Picnic Day!

Have you ever been to a place where you could see dachshunds race, change liquid into ice cream, milk a cow, pass by giant monster bikes, race cockroaches, watch a helicopter take flight, and taste exotic fruits--all in one afternoon? As of last week, I have. Zac and I celebrated Picnic Day with hundreds of thousands of other UC Davis students, families, and alumni. I'm still not quite sure what we were celebrating, but I do know that the 100-year-old tradition is quite the event to attend. All of the departments on campus have booths or activities that let visitors see their research, which allows for a pretty interesting afternoon. Here are some of the things that we saw:

Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and cauldron bubble ... wait a second ... this isn't a witch boiling up a deadly potion. It's the chemistry department brewing up some tasty chocolate ice cream made from chocolate (of course), milk, and liquid nitrogen. My review? Delicious--tasted like a frosty.

"Got Milk?" or "Just do it"? Whatever the slogan, I bet that she was just happy that she wasn't one of the cows at the end of a loooong line of people wanting to try their hand at milking. We didn't want to wait in line, but we did see (and smell) a lot of other animals at the agricultural exhibit.

Living art--apparently a real form of art where blindfolded people slowly move into different statue-like positions.

It was pretty interesting to watch.

My favorite part of the day was probably the Doxie Derby, a derby for the cute and fast little creatures known as dachshunds. I don't know what was more interesting--watching the dogs, watching the owners trying to get their dog to win, or watching the people in the crowd trying to get everyone to do the wave (they finally succeeded). If I missed the dogs, though, I could always catch the end of the race on the instant replay screens--it was pretty funny to watch the dogs run in slow motion. For a small taste of this wonderful event, please watch the clip below.

We saw other interesting things but, unfortunately, I wasn't able to get pictures of everything. We walked by a bike parade, which had bikes that ranged from a huge monster bike to a tri-andum bike (like a tandem but with three seats). We stood about twenty feet away from a helicopter as it was taking off. We saw people racing cockroaches (which I refused to do). We built a protein with one of Zac's professors. We tasted "exotic" fruit--the only one that was really "exotic" was probably the jackfruit (unlike pineapple and mango). I saw glow-in-the-dark bacteria for the first time at the microbiology exhibit. We walked all across campus and, surprisingly, ran into quite a few people from our ward. 

Not bad for a single afternoon.