DC Adventures

So, update on my life. I have been walking a lot around the Capitol Hill and Mall area since our weather finally broke and it’s bearable to be outside and one doesn’t feel like dying. I love the area I live in – it’s so walkable and beautiful to explore. This past week/weekend I finished going through both the NMNH and NGA. I have decided I don’t particularly like the NMNH – I like the gemstones and the dinosaur bones but all the stuffed animals were too eerie – give me a zoo any day. The NGA however, is my kind of museum. I love to look at artwork and really take my time to look at the brush strokes and the way an artist may have gone about the work. The areas I hadn’t gotten to yet included the museum’s Rembrandts as well as the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the United States. It looked a lot like the Mona Lisa to be honest and it was even smaller. Yet another painting to go, “huh” and walk along.

After I finished the NGA, I walked home via the Capitol (after walking through the festival happening on Pennsylvania Avenue – very interesting group of people). I have decided I really love the Capitol Building. It is absolutely beautiful. I just wish the steps were open more so I could get a view of the city from the top. I imagine it’s breath-taking. I then walked around the building to the actual front of the Capitol where inauguration takes place in January. It’s a big mess right now as they are constructing a new underground visitors center. Walking around, I found the Library of Congress (which I’m visiting this weekend – so excited!!) and the Supreme Court building. Turning up towards home, I found the Sewall-Belmont House near Stanton Park which I was more excited about than anyone else probably would be. It was a house where Alice Paul lived so I now need to add that to my list of things to visit. I might try to get it in this coming weekend.

This week I haven’t done too much. With the weather being so nice, I have walked home from work and watched the Representatives queue up for taxis at the end of the day at their office buildings. Yesterday, walking back from the Botanical Gardens where I ate lunch, I go caught up in a motorcade. It was unmarked but with the amount of firepower in the SUVs around it, I figured it was the president which it was, I found out later. The whole city gets put on hold, all the traffic stopped – cars pulled over etc. I didn’t take pictures though. I thought reaching into my purse to dig out my camera might be misconstrued by the military contingent surrounding his car.

Work continues to go well. I was appraising in the NMNH today in the paleobiology department – it was like a dungeon in there and the office was everything you would expect – furniture that was ancient, piles of paper everywhere, more bones, shells and unidentified “dirt” then I think I’ve ever seen (including the Paris catacombs which is saying something). After we finished taking what we wanted, I worked on a collection of correspondence to and from Julia Anna Gardner, a geologist with the museum and the USGS from the 1920s until her death in 1961. It’s amazing how many people spend their lives identifying fossilized mollusks – but some of the letters are fun. They were so formal – “thank you for the specimen you sent. It was beautifully packaged and arrived unharmed” and etc. Tomorrow it is back to scanning.