Happy Birthday to Thomas Jefferson!

This picture is a reminder that the cherry blossoms can, will, and do fade very quickly. I do apologize for not getting down there early enough to take some more attractive pictures. It’s only two hours before midnight here, and I thought about going down to the Jefferson Memorial at midnight to see if there would be any Libertarians trying to dance to their ipods in his honor or something... but, well, being more fond of Hamilton and Adams myself, decided against it in the end.

Yesterday we visited the Albert Einstein and World War I Memorials as a group, and learned some cool things about how they were built and how Washington DC was designed and what the term “architecture” means and... But I exaggerate. Our wonderful Institute leader, Taylor, led us on the tour, and she did a really fantastic job. It was a little nippy outside, even I had to confess (although I also proudly state that I enjoyed it, enough so that I stayed out two hours longer than most people, and eventually got to where I didn’t even feel cold at all), and we held our little Easter devotional at the World War I memorial, in a place secluded from the sun and with no “sitting” spots readily available. This left most of the group standing and shivering in an awkward-looking line. I sat down to lean against an oddly-carved pillar (imagine many concave scoops out of a solid pillar), and tried to pay attention while enjoying the breeze and shade.

I learned a few new things from the trip:

The floor of the Albert Einstein Memorial is designed to show the planets and stars, and if you stand in the middle of it and face the statue, you can talk and hear your voice echoed, as if the statue were answering you.

He doesn't look very happy, does he? Kind of tired and old and ugly...which oddly enough, makes me like him even more.

The World War I Memorial only has the names of the soldiers killed in battle from the District of Columbia. No wonder it’s so much smaller and lesser known than the other memorials!

They're all doing the Wizard of Oz thing. Aw, how cute! Snort.


In this picture, you will note how cold everyone except for me looks, and how snotty and stuck-up I look, standing in the middle of the memorial alone as if I'm too good for the rest of the group. Which, of course, I am (smirk).

After a short Easterish devotional at the WWI memorial, a few members of our group irreverently decided to sing “Popcorn Popping on the Apricot Tree” beneath the dome. It didn’t reverberate as well as the Albert Einstein memorial echo, and I was disappointed at the lack of maturity demonstrated on the part of, well, whoever had the idea (I have a pretty good idea who, but I’m not going to post his or her name).

After that, we played a game where we try to jump on each other’s feet. That game stopped in about 20 seconds, after tall Andrew jumped on my left foot with a loud “crunch.” My foot was okay, but I limped for a little bit, and was so sulky about the whole situation that I immediately departed from the rest of the group for the rest of the night.

I spent two hours perusing the Franklin Roosevelt and Jefferson Memorials and the Potomac River, talking and complaining on the phone with my wonderful, loving family (whom I miss SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much!!!!), and finding a good stick to probe interesting rocks with and use as a crutch. I actually started walking home with it before I realized that the stick wouldn’t fit in very well with the city once I got past Constitution Avenue, so I had to throw away that little guy. Sniff!

When I got home, a group was watching “Mulan” on the 3rd floor with popcorn. The Blanchards had made us a huge Easter lunch/dinner at 4 pm, so I didn’t really feel like having any dinner. Grapes and popcorn ended up being my dinner—delicious.

Today was a fun day. I went to work, sorted through the masses of email that had accumulated over the weekend, wrote up the daily art news (by the way, there were a lot of articles about my museum over the weekend! The Washington Post did a whole article on the Hungarian exhibit on Friday! Check it out!), aaaaand took a nice long lunch break to the Old Post Office, where I rode the glass elevator up to the “almost top,” walked up 97 steps to get to the “as far as you can get” spot, and took some pictures. Not quite as high or as exciting as the Washington Monument, but still very impressive! And I’m glad I got to see the inside of the Old Post Office—it’s cute and quaint and old-fashioned...like a small, old version of Union Station.

Me at the top of the Old Post Office. This was the "South" facing window, which I believe is appropriate.

After lunch, I went back to work, and, since it was the Intern coordinator’s last day for that week, I got a picture with her and turned in my last personal evaluation form.

After work, I walked home, ate dinner (“Hearty” potato soup, bread, grapes) and attended FHE. We did a talent show, with most of the main acts being musical numbers, as expected. I could have pulled something together, but decided not to, as such things always make me feel rather awkward and uncomfortable, not to mention childish. I suppose I could have astonished them with my knowledge of Redwall lore or held the Eagle yoga pose for a minute or wowed the crowd with a full split...but I didn’t want to, and we had plenty of people making an exhibition of themselves as it was, so it worked out just fine. I took a few pictures and a few videos, but my camera was running out of space, so I didn’t get as much as I wanted to. Hopefully some other people got videos of the more interesting parts—I saw a lot of cameras in the room!

After the talent show, we had “German” pancakes—um, the egg-like quality and the square shape makes them German? Yummy with maple syrup, but I would have preferred yogurt and strawberries myself. Anyway, time to stop blabbing away and get this post posted.

I hope to get to writing about the National Zoo and the National Museum of Crime and Punishment next, but we’ll have to see how much time I have. There’s definitely a lot to get done this week, and time is soon to be very precious!