DC on the First Day of Summer

Cactus, National Botanic Garden

21 June 2015

Jack left for Oxford on the second day of autumn.  He returned on the first day of winter.  On the first day of spring he was in Los Angeles. Today is the first day of summer, and he's in DC, where the heat index reached 112 degrees at 5:00 p.m.  I was with him.  We were walking up Capitol Hill from the National Gallery of Art.

Today we managed to pass through three national museums:  the Botanic Garden (inside, this time), the Air and Space Museum, and the National Gallery.  We're back in Jack's room now, both of us having had to hose off after a mere mile or so of slow walking.

I'm also typing with my right ring finger slowly swelling.  This is because yesterday, minutes before Sean and Dale arrived to take me to the train station, a wasp and I surprised each other at the outdoor trash bin.  I can't fault the wasps for choosing a shady nook under the handle as real estate; nor can they fault me for wanting to use the handle to move the bin.  So I downed a couple of Benadryl and was on my way.  The antihistamine and the caffeine in my system duked it out all the way to DC.  I was too tired to focus and too awake to nap. The pills wore off some time this morning, and my finger, which had looked perfectly normal, began to itch and swell down to the knuckle.  Having been out all day,  I couldn't do anything about it until just now, when I popped a few more hot pink pills.  In a few minutes I'll be loopy again. I had less coffee today.  Good times ahead.

So let me get the pictures posted before my brain takes a vacation.

One of our summer students is fond of taking pictures of me and our colleagues at work. She does this while we're not looking, then texts them to us later.  She sent another one this morning.  I was tempted to send back this cactus, for no particular reason. If I'd used my phone instead of my camera, I might have.

As I pondered her tendency to document every moment (it's more than a few pictures she's collected over two weeks), I wondered how much of it is a generational thing.  Then I thought some more and realized that, in my own way, I'm guilty of the same thing.  I just take fewer pictures of people when I do it.

I've been to the National Air and Space Museum before.  The last time was 2008, which is long ago enough to go back again. We spent time looking at the Apollo-Soyuz collaboration (that's the one where the US and the Soviets linked orbiting spacecraft towards the end of the Cold War).  We were surrounded by missiles from both nations.

There was a fun exhibit on timekeeping and the problem of measuring longitude at sea.  We moseyed past moon rocks and moon suits, and felt sorry for poor Pluto, now demoted to "dwarf" planet.  On our way out, we walked past creepy drones.

Our late start led to a late lunch, which led to an hour and a half to spend at the National Gallery of Art before it closed for the day.  I'll end this post with my favorite work of art in the etire "Drawing in Sliver and Gold" exhibit of metalpoint art:  "Eight Studies of a Dead Mouse."

We couldn't take pictures in the exhibit, but we found the drawing in the exhibition book.  Jack and I both took pictures with our phones until he got one that wasn't full of shadows.  I dutifully sent it along to the entire lab mailing list, and, as revenge for having to see myself in so many photos, I texted it back to the summer student, too.

So that's it for my weekly visits to Washington, DC.  Next weekend I'll be blogging from Abingdon, Virginia as Tom and his Insane Bike Posse tour the hills that Bike Virginia throws at us.  On our way back, I'll scoop up Jack in DC and drive him home.

OK.  One of my ten fingers looks sunburned, but it isn't itching.  My head is buzzing.  My finger is miles away. Wheeeeeeeee!

I'm such a lightweight.