Boldly Going Where No Woman Has Gone Before

Thanks again everyone for the words of encouragement regarding my life sucking job. I really appreciate it, and while I still bawled me eyes out this morning when my alarm went off, I'm learning to live with the pain ;)

But enough about work, there are other aspects of my life that are much more interesting.

So, let me talk about Star Trek.

Yes, I said Star Trek.

The Detroit Science Center is having a Star Trek exhibit right now. It started on Valentine's Day and they were having a drawing to win a Star Trek wedding package. Why didn't I think of having a Star Trek themed wedding when I was getting married? I can just see my mom's face upon learning that vulcan ears are a mandatory accessory for the mother of the bride (snicker).

We have always dreamed of going to the Star Trek convention that is held every year at the Las Vegas Hilton but have never been able to fit it in, we thought this would be the next best thing. We took the kids to see the exhibit last Tuesday while we were off from work and they were off from school. I was very excited because I was going to buy myself a comm badge and wear it to work. Then every time someone is annoying me I can hit my comm badge and ask Scotty to beam me the hell out of here.

They didn't have any comm badges for sale. In fact, the peeps who were working the exhibit didn't even have real comm badges. They just had a fake comm badge sewn into their uniform shirts. Rip off. Disappointment. I really wanted one of those comm badges. Rat bastard exhibit planners. They really didn't have any good loot to buy.

On to the exhibit itself. It was pretty cool. They had a replica of the bridge from the original series and you could sit in Captain Kirk's seat and have your picture taken. The pictures were $16 each so we abstained (at this point I was still saving my money for the comm badge that I thought I would find in the gift shop at the end of the tour). Also, the hallway that you walk through in the exhibit is a replica of the Next Generation Enterprise and it looks pretty real. They also had a replica of Captain Picard's ready room and a bunch of real props from the show, including Seven of Nine's uniform. She must be about 87 lbs to fit in that thing. [Side note: my husband, who is in love with Seven of Nine, dragged me over to said uniform and pointed out to me how small she must be, but I'm a secure woman and I can take it because I've got moves that Jeri Ryan has never even thought of. The only thing Seven of Nine has on me is the borg implant that allows her to function like a computer and a COMM BADGE]. They also had a mock transporter that you could stand on and then watch yourself on a tv screen where you were shown being "beamed" down to the surface. It was a little bit lame, but kind of nifty for the littler one. They were also selling photos for this (you were not allowed to bring your own camera in), but again, we abstained.

The culmination of the exhibit was a large room filled with scaled down models of the various Enterprise ships and a timeline of the "Star Fleet" program that begins with the launching of Apollo 11 and spans the original Star Trek series and all subsequent series and includes such events as, "James T. Kirk graduates from the Star Fleet" and "Jean Luc Picard is born".

It was a pretty cool exhibit and we found it to be a little better than the pirates exhibit they had last summer, except for the giant wind tunnel that you could stand in and experience hurricane force winds and the fact that I couldn't get a comm badge. I wonder if you can get them at the Las Vegas Hilton......