anagramofbrat | The Castle of Dinosaurs. (And other neat stuff)

The husbeast and I are in NY visiting the Dads. As per usual, it is early afternoon on Sunday amd I'm ready to murder both of them, so the weekend is going well. Also see Dad's cat being all YAY PEOPLE HERE THAT WILL PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEEEEEEE.

Yesterday I took

cell23 uptown to my favorite place ever, the American Museum of Natural History. Ale and Amanda are still volunteering there every Saturday, so we were able to score passes to the museum and to a few of the special exhibits as well. Oh also these.

There's a normal "smile" pic too but that's just boring so I'm not posting it.

Anyway, as always I had a blast, and

cell23 seemed to enjoy himself too. Ale and Amanda were glad to spend their morning noodling around with us before they had to report for their shift in the butterfly conservatory (which while neat, still doesn't hold a candle to Magic Wings in either size or crowd control). Amid the usual permanent stuff that I like (Northwest Coast peoples, Northeastern Forest peoples, the various dinosaur halls and of course the Hall of Ocean Life) the Whales exhibit was pretty neat, and the one on the Global Kitchen was also cool in that "Think about where your food comes from!" way that, as

cell23 pointed out, is somewhat mind blowing to a city bred New Yorker that doesn't think past Whole Foods or Associated, but old hat to us valley folk where Local Hero and CISAs are kind of a thing. Still, I did enjoy watching his brain explode at the display devoted to Instagrams of food. Yep, there is one. Non-ironically even. There was also a glass wall of hydroponically grown herbs, which was a fancy high tech version of my experiments with sawed off soda bottles last year. (The hydroponic rigs are apparently available for purchase at www.windowfarms.com.)

But yeah, so much footsore squee. There are Reasons why AMNH is, if not my favorite place on earth, definitely in my top three. You would think all the class trips for varying social studies/science classes would have spoiled it, but strangely no.

Other than a quick side-trip to Tohoshoji for more DB606 beads (I have a bulk order standing at the Northampton Beadery, but I'm gonna run out before it comes in) and gawking at groups of roving kilted out Scotsmen strolling through Manhattan (there was apparently a Scotland Pride parade uptown earlier in the day), we didn't do too much else yesterday other than venture out on wild meat chases for Dad and watch Doctor Who on an actual TV on its actual air date/time for a change.

Not much on the docket for today other than being driven batshit by the Dad and possibly a trip to Sibyls so that

cell23 can get his curried goat fix and I can stock up on roti and tennis rolls. And there's also the part where Dad intends to frog-march us up to the at&t store to get my Christmas iPhone finally. I'm finding I'm only cautiously excited about this. On one hand, The Precioussss can go into much needed retirement, and I can upgrade my wallet to the Book Book I got, since the old iPod wallet has fallen apart to the point where I have to be careful about things sliding out of the bottom. Also see having a decent camera in my pocket again. Most of what I did with my old phone was less actual talking and more take random pictures on my wanderings. On the other hand, most of what little fun money I have is going to get sucked up by monthly data plan, and I will no longer be able to go "off the grid" anymore, which while it had its inconveniences, I did rather like. Alas, this modern age does seem to require a person to be accessible 24/7. Feh. Guess I'll just have to adjust to actually talking to people on occasion again. :/ But I guess yay, iPhone? I don't know. I feel like I should be more excited than I am. Of course I'm also expecting something to go horrendously wrong with this endeavor today so I'll probably squee more when the device is actually in my hand.

Oh yeah, I guess sometime towards the end of the day we'll go home, too.

At some point I want to blog about food and culture and how that seems to be the primary way I process/celebrate my own bits of Guyanese heritage (see trip to sibyls later). Also the concept of being The Black Friend and various Feelings about that, because unsurprisingly I have some. Not today, but soon.