After the museum trip on Friday, the rest of the weekend was uneventful but pleasant. We watched Tour de France coverage both days and I made progress on my Tour de France Knitalong project, the baby blanket, which needs to be done in less than two weeks. The cotton is starting to take its toll on my wrists, though, so I’ll be glad to see it done. I mean, plus the baby is already here, so there’s that.

We visited a new-to-us pool, as well as our usual one. The new one was nice and had the advantage of being fully in the sun and smaller and shallower than Francis, which meant it was a lot like floating around in the bath, if you shared your bath with a bunch of kids who didn’t especially care you were there. I’ll definitely stop in at Jelleff again if I’m trying to fit both a trip to the library and one to the pool in and am inching toward closing time for both.

We picked things from the garden and mourned another tomato lost to the bite of a squirrel. (I will steal pieces of strawberries back from slugs, but I’m not convinced that’s so healthy to do with rodents.) We did chores and ate homemade pizza, and I sat in the park. and the middle episode of Tennyson and cheered that the next Doctor Who is a woman.

Today was National Ice Cream Day, but I thought it was yesterday, so we had to eat ice cream twice. Shucks! Darn! The first time we topped it with homemade dulce de leche Rudi’s friends gave us and the second time with raspberries and blueberries.

I traded books and dvds at the library and finished two books, one on audio and one in print, both of which I enjoyed. I started a new one I just picked up that got a lot of buzz at one of the conferences earlier this year. Doesn’t it look good? I hope we can judge it by that metric!

My weekend began a little early on Friday because Sarah’s sister had extra tickets to the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, which remains so popular that you either need to reserve space months ahead or wait in line for a giveaway spot. Being lazy, I’d opted to do neither, figuring that sooner or later all hot spots die down and eventually I’d be able to just stroll in. Or as strolly as one gets in D.C., where walking into practically any venue requires either showing an ID or going through a metal detector or both. (I remain grateful that none of the D.C. libraries requires such ridiculousness.)

Where was I? Right! So we spent the afternoon at the museum, sort of with our friends Michael and Julia and sort of not, since we split up, regrouped, and split up again, which meant Julia was done about 45 minutes before the rest of us, but that’s because Rudi and I stopped and had a late lunch partway through.

Here are just a few of the things we saw during our 4+ hours at the museum: (more…)