Saturday my dad and his wife endured the thronging masses enjoying the Smithsonian for my sake, and I'm grateful. I wasn't expecting the extreme awesomeness of the place, even though I practically grew up there because my dad worked there his entire career. It was fairly amazing if slightly creepy to explore the halls behind the exhibits as a child, halls filled with drawers of dessicated small animals and insects, jars and jars of things once alive, exhibits detailing the burial habits of various tribes, bones of little girls, footsteps echoing in the halls.
We spent most of our time in the Mineral Hall on Saturday because my daughter wanted to see a shooting star. We turned our back on the Hope Diamond and the crowd surrounding it to contemplate a meteorite vaguely resembling the head of a dinosaur. The Mineral Hall's excellence took me by surprise, though I may be a bit partial to it since dad's a Geologist who had a hand in some of the exhibit design, even though his tenure at the museum was as a research scientist in the field of Geology, specifically Volcano-ology. Volcanology, that is. Thanks to this most recent tour, I now know where his handprints are.
The crowds didn't bother me too much except when a woman shoved passed me in one of the lines at the cafeteria, causing the tray I was holding to slam into my son's temple. But you know, I'm taking her as a caricature of my own gluttony, which I notice gets out of hand at times and ruins everything. Blah.
I learned something about my Dad I never knew before, that the color of Azurite when cleaned is his favorite blue. That's Azurite in the first picture, above, followed by a Regal Thorny Oyster, Sandstone with Gastropods, the polypy surface of Geyserite, Gold in its flakier varieties, and lastly, Bubble Gum Coral.
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