Despite spending my formative years in beautiful but winter-stricken Minnesota and the damp Pacific Northwest, I’ve been riding out most of my time on this planet in the balmy climes of southern California. Personally, I tend to run warm, so if you listen carefully you may hear me mutter unseemly things about our never-ending summer (eighty degree heat in November!) and make the occasional wish for a bigger, perhaps slightly flashier statement that winter has finally arrived than our mild drop in evening temperatures. So let’s face it: I wasn’t truly prepared for you, DC. I wasn’t prepared for your brilliantly sunny day with a temperature that hovered right above freezing — perfectly okay by itself, remarkably bracing when accompanied by a gusty bit of wind. When I can feel the blood drain away from the surface of my skin to protect my innards… well, that’s bloody cold.
Today’s outing took me to Eastern Market, which features a flea market on Sundays (more crafty items are to be found on Saturdays, so I’ve been told). The lot was partially empty — I’m sure that the chill that kept many vendors away also drove plenty of people inside the building that houses butchers, a diner-like counter, and plenty of sellers of fresh fruits, vegetables, and prepared foods. A cute guy was selling a table’s worth of really lovely ornaments, and the rich, festive smell of Christmas trees for sale made me long for A Charlie Brown Christmas and a mug of cocoa.
Afterwards, I explored the National Museum of Natural History on the Mall. Dinosaur bones make me smile — they take me back to my childhood when I would become very interested in one subject for a year and read everything I could get my hands on about it in the library before moving on to something new and, often, unrelated: one year it was biographies of presidents, another it was astronomy, but it was the Year of the Dinosaur that I remember as my first obsession. Please picture my inner seven year old squealing with glee as I marched right up to the skull of a triceratops. Awesome.
Whales and other sea creatures suspended in mid-air in the Sant Ocean Hall at the museum:
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