American pride

I've only spent a few days in Washington DC before, and my first two weeks here have been full of one impressive thing after another - the Smithsonian Institution's square mile of museums full of treasures, the Capitol building with its changing lights at different times of day, the shiny Washington Monument opposite the Capitol, across the mile of museum-lined National Mall that's full of tourists and runners and pick-up baseball players.
The story of my Tuesday this week is full of the wonders of Washington:

In the morning I rode the Metro with the commuters, reading the free morning paper like everybody else, to the back entrance of the National Museum of Natural History, where I flashed my cool government badge to get in. I spent the day following around the museum's two fossil preparators, as well as their countless volunteers and the other people who work in the paleobiology department. And I got to paint a plaster copy of a giant meat-eating dino's footprint, which was mostly an excuse to question the copy-maker about his methods while he told me how to paint. It was also SUPER COOL to help make a cast of a spot where a dinosaur walked in the mud some 70 million years ago. After work I walked to the Library of Congress, which is on the opposite side of the Capitol. (I maybe got an ice cream on the walk down the Mall under the beating 90-degree AWESOME sunshine...) After a few wrong turns and some eye-rolling at government bureaucracy, I was the proud owner of a Reader's Pass, which means I can request to see the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or whatever other of the nation's rarest books - WHOA! Anyone can get a Pass, and I mostly got one to use the library's reading room because it's often open late and I need somewhere to work after I leave the museum. So I typed up my day's notes sitting beneath a beautiful glass dome in the Library of Congress, hoping that some Congressperson would walk by (they're the only ones who can check out books! It is their library, after all...). Then at 8PM I left the library and took the metro to the Georgetown area, for a date with an art student I met at a hippie cafe on Monday. At the cafe we'd talked about art and science and the meaning of life, but on the date he talked about how the world is awful and lame and no people are worth his time. Ugh. Despite his dramatic artist's melancholy, we (or at least I) had a lovely dinner and walk around Georgetown, spotting a few of the city's ubiquitous street mice along the way, and it was great to have someone to talk to without desperately trying to remember everything they said and what it might mean for the sociology of science.

I've got 3 weeks left to interview lots more people, transcribe all those interviews, keep up with my field notes, and try to make sense of how this super fun, welcoming, teasing, work-obsessed "Smithsonian family" works together to do science. This is awesome.
Me with dinosaur footprint cast - that white circle is one giant three-toed footprint!!