Hi EOS,
Felicitations on your 1200th post! Twelve hundred? wow that’s an awful lot of posts.
I wonder how many Californians think they are lucky, or even care that we have so many aquariums?
That you like my photos pleases and humbles me. Thank you.
I’m also a member of the “I can’t scuba dive” club.
Amazing photos!!! And Happy Anniversary again!
Thanks Dinah.
What a colorful and romantic place to celebrate your anniversary! I love the puffin! Congratulations of your 300th post!
We have an aquarium in our area – Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration – we used to have a membership when the kids were small. They do amazing marine biology research there and often rescue stranded whales and dolphins… But they don’t have a restaurant for a romantic dinner. 😦 They didn’t even have a noisy cafeteria until recently…
HI Barbara,
Sorry I somehow missed this lovely comment from you. We had such a lovely day at the Aquarium we both can’t wait to go again. Hopefully we won’t wait til the next “zero” celebration 🙂
Our dinner celebration wasn’t at the Aquarium. Sorry if I didn’t make that clear. (I think the Aquarium of the Pacific also has a noisy cafetaria but we just had a snack at the coffee shop.) Our celebratory dinner was at one of our fave sea shore restaurants in Malibu called “Moonshadows”.
I also loved the puffins. Perhaps you’ll be inspired from this outing of ours to go to your aquarium. I’d love to know how they rescue stranded whales?
No problem, Rosie, I often seem to be lagging way behind in my commenting! *Moonshadows* is a wonderful name for a restaurant and looks very romantic.
When the kids were still living at home we used to go Mystic Aquarium at least once a month and they also went to the various summer day camp programs they had there. They even met an astronaut there once! Now we go mainly when we have out-of-town guests.
I would love to participate in one of their encounter programs with their beluga whales, but it’s awfully expensive. My sister-in-law and I watched one a few years back. The participants stand in waist deep water and the beluga comes up to them and the biologist/trainer teaches them how to touch them and feed them. When we were watching, the beluga took a liking to one of the men in the small group and kept going to him and ignoring everyone else, in spite of the biologist’s prompting. So the man stepped back to give the others more of a chance and the beluga kept bobbing her head up trying to see over the group. No one could explain why she was so attracted to that man!
A young friend of ours is working at the Aquarium now while she works on her masters in marine biology at UConn’s Avery Point campus here in Groton.
I found this link on our aquarium’s webpage – it has some info that might answer your question about rescuing whales:
http://www.mysticaquarium.org/animals-and-exhibits/animal-rescue-program
Moonshadows is right on the water and a very romantic spot especially at sunset because the sun sets right in line with the restaurant, but I love going there any time of the day because, like you, I love being near the ocean.
Gosh your kids were lucky to meet an astronaut at the Aquarium 🙂
I know what you mean about entertaining out of town guests.
I often meet visitors at the Museum who tell me that although they live in L.A they’ve never been to the Museum before.
“So why are you here today?” I ask
“We have out of town guests…”
I wonder why the whale liked that man? What a lovely story.
Thank you for so thoughtfully providing the link. Interesting to read:
* Do not touch a stranded animal.
* Keep pets away
* Do not pour water on seals.