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when I grow up I want to live in a country that doesn't start their elections a year in advance
I need another set of interesting grocery stores; the cool ethnic one in Marley Station and the middle eastern one in Jessup are now both closed. At this point, the closest place I know of to go for non-US-style interesting food options is the H-Mart out rt 40 in Catonsville. (This isn't a lot farther away, really, but it's not a direction I generally go, and requires highways.) Fortunately, I'm pretty sure my local stores do stock coconut milk, and despite running about all over the place yesterday and not finding an ethnic market of any sort, I did end up having enough interesting things in-house to make exciting curry. With star anise. Mmm...
We spent the weekend going places-- on Saturday was a trip to Fort McHenry, where the SHAs were having their public displays. (I still feel vaguely regretful about not going to listen to exciting archaeology lectures, but it was ridiculously expensive as a hobby-decision.) The public day displays were sort of disappointing, but the fort, which we'd never been through despite years of doing wetland clean-up on the park property, was worth the trip. They have not only a historic set of buildings & fortifications in good shape, but a well-presented exhibit set-up addressing various aspects of the fort's history.
Sunday we braved single track metro delays to head down into DC for the Staffordshire Hoard exhibit at National Geographic. If you're even vaguely local and haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend making the trip before it closes on March 4. It's a pretty amazing collection-- absurdly tiny tessellated designs made up of gold wire and hand cut garnet-- with a bunch of nice video and interactive bits talking about what they do and don't know yet about construction and use, as well as modern curation. (They're using thorns to clean the dirt off! Hee! I would love to be part of that, up until I remember how sick I got after a day of sorting micro-matter in the URS lab.) It was also surprisingly uncrowded; we ordered tickets in advance, but probably could have managed without bothering. Not at all like the madhouse at the clay warriors exhibit.
Things I would have liked to see but didn't include an actual exhibit catalog (even just of the stuff they had here, as opposed to the whole hoard) and some nod to the fact that metal detecting in the US is a very different legal/moral situation than it is in Britain. (We don't have any compensation laws, nor any ancient caches of gold, so instead of working with archaeologists, our metal detector hobbyists are more likely to loot what they find for resale, mucking up anything that could be learned from the site. Also, the truly ancient stuff gets into the mess of ownership by tribal councils who, having dealt with generations of messes caused by US Government and early archaeologists, are often even less interested in getting along with modern archaeologists than the relic hunters are.) There could also have been a little less video footage of dramatized ancient warriors, but apparently they decided that a hoard requires hordes. Or something. Either way, still worth going.
We spent the weekend going places-- on Saturday was a trip to Fort McHenry, where the SHAs were having their public displays. (I still feel vaguely regretful about not going to listen to exciting archaeology lectures, but it was ridiculously expensive as a hobby-decision.) The public day displays were sort of disappointing, but the fort, which we'd never been through despite years of doing wetland clean-up on the park property, was worth the trip. They have not only a historic set of buildings & fortifications in good shape, but a well-presented exhibit set-up addressing various aspects of the fort's history.
Sunday we braved single track metro delays to head down into DC for the Staffordshire Hoard exhibit at National Geographic. If you're even vaguely local and haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend making the trip before it closes on March 4. It's a pretty amazing collection-- absurdly tiny tessellated designs made up of gold wire and hand cut garnet-- with a bunch of nice video and interactive bits talking about what they do and don't know yet about construction and use, as well as modern curation. (They're using thorns to clean the dirt off! Hee! I would love to be part of that, up until I remember how sick I got after a day of sorting micro-matter in the URS lab.) It was also surprisingly uncrowded; we ordered tickets in advance, but probably could have managed without bothering. Not at all like the madhouse at the clay warriors exhibit.
Things I would have liked to see but didn't include an actual exhibit catalog (even just of the stuff they had here, as opposed to the whole hoard) and some nod to the fact that metal detecting in the US is a very different legal/moral situation than it is in Britain. (We don't have any compensation laws, nor any ancient caches of gold, so instead of working with archaeologists, our metal detector hobbyists are more likely to loot what they find for resale, mucking up anything that could be learned from the site. Also, the truly ancient stuff gets into the mess of ownership by tribal councils who, having dealt with generations of messes caused by US Government and early archaeologists, are often even less interested in getting along with modern archaeologists than the relic hunters are.) There could also have been a little less video footage of dramatized ancient warriors, but apparently they decided that a hoard requires hordes. Or something. Either way, still worth going.
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