After that, we returned our shoes and I heard that Glen had somehow staked out a pool table.  The Garage has about as many pool tables as lanes, which I’ll just guess as 20, and the tables are always packed, as far as I’ve seen.  And this was a Friday night in Seattle.  I went between playing a game and playing with my new camera.  Little did they know that the frat house I stayed at all summer (while doing research at WSU on the dielectric properties and percolation thresholds thereof of carbon nanofiber reinforced plastic composite thin membranes) had a pool table with fast felt and a few gouges, so I knew how to improvise.  I scratched on a break, so Brian went for a long corner shot, missed, and scratched; I went for the same shot, banked the cue ball first, and sank it.  Just the thing that makes him grind his teeth.  And playing with my new camera and lens, a Nikon D40 with a Nikkor VR 55-200 took up the rest of the night.  When I first got an iPhone, I couldn’t put it down; Brian just got the google phone, and he can’t either; and now I have a new toy to play with, learn the features, and look up how aperture affects depth of field.  Sure, I can figure out the wavelegth of laser light bounced off a ruler onto a wall, but I can’t figure that one out.  All I know it, when in a dark pool hall with quick subjects and a zoom lens, keep the ISO high and take a lot of photos.  Some managed to come out fine:

Everybody else got bored of the beach, so we went back to Seaside and played minigolf. There was a helicopter tour next door that took off every 10 minutes we were there, and at a minimum of $40 a pop, they probably light their cigars with benjamins. Then we went out to the beach and flew kites. The dragon flew well, but the delta went even higher, and the diamond hovered inches above the ground despite my best engineering insight. I tied the delta to a log because it didn’t need my attention, but it didn’t come close to my 4-hour kite aloft record.

Today tests, a dielectric analysis of different thin film samples of polymer composite, take 15 minutes each, giving me plenty of time to advance in Aurora Feint. After I upgraded to 2.0, my iPhone starts up with the pineapple now, but I miss Puzzlemaniak, my old timedump. It’s just a matter of time before Cydia gets off it feet.

Bethy’s picking me up tonight, and we’re driving home to the TC for the night. Tomorrow we’ll get up bright and early to get to Seaside to meet the rest of the Kays. I went with them last year to the Oregon coast, all piled into a van, listening to the first half of the HP7 audiobook. This time, we’re meeting two more brothers their partners, and their kids, 13 people total. We’ll need a bigger bonfire to keep us all warm.

We planned some community service projects and club activities, and the ride back took half as long as the ride out there.  I got 10 pages into my newest book — one of the only nonfiction books I’ve ever read — “Collapse” by Jared Diamond.  The prologue hooked me, and I will now reference “Ozymandias” every chance I get.  It might even get used more than “hysteresis.”

Today was only the first day of class, and we’ve already done so much.  It was great to sleep in for a couple days; we went to Archie Mcphee while Brian almost got blood drained from the scar in his butt; then to Brian’s house to raid the pantry and forget everything on our list; and jumped off a dock in our skivvies.  We finally got plates and bowls today, although we don’t have silverware yet past plastic forks and steak knives.  If only we could get to Ikea…

And the fun doesn’t stop there: we still have to have a bonfire at Golden Gardens, see the Beatles laser show, go to Ivar’s at the end of Madison, head up Broadway to St. Mark’s, head farther up Broadway to visit Selma, see some shows at UW, go to the symphony, get a double feature at the Pacific Place AMC, Blue C Sushi in Fremont, climb the giant Lenin in Fremont, climb the troll in Fremont, see the Red Bull Soapbox Derby in Fremont.  Then there’s the question of where to go on my 21st.  Decisions, decisions.

Hopper is one of my favorite artists for his simple settings, focused composition, realistic colors, and hidden detail. The exhibit started with his sketches and early watercolors and through the beach house scenes to Nighthawk and his later works. The hidden detail I mentioned came from staring at Nighthawks as you would any staple of American art. It’s just two people in a diner, right? But the building across the street is straight out of one of his earlier works. The sidewalk and street that sweep across the left side are covered in crossing shadows from lights in the diner. You notice that the bar is just waxed enough to barely reflect the waiter and patrons. These hidden details are hardly the first thing you notice, and had I painted the same scene, I would have skipped them. That’s why I enjoy Hopper.

I then hopped on the metro to the Renwick Gallery, one of the Smithsonian’s smallest galleries, but one of my favorite. Apparently it’s been one of my favorites for a long, long time: we used to live in Gaithersburg when I was three, and this swordfish made of toys,

… is one of my only memories from then. They also have an amazing grandfather clock:

Sure, there’s no face, but you have to realize that that sheet draping and tied is the same piece of wood as the clock. The sheet is carved and painted. Look at those folds, come on!

I sauntered past the White House, no big thing, and caught the metro to the zoo. We’d already seen the pandas, so I ran down to the Ape House and the Invertebrate House right behind it. I would have never found the latter unless Rachel had told me about it; you have to take a path you’d never choose, past crocodiles and komodo dragons, and there’s a building hidden in the trees. I watched the octopus get fed; I saw the nautilus be creepy, staring at me with those wee, beady eyes; and I freaked out when the orb spiders definitely did not have glass between me and them. Spiders are still above nautilus, and I quickly edged away.

Since I still had some Harry Potter on my ipod to get through, I walked the eight blocks over the the National Cathedral.

Now, I’ve never seen Notre Dame — I’ve never seen them play, either — but Rachel assures me it’s much larger than any cathedral she’d seen in Europe. Being built hundreds of years sooner than those in Europe probably helped its size, but the National Cathedral is still extremely impressive. You can take an elevator up one of the towers for a 180° view south to Georgetown and the Mall; if you ignore some signs, you can get up to 270°. One of the stained glass windows even has a moon rock donated by the Apollo 11 crew, but in my haste, I never saw it. The sun was getting pretty low, so I didn’t see the windows in all their respective glories, but it was enough:

I left the next day, but I still had the morning to wander around, so I ran inside the Marian Koshland Science Museum, which was much smaller than I expected. If you know nothing about Global Warming or infectious diseases, it would be great. Since I could already spell HIV, I should have skipped it. Good thing there was a student discount, and good thing the ticket guy recommended the National Building museum around the corner. Half the museum was under construction, but the other half had a history of bricks, some decorative corner pieces, and a gigantic copper facade from one of Andrew Carnegie’s NY mansion’s windows. Another exhibit was a history of the capitol’s city planning, from L’Enfant to later renovations of the Mall. One modal 15-foot model of the Mall had a marina where the Lincoln Memorial is now. An exhibit upstairs had modern designs based on the Globe Theater. Next door was full of David Macaulay’s sketchbooks and an interview about this process. I’d definitely recommend the National Building Museum.

After a quick run-through of the National Portrait Gallery, I hopped the metro to Roslyn, met Rachel for lunch, and headed out to BWI. Now I have to unpack and repack for going up to Seattle University for my third year. More on that later!

The following day, I was suckered into helping with the next podcast.  I mostly chopped onions and peppers and, due to being average height for a male but still taller than anyone there, I hung curtains to keep stray light out of the kitchen and out of the shot.  It was a lot of fun, and I got to meet all the people Rachel has talked about.  I also learned some secrets — is the oven really down there, or is it really ont he wall behind the camera? You never see it! — and more symptoms of celieac disease.  The founder of NFCA had several miscarriages  (because she couldn’t absorb nutrients, her baby didn’t get nutrients) and a veterinarian eventually diagnosed her before any people doctor did.  Rachel’s boss Vanessa, the one in the video, had persistent migraines than the most potent of medicines barely helped alleviate; early osteoporosis exacerbated mild carpal tunnel syndrome.  After a second blood test — the first was for diabetes, which the doctor had ordered by mistake, not being familiar with ‘celiac’ — she was diagnosed.  After getting off gluten, she hasn’t had a migraine since.  Some instances of ADD has been helped by staying away from gluten.  The symptoms are wide, so if you have any chronic pains or you get sick every time you eat, you might as well get checked.

There’s a movie theater with what we guessed was just a longer-than-normal commercial, so we skipped it. We went on the factory tour, which starts with a mural of cocoa trees, burlap sacks, and ships and video bytes of the cocoa beans (which looked a lot like coffee cherries, and even the process looked similar to harvesting coffee). Then comes a tour of the factory where you get in carts that follow a track, like a preschool roller coaster. A bear above our heads introduces us to the factory process (a bear? really?) and tells us the thing that makes Hershey Chocolate what it is is the milk. At this point, three robotic cow heads peek out of a barn window and sing about how important the (their?) milk is. It’s some kind of Willy Wonka, Jurrassic Park, Little Shop of Horrors mindfreak.

The actual fake factory has magical conveyor belts and a constant smell of fake chocolate essence and burning rubber, which is somehow even worse than it sounds. The tour leads directly into a gift shop. It turns out, the entire building is a gift shop, but big surprise. We managed to get out with only a couple handfulls of bags and bars. We skipped the amusement park and went up to the museum, and we could have skipped that too. It had a couple of the real factory’s old machines and had workers’ descriptions of how hot, noisy, and generally miserable the old factory was, but the museum was mostly Mr. Hershey’s collection of Pennsylvania Dutch tools. We got out of there pretty quickly and went straight to the Botanical Gardens up the hill. That was very worth it: it starts out in a gigantic rose garden (we smelled each and every variety), went through the butterfly house (it was just warm enough for them to be active, and we even saw a Monarch hatch), and smelled everything in Mrs Hershey’s herb garden.  There were hershey kisses everywhere:

These whistled in turn and spouted steam, which I thought would burn the faces off of unsuspecting young children, but Rachel risked her hand and found it was just cold water. From the hill the gardens were on, we could see the fake factory, the much larger and blander real factory, the amusement park, and the highway back to civilization.