The Puppy Hammer You Rode In On
2005-03-29,

Other than feeling like we're under constant assault from the forces of evil, things are swell.

The weekend in D.C./Baltimore went virtually without a hitch. We managed to leave on time, which is a near impossibility when you're corralling two kids into a vehicle at 5am. I'm glad to see that our trip preparation skills are still honed and sharp. The weather cooperated with the drive, as well. We got into the area at noon and met up with our hosts, an old friend of H's and his wife, whom we'll call D and L Socialist, respectively (hereafter known as DS and LS).

The first thing we got to do is have ourselves a private planetarium showing, courtesy of one of LS's co-workers at the university where she teaches. It was a small planetarium, and old - the guy running the device was saying how they just fixed it so the globe used for teaching about celestial navigation wouldn't fall off anymore when you tried tilting toward the south pole, plus the moon "[wasn't] working" at the time - but otherwise, it was cool. I got to ask a couple of semi-informed questions to make myself look more intelligent than I am and got to cuddle with H under the faux stars, and the kids seemed to enjoy themselves. This we followed up with a viewing of The Incredibles on a projection screen in one of the physics department classrooms. H and I hadn't seen it yet, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Everyone's noses were wrong, though. What was with the Klingon ridge that was the dad's nose bridge? Also, it was kind of spooky how they were able to integrate the facial expressions of the actors into the characters. Jason Lee (as the bad guy) was especially noticeable, but then, he's almost a cartoon character to begin with. Oh, and, after this event, H finally agreed with me that a projection monitor is a must-have in the vague, distant future. One day, she will agree with everything I say-- it's just a matter of when she comes around to it. ("Always agree.")

We progressed into dinner in Baltimore's Little Italy, where DS and LS reaffirmed their near-violent aversion to mushrooms and The Girl learned that she's not fond of Marsala (the sauce, not the city). I can't remember their name off the top of my head, but their tortellini was fantastic, and the sun-dried tomato and basil pesto sauce for my bowties and shrimp was even better. H will remember.

After dinner? Karaoke, of course! All of us had been itching to sing to badly-timed, tv-screened lyrics, and we found a place that, as it turns out, needed singers badly. As in, no one was turning in request slips. For the hour or two that we were there, we practically owned the place. Even the kids went up to sing, and both of them did well, especially The Girl, whose voice is improving. She says she's going to start choir next school year, and I hope that's true.

I managed to not keep everyone up overnight with my insidious snoring, and our weekend continued into D.C. We spent the first half of the day at the National Zoo (The Girl's choice for the weekend), which was a pretty nice place, in spite of the ever-present smell of a waste processing plant or something somewhere. No one else seemed to notice it but me, even though it sent me into short bouts of coughing (granted, I'm recovering from what I think is a super-minor respiratory infection so I'm a little sensitive to air impurities, but still). We saw the two pandas on loan from China, naturally. And they were lazily either sleeping or eating, naturally.

Excuse me while I Google the phrase, 'pandas are not bears'.

Seems I was misinformed. I was under the impression for a long time that pandas, while closely related, are not technically bears, mainly due to the fact that they're vegetarian, they don't hibernate and they can't walk on their hind legs. I can understand the confusion, I suppose; maybe at one time they were considered a separate species because of those differences. Begs further investigation.

Anyway, we spent the most time in the Small Mammals building, marveling at lemurs and the rock cavy and especially giant elephant shrews, which are really alien-looking, with their relatively long legs and twitchy snout. They look like something out of Fantastic Planet.

After lunch, we bravely ventured into D.C. proper, navigating the city's weirdly clean subway system, and to the Air and Space Museum, The Boy's choice for the weekend. Considering the fact that we'd already been on our feet for several hours and the fact that the museum was inordinately packed with visitors, to the point where you couldn't walk in a straight line for more than a meter or two because someone was in your way - making the place almost unbearably close (as in hot as well as in personal space) - it was no wonder that we started getting irritable. We were able to enjoy the place to some degree - especially since we got to see the actual model of the USS Enterprise used in the original Star Trek series, something even the kids were impressed with. Good to know they're well on their way to being proper geeks.

After escaping the overcrowded D.C., we headed back to Baltimore for a 'ghost tour', which ended up being more like a historical tour of one of Baltimore's historical districts. Nice to know, though, that there's pseudo-new-agey bad actors everywhere, not just in Cleveland. One of the places we visited (i.e. stood outside of while the hostess told us the 'spooky' story) was 'The Horse You Rode In On', a tavern where Edgar Allen Poe drank away some of the last of his days, and where his ghost apparently frequents. H and I plan on heading back there to drink a toast to him. "Nevermore." [gulp]

We returned home and wound down with homemade pizza and a party board game, of which I can't remember the name (geez, my memory's worse than usual). It had the perfunctory game board to pacify any competition-addicted American, but it only served as a counter, really. The point of the game is, the person in charge that turn reads a card, asking some sort of opinion-based, self-exploring question (like, "If you were a tree, what kind would you be?" or "What's the worst way to die?" That kind of thing), the rest wrote down their answer and the in-charge person had to guess who answered what. This proved to be more fun than it sounded, especially the numerous times that H and I gave the same or nearly the same answer. It was also an opportunity for strangeness, of course, so when the question, "If you were a famous person, what product would you not endorse for an ad?" came along, my answer was, naturally, the "Puppy Hammer". Surely, no one would deign to endorse such a cruel device for use. Kill puppies? That's a big Nay in my book. It did kind of make the figuring out of who said what a little easier, but I couldn't help myself. How often do you think of Puppy Hammer, and then get to write it down for display? Seriously.

Now presenting, Vol. 1, Ep. 2 of Fun With Visio:

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