Greetings and Happy Independence Day to my fellow U.S. flisters!

I feel so accomplished because I actually went out and did stuff today. In the capital, even! Go me! Okay, so I only did one patriotic thing, but whatevs.

( Archives love )

( Bhutan love )

Hee, I had a very Office-y day at work today. As in Dunder-Mifflin The Office, with Jim and pranks. Though, sadly, I have no Jim equivalent. There were pranks, though!

( Mischief managed! )

I've been approved for the apartment!

*does mental cartwheels* \o/


Now I just have to figure out how to move all my crap since I don't know anyone with a truck...

I'll be sending the new address to relevant peeps later this month, and please don't send me anything here after the 20th.

:D :D :D

It's kind of tiresome keeping various body parts crossed for so long, but I had a possibly promising quick conversation with the guy who's processing my apartment app, so... *keeps crossing*

Things that are keeping me smiling in the meanwhile:

-Rereading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

-Acquiring and reading Love Signals, referenced in the McShep Theorem.

-JFlan's Family Album gayface

-Space robots in love are the cutest thing EVAR. (Saw WALL-E with E. & M. tonight (OMG I went out on a weeknight!) and it is distressing and disturbing and yet so very very CUTE and HAPPY. (Aside from the traumatic sixth grade music class memories.) Go seeeeeeeee it. Now. Or, you know, soon, if it happens to be the middle of the night where you are or you have Important Things To Do. But it is happy-making, so it should also be classed as an Important Thing To Do.)

-Seeing a FIREFLY on my way back from the bus stop just now. A FIREFLY. *flails* :D

And now, sleeeeeeeeeeeeeep. ♥

And thusly, for the benefit of my new flisters (and for those of you who've been around for a while but haven't been paying close attention)...

( That 'getting to know you' meme )

I'm open to other questions, too, if there's anything in particular you're curious about. :)

Today at the NASM, there was a Meet the Astronauts! event. So I got to see three astronauts and hear them talk about space geeky stuff amid the artifacts in the Space Race gallery. It was awesome. :D

( Ad astra per aspera )

( Star Trekkin' )

While waiting for my bus on the way back from work, there was a gaggle of tourists who'd been to the National Archives. (They were all sporting National Archives gift shop bags.) One of the dads in the group had bought a book there (David McCullough's 1776, if you're a nosy book geek like me) and he pulled it out to read. Except he'd already started reading it earlier and he'd marked his page by dogearing it.* D: It is especially ironic because he'd bought it at the Archives where, you know, they try to preserve things.

*(This is a bad practice that makes librarians/archivists the world over twitch in vexation. I hated dogeared pages even before I wanted to be a librarian—it's just not nice to do that to the pretty books.)

In other news, I'm still stressed and freaking out. I won't bother you with more whining today, though. Instead, I shall regale you with stories of space geekery later. Because space geekery is therapeutic. :)

But for now: walkies!

I wandered through the National Gallery of Art this afternoon. The West Wing, that is, where all the good classic stuff is. (East Wing is modern stuff.) And while looking at things like Adriaen van Ostade's The Cottage Courtyard and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Forest of Fontainebleau and Meindert Hobbema's The Travelers, I got to wondering why we don't still have nice landscapes and quotidian scenes being painted today. Or, more to the point, why museums don't display those types of paintings from our own time period (since someone, somewhere must still be painting in those styles; you still see some of those sorts of paintings in independent galleries). Those nice landscape and portrait styles were in fashion for centuries and we still admire them in museums. So why is all the modern art shown in museums modernist?

Yes, we've had the Industrial Revolution and we really don't live like that anymore, but there are still nice countrysides full of sheep to be painted or farmers in fields or beautiful buildings and gardens. So I don't see why all the modern sections of museums have only dots and splatters. (Which, okay, some of them are interesting, but for the most part I only breeze through one or two galleries of "modern art", while I pause to pick out all the tiny details in the "classical art". I miss those tiny details. There's so many stories in those details—the way someone is looking at someone else across a crowd, the way a hand strokes a lapdog, the angle of the moonlight over ancient ruins.

Maybe it's just because I am a storyteller; I look for stories everywhere. And they (of the era of "classical art" and before) were storytellers, too. And we're not anymore. They told stories by firelight, in farm fields, beneath the stars. We watch TV and play on our computers—and what are those made up of but tiny dots and splatters of colour? We don't even look at the sky properly anymore. We've lost touch with our storytelling culture. And that makes me incredibly sad.

So naturally I thought of this incredibly sad poem "about suffering" as painted by the Dutch masters:

( 'Musee des Beaux Arts' by W.H. Auden )

My mum got the sheep book for me from my grandmother! \o/


This may seem odd to y'all, but it makes me happyish. (It's the little things that keep you from flying apart.) Back when my mum and I were cataloguing my grandfather's library last year, I took a shine to the sheep book (Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook, to be precise).

However, we made the mistake of pointing it out to my aunt, who then also expressed an interest in it. I don't remember what made me think of it again while talking with my mum the other day, but I got her to pilfer it for me so my aunt won't get it. (With my grandmother's blessing. We are not total thieves.) My mum also put in a word for me regarding the set of classics my mum's family picked up in Italy, so hopefully I'll get those too. They're adorable, small hardbacks from a series of classics, though the ones in the library are more obscure classics (Flora Thompson's Lark Rise To Candleford and some of the lesser-known Bronte works). They are such a pretty wee set and I love them so. My aunt has already laid claim to the table they are kept in, but I want those books!

Um, just to clarify, we are not obsessing over who gets what when my grandmother dies. At least not too much. She is still healthy and spry and I expect many more years of her blunt remarks and general crazy-awesomeness. ♥ But my mum and I are more deserving of the cool stuff than my aunt, so we are trying to pilfer and/or lay claim to what we can on the sly. I mean, my mum and I catalogued the library and I'm a librarian—we totally deserve first dibs on book choosing! Then there is also a photo of my grandfather that my mum really wants and expects she'll have to fight my aunt for, but I've come up with a devious plan involving a scanner and a photo print center. The plan requires refinement, though, as it'd be obvious it wasn't the original as soon as she took it out of the frame. I'll have to think about this some more...

But for now, the sheeps are mines! \o/

I got to leave off work at 2:30pm today to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival for SI staffers. The tents are all still empty, but it's going to be soooo awesome! The guests this year are Texas, NASA, and Bhutan, which should be a diverse and interesting experience.

( Festival preview + an extra bit of love for Bhutan )

I am soooo excited for the Festival! :D