On Saturday, plumtreeblossom and I went to the American Museum of Natural History, one of my favourite places. sexykneesocks, who happened to be in town as well, met us there, and it was great catching up with her. I took lots of photos, which I will try to get posted at some point.

plumtreeblossom and I tried to go next door to the Rose Space Center, but we got there close enough to closing that we couldn't see a show, so we went back to the AMNH for another half hour or so.

After that, we met nex0s and midnightstation for dinner nearby, and had a fabulous time. I'd seen nex0s in Boston a few months ago, but I hadn't seen midnightstation in far too long.

On Sunday, we got together at Fred's, a dog-themed restaurant I've posted about before, for brunch with beetiger, eisa, and fairyleathrdady, who surprised us by paying for brunch. Lovely seeing all of them, and I'm so glad beetiger drove in to meet us.

Then we made our way back to Chinatown to take the Fung Wah back to Boston and had a lovely snuggly trip back with lots of nice conversation.

Y'all should also go read plumtreeblossom's post about the weekend here, since I'm posting this in a hurry and I'm certainly missing stuff.

So a few months ago I read Stiff: The Curious History of Human Cadavers, by the smart, funny, and irreverent Mary Roach. I loved it.

Today, on my way home from dropping plumtreeblossom off at her house, I overheard on NPR that Mary Roach had a new book out about the science of sex. It’s called Bonk.

You can bet I placed an order as soon as I got home.

My delightful friend golux_org, among his other excellent qualities, is an astronomy buff and a photographer. He posts a daily photo at http://photo.bluebrook.com/potd.html, which I read through its LJ feed, bluebrook_potd. Usually he posts (gorgeous) nature scenes, but today’s photo is of the ISS, with the shuttle docked, passing overhead on Saturday. As it happens, I was there when he took that photo, and it was pretty impressive. To my eyes, it looked about as bright as Venus, and it crossed about three quarters of the sky before rapidly dimming and disappearing as it entered Earth’s shadow. It was visible to us (given that trees and buildings blocked our view as it rose) for a minute or so.

On a related subject golux_org reminded me that our mutual friend dalek (a/k/a Marek), who works with the Clay Center Observatory, was one of the people who took this impressively detailed ground-based photo of the ISS and Atlantis during the previous shuttle mission to the ISS. Atlantis is docked to the bottom-left of the main space station body, between the two large groups of solar panels, mostly in shadow and pointed away (with the main engines pointed towards earth), so we’re looking at the rear of the shuttle. The ISS is well-lit. It’s worth clicking through the picture on that page to the higher-resolution version; you can see considerably more detail.

(BTW, my userpic for this post is the Hubble Space Telescope; nothing to do with the ISS.)

plumtreeblossom’s mom has been visiting her this weekend, and I spent a bunch of the last couple days with them. After work on Friday I met them at the Kendall Square Legal Sea Foods for dinner. I forget what the fish I had was (it was a special, so I can’t just check the online menu), but it was deliciously prepared in an elegant sauce that involved lemon, butter, and mustard, and it was “breaded” with shredded potato, which worked very well. plumtreeblossom had filet mignon, and her mom had lobster.

Then this morning I brought over corned beef and some veggies, which we put in plumtreeblossom’s crockpot for the day while (after bacon and eggs which plumtreeblossom) we went to the Aquarium for the afternoon. It was unusually crowded (neither plumtreeblossom nor I had seen it quite that crowded before, and we got a wheelchair for plumtreeblossom’s mom, who broke her foot a couple months ago and isn’t up to lots of walking yet, and it was quite a challenge getting through the crowds to see the exhibits with the wheelchair. We’d see a gap we could squeeze into and start for it, but within three or four seconds it was full. So there was a lot of waiting, but it was still quite a lot of fun for all three of us. The sea lions and penguins were utterly adorable as always. (sionnagh, I told them how you used to feed the penguins. They were all rockhoppers then, right? Now they’re all or mostly African penguins.)

Then we came back to plumtreeblossom’s place (where her wildflower garden is doing quite nicely, thank you) for corned beef, which we got to share with her housemate vanguardcdk who arrived just as we did. After dinner there was cake with ice cream, and then we sat on the balcony and chatted for a while.

Now I am home, and I think I’m going to go to bed early (maybe after reading a little more of Harry Potter). It makes sense that I’m sleepy, since I woke up out of a prosaic-but-inexplicably-creepy dream at 6:30 this morning (which would count as sleeping in for ka9sqb, I’m sure, but is unthinkably early for me) and couldn’t get back to sleep.

In other news, I have a doctor’s appointment (with another doctor in my PCP’s office since he said it had to be a morning appointment and he didn’t have any available until the very end of August) to gauge the results of my hormone treatment. I presume it will involve bloodwork and that’s why the time of day matters. (The short subjective version is that I’m doing much better since I started treatment, but don’t feel like I’m quite there yet, so I think my thyroid dosage needs some tweaking. I think my testosterone dosage is probably fine.)

If you're out after sunset with a reasonably unobstructed view this weekend, look west. Venus and Saturn are very near each other in the sky at the moment. The brilliant white thing that doesn't twinkle is Venus; the much dimmer (but still fairly bright compared to most stars) yellowish thing above and to the left of Venus is Saturn. Noticed them this evening and wondered if that was Saturn since I’d read it was going to be very near Venus this weekend; when I got home just now they were still above the neighbouring rooftops and I was able to confirm with binoculars and with a dinky tabletop telescope I have. (In the binoculars, they were both obviously oblong, at perpendicular axes, and in the telescope I could pretty well tell what phase Venus was. The big difference was not magnification but stability.)

(The earlier after sunset you look, the higher they’ll be in the sky.)

In the Wikipedia article on floaters, I discovered that if you make a pinhole and move it rapidly back and forth in front of your eye (with a light source behind it), you can see the blood vessels in your own retina! I just tried it and it works. Evidently, the reason you don't normally see your blood vessels is that they’re always there, in fixed positions, and your optic system just tunes them out. (You can experience that bit by holding very very still and staring at one spot; eventually, everything goes grey.) But the pinhole trick means that you’re only seeing the blood vessels (along with all the stuff you can see through the pinhole) very briefly, and the tune-out-everything-that-doesn’t-chance circuitry doesn’t come into play.

More “entoptic phenomena”.

(Now it’s really time for me to go to bed!)

As I mentioned, eisa and I saw Pan’s Labyrinth on Saturday, and I loved it. I think that might be a movie I need to own, although I’m very glad I saw it on a big screen. (Actually, we got to the theater pretty late and ended up having to sit in the very front row, so I saw it on a trapezoidal screen which was big at the bottom and small at the top. :-)

( Dream, CPAP, good food, and dogs. )

Then we went to the American Museum of Natural History. We’d been there the last time (or so) I visited, but we’d only had time to see the Darwin exhibit (now in Boston at the Museum of Science, and to dash through a tiny bit of the rest of the museum. This time we spent almost all of our time in recently revamped Hall of Human Origins, which was really amazing. The science and physical discoveries presented there were very current; it was neat seeing casts of bones I’d read about in the news recently. Notably, they had a cast of a Homo floresiensis skull. That was very impressive. I’d love to go back to that exhibit. Before we left, eisa took me to see the dinosaur and extinct mammal fossils, mainly to show me a giant sloth and a glyptodont, both very impressive.

( Weird Japanese toothpaste. )

Highlights since I’ve been back (which are getting fewer column-inches than they deserve just because I’m exhausted and need to stop typing and start sleeping) are a delightful date with plumtreeblossom on Monday, which included some very nice hanging out with thanos73 and mynext_boldmove, and dinner (and dessert) tonight with cathijosephine and xmelancholia. Oh, and a highlight from before the trip was a couple phone calls with missingworlds, a good friend of mine from college.

I confess I’ve been mostly skimming LJ lately, so apologies if I’ve missed important stuff. If you invited me to a party or offered me a free car or the presidency of a small but peaceful and mineral-rich country on LJ recently, you might want to comment here to make sure I saw it.

OK, I again should be asleep instead of posting, but this time I’m going to post. Quickly, though, with bed to follow.

• Wednesday and Friday: With a bunch of other people, saw off ragingamazon before her two-year adventure. (Well, “two-year adventure” is understating it. This is ragingamazon. Her whole life is an adventure.)
• Saturday night: Had a quick dinner in Davis with plumtreeblossom, followed by a very fun reading night, followed by other fun.
• Sunday morning: Went to a potluck brunch with plumtreeblossom, which involved catching up with all sorts of wonderful people I don’t see often enough, among them lilbjorn.
• Sunday evening: Went back to Body Worlds 2 at the Museum of Science, this time with chienne_folle. Really enjoyed it again. Afterwards got to catch up with chienne_folle over very good meatloaf (mine) and corn tamales (hers) at the Cheesecake Factory.
• Monday evening: Had cathijosephine over for a very unpretentious dinner.
• Today: Finally called an auto glass place to have my window replaced (reminds me, I need to get some stuff out of the car before they come over). Had dinner and a wonderful conversation with plumtreeblossom in Davis, and briefly dropped in on the Diesel social afterwards, although it was pretty quiet by that time.

In other news, I finished watching Catch 22. I had only watched it once before, as a child, in a Cinemascope print projected with an ordinary lens so everybody on the screen was noodle-thin, with one of the speakers torn so there was this hideous buzzing all the time. Oh, and the projector bulb burned out for about 10min at one point in the middle of the movie. (For all I know, the reels were shown out of order, too. This was Catch 22; how would I have known?) It made much more sense this time around.

It’s January 6. I live in Quincy, Massachusetts, slightly south of Boston and right in the heart of New England. I just went outside onto my porch in jeans, no shoes, and a T-shirt, and I was entirely comfortable. If I go for a long walk outside today, I think I might put long sleeves on, but a sweater would be overkill.

I’m glad my house is quite a bit above sea level.

What a full and fine weekend! Saturday morning I had dim sum with plumtreeblossom and a bunch of her friends and mine (and in the process discovered that we have some friends in common I didn’t know about!). Dim sum was yummy as always, and I was ravenous when I got there, so I stuffed myself.

(I’d been running just a little bit late, so decided to take the car to the Quincy Center T station rather than walking. What I didn’t realize was that Quincy’s Veteran’s Day parade was about to start — I had no fewer than three intersections close just as I was about to go through them, had similar trouble getting back home (since some of the streets I’d come through were now blocked off), and ended up dropping my car off in a parking lot I could get to and walking. So I was sadly more than half an hour late, but fortunately that just meant there was lots of yummy stuff already on the table when I got there.)

Then the lovely (x3) minerva42, underwatercolor, plumtreeblossom, and I went to the Museum of Science, intending to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit. Unfortunately when we got there we found out that the earliest entrance time that still had tickets available was 5:30 (6:00 by the time we’d finished talking about it), and minerva42 and underwatercolor had evening plans and hadn’t planned on spending that much time in the museum. So we all got exhibit hall tickets, and plumtreeblossom and I got tickets to a movie and to Body Worlds 2 as well.

The regular exhibits were fun, but not particularly new to any of us. (The electricity show, with the huge Van de Graaff generator, suffered from a presenter who could give Mumbles a run for his money.) Definitely fun, though, and we got to see tamarins! Yay monkeys!

Then we said goodbye to minerva42 and underwatercolor, and plumtreeblossom and I saw the ( 3D Mars movie ).

And finally, we got to go to the Body Worlds exhibit, which was amazing and somewhat awe-inspiring. ( Body Worlds 2 exhibit )

I could go on and on for ages about this exhibit (feel free to ask questions, or browse through the exhibit catalogue if you’re over at my house), but I’m running out of LJ-posting steam, so I’ll stop babbling now. (I definitely want to go back while it’s still in Boston, more than once if possible.)

plumtreeblossom and I then took the T to Quincy, where we both slept very well. I dropped her off at home, since she had a busy Sunday planned. [EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention introducing plumtreeblossom to Sarsfield’s, an Irish pub in Quincy. We had a couple of yummy pints, but I like going there on weeknights better — it was extremely crowded.]

I had a busy Sunday planned, too, but so far I don’t seem to have actually gotten to any of it. :-)