Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I don't know what it is about traveling, but it wears me out.

I've been home since Tuesday (a.k.a. failed rapture day), but today is the first day that I sort of vaguely feel human again. I'm up early, so it seems like a good time to recount the last days in DC for you all. 

Speaking of up early, naomikritzer rarely is. To be fair to her and all the other crepuscular folks out there, I am an unusually early riser. Every day of the convention I popped out of bed without an alarm somewhere around 6:30 am CT/7:30 am ET.  The fact that it was an hour later in DC than at home worked to my advantage because by 7:30 am a lot of coffee shops are actually open. So, just like every day of the convention, I wandered across Rockville Pike to get us both a nice espresso drink. But, on Monday, I was in no hurry to get back because I very wisely made us no plans until noon. 

First of all, I figured that after GoHing at a convention, Naomi would appreciate a slow morning. Secondly, both she and I walked a little too far the night before and woke up feeling it. On occassion, I plan fantasy trips for myself and I'm now going to be giving any directions that include "a twenty minute walk" a bit of a side-eye. I can walk for 20 minutes, but I do start to drag if there are lots of those! I mean, it does kind of matter whether or not the view is interesting. Some 20 minute walks feel faster than others. I had, at least, taped up my arches. My arches have been giving me trouble lately (I've been seeing a PT) so I was prepared and had been doing my exercises, but, man.

DC is funny because a lot of touristy stuff in it is both really centrally located AND really spread out. As that ad reminded us last night, the  Smithsonian Mall is big!

My plan for us that morning was to check out the DC fish market.  Maine Avenue Fish Market is the oldest continually-operating open air fish market in the United States. It was founded almost two decades earlier than the one in New York City, believe it or not. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Avenue_Fish_Market).  I will say? It doesn't look like much. 


Image: fish market, with a haze of... my fingers? Not sure. Pretend it's an old-timey photo, since this was the best one I took.

The market is just off the L'Enfant Plaza metro stop (also on the red line!)  Enough people were headed to the market for lunch that we just sort of followed the crowd down to the wharf area. It is, in fact, little more than you see in the picture (minus my fingers). There's this set of stalls and another set of equal size directly behind. It's one of those places, though, where you can buy your fish or seafood on one side and bring it in a bucket over to the other and they will cook it for you fresh. Naomi bought a handful of shrimp for us to have this way and they were amazing. I ended up wanting something more like a full lunch, so I stopped at the little shop at the end which had prepared (but fresh!) sandwiches. 


Image: crab cake with sweet potato fries.

I got the crab cake because crab cake is something I used to try to make at home without ever having experienced the "real thing." This was really very good and I will admit that I fed the pigeons, seagulls, and little brown ones (sparrows) bits of fries and hamburger bun. 

We could see the tip of the Washington Monument from the market and so Naomi convinced me (only slightly against my better judgement) that it was an easy "20 minute walk" (now my code word for any walk that I later come to regret) to the Smithsonian Mall. It wasn't bad, really. Washington, DC has a whole lot of really lovely parks along the river. This one had clearly been planted with a ton of cherry trees, many of which had been trained to droop and arch their branches over the walkway. I bet that in the spring, during cherry blossom season, the walk we took would have been absolutely stunning. In late September, it was a little muggy and kind of hot. 

We once again ran into a clot of Naitonal Guard, whom Naomi asked where they were from. Once again, it was West Virginia. She also asked them all what they did when they weren't serving in the Guard and it ranged from "just out of college" to "IT manager." Again, the group was largely white, though at least one person could have qualified as a PoC in my estimation. We wished them a good day, which, I know, was probably a wasted opportunity to yell at them about the current presidential administration, but, frankly, I don't see how being deployed here is their choice. For all I know, the whole lot of them voted for Kamala Harris. I kind of have to wonder at the fact that we rarely saw National Guard anywhere but touristy places (and subway/metro stops) if this wasn't a kind of quiet quitting on their or their commander's part. Like, they weren't actually marching in the streets. They were just boredly wandering the Mall or chatting amongst themselves at metro stops. 

I dunno. I will say, they were carrying guns, so just standing around did also feel threatening? If they were in Minneapolis/St. Paul doing this, I might feel really differently, that's for sure.

These days a lot of the popular Smithsonian museums require that you sign up for timed entrances. Naomi and I debated a lot the night before about how long we thought it would take to get from here to there, and what time would be most conveinent so that we could connect up with our friend mrissa .  We had settled on 3:00 PM for the National Musuem of Africian Amerian History & Culture, which nearly worked out? With our slow wander up from the wharf, it was close to 2:00 PM when we got to the Smithsonian.  We sat for a while in the shade, having bought cold water from the gift shop near the Washington Monument. Even though it was a crap shoot as to whether or not we'd've needed timed tickets, I convinced Naomi to consider wandering the National Museum of Asian Arts as it was directly across the mall, or thereabouts. We lucked out and were able to waste a bit of time in air-conditioning wandering the exhibits. I feel like the National Museum of Asian Arts is one of those museums that could be called "stuff a rich guy brought back from Asia in the late 1800s/early 1900s." Not unlike the Walker's Asian Arts section, honestly? But, it was nice not to have to be sitting in the surprisingly bright sun.  

My feet, at this point, were kind of killing me, but I had a secret plan to solve that once we were inside the Africian American History & Culture museum. Neither Naomi and Marissa like to sit and watch movies at museums, but my plan was to sit through all of them in the back row and massage life back into my feet. Which, once we got in, I totally did. 

I actually came out of that museum feeling almost kind of human again, though when another "20 minute walk" was proposed to get us to the restaurant, I will admit, I baulked and ended up hailing us a taxi cab. 

But, I get ahead of myself. 

The museum is huge. One of the reasons, of course, that the three of us wanted to go (or at least, I wanted to go) is because it is my darkest suspicion that if Trump gets a chance, he will destroy the collection as much as possible. I noticed a lot of people--mostly Black--actually filming everything they saw on their phones. I wonder if there is some kind of community or grassroots effort to collect and preserve the exhibit, particularly the history of enslavement, given just how many people I saw filming.  The musuem as it is set up now has its lower levels devoted to history. Very cleverly, you literally rise up out of slavery, as the story of kdinapping and enslavement starts at the lowest level, C, and you work your way up through the Civil War and Emancipation, B, and end in the Civil Rights to present level, A. Luckily for me and my feet, there was a nice 10 minute movie at the crux of each level (you go up these long ramps to move between eras) and so I watched each of those. 

I suspect I was supposed to do the opposite with the culture sections, ie, start at the top and work my way down? Because the top floor has a lot of physical art, like painting and such; the next level down has what I'd call the art of revolution--so like a lot of art that came out of the sixties and the Civil Rights movement, like this....


Image: statue of the famous moment at the 1968 Olympics when medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the symbol for Black Power during the National Anthem.

...and then the next level down encouraged people to interact with art by doing a dance-dance revolution type thing to hip hop, etc. It didn't diminish my experience to do it the "wrong" way, but, because the museum closed at 5:30 pm, I sort of wish I'd had more time to explore the art at the very top. Ah well. 

I will say, it was one of the better museums I've been to in a long time. No surprise, I suppose, given that it is a Smithsonian, but I really could have spent the whole day there exploring. 

Marissa wanted to return to a place she'd had dinner at the night before, Oyamel. There is apparently also one of these in New York, but, obviously, we were at the DC location. I was not feeling nearly as adventurous as I normally am, and so I ended up just having a lovely chicken tamale. I absolutely ADORED the atmosphere of the place, however. The three of us sat outside and the evening was fully magical in terms of temperature, the company, and that sense you get when you're traveling that you are having An Experience, you know? 10/10 would again and the next time I would order the cricket tacos. 

The metro was quite close, so we all hopped on and returned to our hotel. 

All and all, it didn't necessarily feel like we did All The Things, but I think we did enough of the things. Oh, and I got to use my superpower of being able to summon a taxi in a world filled with Uber and Lyft in order to get the three of us to the restaurant. It is a superpower that is normally very useless, given that I live in a town where taxis must be called on the phone and appointments made. But, I have rarely failed to catch a taxi any time I'm visiting a large enough city. I've hailed them in Chicago, Los Angeles, and DC. (I was too young to use this superpower when I was last in NYC.) And by hail? I mean, literally, I will be in a street and an available taxi will come by and I will stick my hand out and yell, "TAXI!" and they stop for us. 

Naomi thinks I had a past life as a New Yorker. Because this skill is clearly fairly useless in the modern era. But it is the reason I do not have a Lyft or Uber app on my phone.

So, yeah, there's very little to say about Tuesday other than Naomi and I did discuss the possiblity our pilot getting raptured. Luckily, that did not happen. 

Now, I'm home, returned to the "real world" where dishes must be washed and food prepared. Alas, down to earth once again.

This last weekend my parents came up for a visit, something we called "Christmas in May," and maybe we shouldn't have, given that it seemed determined to SNOW on Sunday, it was so cold and miserable. The idea, however, is that the road (and even the train) have become un-fun ways to travel for my folks, for reasons of age and weather. And, no one in my family is Christian, so there's no particular reason to celebrate Christmas at all, but certainly there's nothing binding us to to the traditional time. Though, everyone likes getting presents.

We exchanged gifts on Saturday. My folks came up late in the day because Mason works at the Science Museum. Normally, he's out by 2 pm, but last Saturday they went on an excursion to a hydroponic basement "farm" at a local restaurant and didn't make it home until almost 3 pm. That was fine because we all eat ridiculously early so by the time we all made it to my folks' hotel and did a little chatting, we could walk over to a nearby restaurant for dinner.

On Sunday morning, we set off for MIA. This is second time in so many weeks that i've been to that particular museum, but there is so much there that it's impossible to not see something new each time. Ironically, my mom also loves contemporary and modern art, just like my visiting Canadian, so we ditched Mason in the "Asia" galleries and booked it to the Modern/Contemporary galleries.

I got a great shot of my dad being captivated by a piece of art:



My art savvy friends have told me that the name of this piece is "The Father of Aviation II" by Santos Dumont. (The link should take you to MIA's page about it.)  It's very striking. I'd love to see more of Dumont's stuff, honestly.  

For me, that's my favorite part of any museum trip. Having a "wow!" moment. It's almost never a piece that anyone remembers from the one art history class they maybe took, except the first time I went to the Chicago art museum I was dumbfounded when I saw Seurat's famous pointillism piece, "A Sunday Afternoon..."  But, usually, it's some side gallery piece that makes me stop and take a moment to think, "Wha?? How is that so...???" This time, for me, it was a picture of pots and pans made of copper that just... there was something about how the artist had showed the light and reflections that took my breath away. I'll post the picture, but there's an extremely low chance that it will hit you the same way. Next time I go, I'll probably walk right past it. That's how museums work for me, anyway.



Yep, just a bunch of metal pans. 

So, that was my weekend. I spent yesterday running around like crazy. I sent back the contract for Unjust Cause (Whoo! I am officially contracted again!!) and spent some time frantically working on the first chapter at my favorite coffee shop. Then, I went to the bank to get cash from the change in my piggy bank because I joined an office bet at the library for the women's world cup and I wanted to be able to bring the cash in when I went to do my data practices training. (Fun times, though I'm always amused when it is mentioned that one can not delete records without permission from the state archives, to which I ALWAYS mentally add, "Or, as I like to call it, my wife.")

So, that was me over the past few days. I will try to be better about this.

But, hey, do you have a museum experience you want to share? I want to hear it.

My family has a very unusual attitude towards truancy. We encourage Mason to practice it from time to time, as needed, to blow off steam and to have a 'mental health' day/practice self-care. I don't ask a lot of questions or make any requirements for him to use these days. Mason just knows that he's allowed to say that he needs a day now-and-again.

On Thursday, driving in to school, Mason said, "You know how we sometimes just take off and drive somewhere? Today would be a good day to do that."

So, we turned around, I called him in sick, and we went home so he could catch up on a bit of sleep. Then, we talked about what kind of adventure he wanted, and, since it was really cold and there was supposed to be a winter storm moving in around us, we decided to stick close to home. After a comforting lunch, we headed out to Como Zoo. We spent most of our time in the Conservatory, because it's warm in there. Here's the view looking up at the glass dome.



This was just what the doctor ordered. Mason and I chatted about what's going on in his life, while strolling through the heat and the humidity of the conservatory. Because of the time of year, a lot of the tropical plants had fruit. We saw a Buddha's hand, coffee beans on the coffee tree, several ripening cocoa pods, and a bunch of other stuff that made me think that maybe I should try to take over the Conservatory when the apocalypse comes. I mean, they have COFFEE!

Then, because we're insane, we decided to see which animals might be out enjoying the sub-arctic temperatures. No surprise, perhaps, but the Siberian tiger thought it was lovely out.



As I wrote on Facebook: 'Not the polar bear, surprisingly, she was sleeping. The Siberian tiger was out, as were the wolves, the reindeer, the bison, and the arctic foxes which I have LITERALLY never seen at Como Zoo before, despite having walked passed their labeled area for YEARS. The two foxes were prancing they were so happy that the temps were sub-zero windchills."

I couldn't get a good picture of the arctic foxes because probably all you'd see would be two eyes and a nose. They are MADE to perfectly blend with the snow, after all. But, they were very, very adorable. Potentially worth braving the temperatures to see, honestly. The Como Zoo is still kind of the sad zoo (as opposed to the MN Zoo, which we just call "the big zoo"), in that a lot of their "enclosures" are still little more than chain link fences, but they've been slowly renovating the place to improve the animals' quality of life. The foxes, unfortunately, are still in a very small-sh space, so that's why I'd say "potentially" worth a visit. Your enjoyment would totally depend on whether or not you can stand that kind of zoo.

Then, on Friday, Mason was officially home from school, but I let him sleep in while I met a friend on Friday to go to the Science Museum. As part of his job, Mason gets free passes to the museum and this friend had been looking for cheap/free things to do during the day. I ended up cancelling on my usual ladies to hang out with her, but I had previously planned to go on Tuesday, but that was the day the plumbing broke. What I would say about our trip to the museum was that, if you go, you totally should spend some time in the Race exhibit. It's... well, I mean, parts of it are heartbreaking and awful, but it's extremely well done. Anna and I probably spent the majority of our time in that room. It was a moderately quiet room, not being a favorite of the countless screaming argonauts (aka other people's children), which was also nice for us, as Anna is deaf/hard of hearing.

But, also, there are dinosaurs! This is a "compi" from Jurassic World (Compsognathus).



Anna and I don't know each other terribly well--this is the third time we've done something together, though the first time it was just us. I would definitely hang out with her again. She's lovely company. 

In other news, I continue to try to find a plumber for our upstairs bathtub. The good news is that we have a fully functional bathroom on the first floor that has a tub, so we're not out anything while we figure out what we're doing. I had one set of plumbers out already, Ryan Plumbing, whose estimate was 1,500 - 2,000 bucks, as they figured they'd have to rip up the kitchen ceiling to get at all the pipes. Weld Plumbing called back and would like to wait and talk to their owner about whether or not they think they're the right people, which I told them was FINE as we're in a buyer's market, as we can just let it sit there until we get the right people with the right price. Weld was the first group who said that they thought there might be a way to McGyver it, if we wanted to try a fix for ourselves... which made me like them a bit more than the Ryan guys, but the chances of them calling back seemed kind of slim, you know? As soon as "I have to talk to the owner" comes out, it either means they think your job is too small for them or they otherwise don't want to do it at all.

BUT. I'm going to keep calling a couple of outfits every day because seriously, we have all the time we need to figure this out. It's a BIT WEIRD to take a full soaking bath downstairs while the rest of the family is hanging out in the living room, but it's definitely not the end of the world. 

I've been mostly keeping up with my spell of the day, but I'll catch up on posting about those the next entry. I've got to wrap this up as I need to run off to pick up Mason from his job in about five minutes.

First of all, I have to apologize. I've been very off-line. Part of it has to do with the fact that Mason is off school right now. We've been spending our days enjoying his vacation by doing nothing together. Plus, the big computer has been occupied, as we're trying to beat the "insane" level of Luxor 3. Important stuff, don't ya know?

A lot has happened since last we talked.

First of all, my folks came to town and we checked out the Minneapolis Institute of Art's "Louvre" traveling exhibit. My short review: save your money, and start budgeting for a trip to France.

The long review goes like this: we went on a Saturday, which was insanely busy, and the show was sold out to non-members, which meant that if we wanted to go to the special exhibit, we had to fork over the $50 for a membership. My folks paid for me (they got a discount ticket for their membership), but even at $2.00, I'm not sure it was worth it. Have you been to MIA? The traveling show room is really only about three rooms big. You COULD pack a lot into those rooms, they certainly did when they brought the "Myth and the Magic of Star Wars" there. But, as I've been describing this, it was like they took all the weird stuff they keep in the basement of the Louvre and brought it to Minneapolis. There were two "oh wow!" names there: Da Vinci and Michaelangelo. But in both cases, what they showed us were studies/sketches of nothing special, which is to say it wasn't even the practice piece for something famous... it was, in the Da Vinci case, a sketch of sunlight over a drape of cloth in pencil. It was clearly GOOD, but nothing that made me catch my breath.

I'm not an art historian or even necessarily a good judge of fine art, but I have had the experience of walking through a museum and having my breath taken away by something that just HIT, you know? At the Louvre the first time, it was seeing Nike/winged victory on the stairs (it's since moved). The second time, it was David's "Oath of the Horatii." (sp.) At the Chicago Institute I have "Aries Chastising Cupid" stop me dead and an El Greco rock my world. At the MIA there's a bust of a woman behind a gauze veil done in marble that is stunning as well as a smaller painting by a lesser known artist of a rug merchant bazaar that also gave me that "oh!" moment.

At this little exhibit, there wasn't anything like that for me. Some people seemed stopped by some of the bigger paintings, but, well, in the parlance of writers, "they didn't quite grab me, alas." And art *is* subjective, so perhaps, if you go, you can tell me about the amazing stuff I missed, but I'd recommend to most people to save their money and go "masterpiece" hunting through the main museum. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is full of some really crazy cool stuff.

And it's free.

And I think that's what it comes down to. For fifty bucks, or even whatever the regular cost is to get into the special exhibit hall, you kind of expect.... well, something. If not something that knocks your socks off, at least a sense that you've seen something "important." Maybe that's not a fair expectation, but it's there all the same.

And, for those of you locally, be warned: the art the MIA is using in its advertising is NOT in the show. (It's a Renaissance looking-painting, though I think it's more in the style of Waterhouse, of an alchemist/astronomer gazing at a globe. Not there.)

Anyway, I'm being bugged to read from the KING'S QUEST COMPANION... so I'll leave things here for now.