Welcome to the halfway point of Nano Poblano! Since most of my posts are either long-form or very photograph heavy, I thought it would be nice to take a beat at the mid-point of November to reflect on how well we’ve all done keeping up the posts.
I’ve been reading loads of things from new friends this month, as they push through their own Tiny Pepper challenges. If you’ve got some time to read new things, take a moment to look at some of these fine folks– you won’t regret it.
I genuinely thought I would have less to talk about because my usual adventures have been completely stifled by the pandemic. It turns out that I have enough tiny adventures to completely keep this train moving.
Speaking of trains, it has now been 100 days since I arrived in Arlington aboard the AutoTrain. One hundred days in my new home, and I still haven’t found a sofa. Or tried all the restaurants I want to try around here. Or met any of my neighbors, really. After one hundred days in Arlington, I’m still exploring and learning my immediate surroundings.
Which brings me to the photo…
I stumbled across this while simply walking around the neighborhood. I was coming back from the store, and I decided to take a slightly different path than normal. I was thinking I might find a slightly more direct route.
My slightly more direct route actually took me between a couple of condo buildings. In the middle of the path, there was a pedestrian roundabout filled with some small plants, a little tree, and… three plastic flamingos. The “please do not feed the flamingos” sign tickled me so much I actually stopped and went back for the photo.
I love signs that exist solely for the joke. This really appeals to my sense of whimsy.
One of my favorite parts of the Smithsonian is the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The Udvar-Hazy is a part of the National Air & Space Museum, but it’s not on the National Mall. The National Mall has limited space, so in 1999 they had the brilliant idea of putting a giant hangar near Dulles Airport in Virginia and filling it with all kinds of cool stuff that wouldn’t fit in the main Air & Space Museum.
If you have a long layover at Dulles Airport, this is a GREAT way to kill some time. Fairfax Connector operates a bus from Dulles to the Udvar-Hazy Center every hour. The trip takes less than fifteen minutes, and it only costs a few dollars.
They’ve got hundreds of fascinating historical aircraft, as well as a restoration hangar where they can work on several airplanes at once. This is a BIG place. They have Felix Baumgartner’s capsule, ultralights, stunt planes, dirigible cabins, and so much more. They have cool space stuff like the Gemini 7 space capsule. They’ve also got an SR-71 Blackbird. And an Air France Concorde. And the freaking Enola Gay.
And they have a Space Shuttle. Guys, this place is SO COOL!
There are four space shuttle orbiters left, after the tragic destruction of Challenger and Columbia. The remaining four are all retired into museums. Endeavour is at the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California. Enterprise is at the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum in New York. Atlantis is at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. And Discovery is here, at the Udvar-Hazy.
I’m not likely to ever see Endeavour because I have no interest in going back to Los Angeles. I’ll see Enterprise next time I’m in New York for work, post-pandemic. Nikhil and I went to the Kennedy Space Center this summer and saw Atlantis. (Editor’s note: I thought I had blogged the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, but I don’t see it here. I’ll have to come back to write that post later because the spacecraft on display are amazing.)
I mentioned Lorrie’s weekend visit back in my post about the Air Force Memorial. That same weekend, we drove out to Chantilly to see the Udvar-Hazy, and to get some quality time with Discovery.
An STS Orbiter is a very, very large thing. Larger than you might expect. The rockets at the back are just insanely large. Until you see them up close, it’s difficult to describe the immensity.
I call this photo “Lorrie looks at Shuttlebutt.”
The space part of the Udvar-Hazy has some displays pertaining to pop culture and how it intertwines with our space exploration. There are items from Babylon 5, Star Wars, and Buck Rogers, among others. There’s also a hero model used in the filming of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. You don’t ever see it in the movie, but there’s a bunch of little things glued onto the model in various places to give it more detail. Like trucks, and mailboxes, and R2-D2, seen in the photo below. (Here’s a fun pop culture trivia- there’s also a small R2-D2 on the deck of One-Eyed Willie’s pirate ship in The Goonies. That little droid just gets everywhere.)
For some reason, there’s even a tiny model of the Space Shuttle in the Space Shuttle’s wing, complete with tiny people. I love miniatures, so this was extra fun for me.
I took hundreds of photos in the Udvar-Hazy. If I showed the rest of them inline like this, the post would be insanely long. Instead, I’ll just throw 78 of them into a gallery!
Long time readers of my blog know that I absolutely love tall things. Whenever I get into a new city, I generally like to find the tallest thing around and climb it. I get a little bit King Kongy, albeit from the inside. If it’s got an observation deck, you’ll observe me wanting to go to there.
When I arrived in Arlington in August, however, the Washington Monument was closed to inside visitors. It had only just reopened in September of 2019 after a three-year renovation to the elevator controls and security screening area and then had to close down again six months later because of Covid 19.
As you might imagine, I was incredibly stoked when they announced that it would reopen on October 1st, even with a limited capacity. In order to visit now, you have to get a timed entrance ticket from the recreation.gov site. A very limited number of tickets would be available each day, and each group would only get 10 minutes at the Observation level. They opened the Monument on schedule, and I tried a few times a week to snag one of the precious few visitor slots for each day that I might be able to visit.
On October 28th, I was finally able to snag a slot for the following day, soon after I finished my work for the day. I was incredibly excited to finally get to go up inside the Monument.
I wasn’t paying attention to the weather, though. Hurricane Zeta had just made landfall, and all the leftover rain was coming our way– it was slated to rain all day long, including well past the end of my time slot to visit the monument. I briefly considered not going at all since I would be trudging through rain and the views would be hampered, but after a series of should-I-go-or-not coin flips, I finally grabbed a rideshare to the National Mall. (Normally I would go via the Metro, but my workday and the visit timing were too close together, and I needed a slightly more direct route. I took the Metro home afterward.)
I don’t need to talk about the two shades of marble again, do I? I just talked about that the other day.
By the time I arrived, my feet were wet, and I was well and truly damp despite my coat and umbrella. You can’t quite tell in the photo above, but it was raining. It was raining a lot.
One unexpected benefit of going to the Washington Monument in the middle of what’s left of a hurricane, however, is that there was nobody else there. No tourists, I mean- the staff of Park Rangers was all there, waiting at the entrance of the security area for visitors. I was the only person visiting, though. I went through security in moments, and they let me into the lobby, past some VERY large metal security doors, to the elevator.
I was alone in the elevator, and after a moment I reached the observation deck at the top. There was nobody with me except for another Park Ranger, so I had all of the windows to myself. In hindsight, I really should have taken pictures of the observation deck’s interior to show how I had the place to myself- that’s never going to happen again. It was kind of magical.
Anyway, here’s what I could see out of the little slot windows at the top of the monument. Visibility was hampered by all the rain, but I could still see quite far. Looking East, I could see the National Gallery of Art on the left, the National Air & Space Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian on the right, and all the way in the distance, the United States Capitol. The Library of Congress and the Supreme Court are back there too, but the rain made those nearly invisible.
Facing South, I could see the Tidal basin and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The Tidal Basin is where they have the Cherry Blossom Festival when it’s not a pandemic year. I still need to visit the Jefferson Memorial; I haven’t been there.
Continuing my clockwise walk around the top level, this is the view toward the West. The World War II Memorial is in the foreground, then the Reflecting Pool, then the Lincoln Memorial in the distance. On a clear day, you could see the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from here, along with the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. I could not.
Lastly, I looked to the north. That big round path around grass is the Ellipse, and sitting behind that is the White House.
Here’s an obligatory selfie of me pointing toward the White House. I promise, that’s what I was pointing at.
After a few minutes looking out the various rain portals and up toward the capstone, I was ready to go back down to the ground. There’s an exhibit level just below the observation level, but it was closed during the pandemic. Stupid pandemic.
I really need to go back on a clear day.
After a brief but lively chat with a friendly Park Ranger, it was time to go back down to the ground. One more very heavy security door and another vestibule, and I was back outside. There was another group of about three people about to go in as I was leaving. Even though it was still raining, I decided to try getting some more National Mall photos- I’d never seen it that empty before. This is looking toward the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial.
…and of course I had to take the “It’s right behind me, isn’t it?” photo. My camera lens was fogged up from all the rain, but there you go.
After that, it was time to walk along the National Mall, in the direction of the Capitol toward the Metro, and on toward home.
Have you ever been inside the Washington Monument?
Allllllllll the way back on the second day of Nano Poblano, Anyes posted a “Let’s get to know each other” entry on her blog, and it posed a few questions that I thought would be fun to come back to.
What’s the #1 most played song on your playlist?
When I saw this posted by Anyes, I checked the play counts in my iTunes app, and found that “Undisclosed Desires” by Muse was at the top of the list. Well, a non-musical binaural sleep track filled with white noise was actually the most played item, but Muse was right behind.
Here are the top five played (musical) tracks in my iTunes library. It is undeniably a fascinating cross-section of some of the music that makes me tick.
There’s a problem with this list, though. Several problems, actually. First of all, I suffered a library glitch with iTunes on October 5th, 2008. All the data was reset on that day- no song in my iTunes library has a “Date Added” later than 10/5/08, and any plays from the years before are gone. I started using iTunes with my first iPod back in 2003, so that’s five years of play data gone.
Secondly, this question doesn’t specify which playlist. I have many, many, many playlists. Or even which audio source- there is still a CD in my car’s deck, although I’ve forgotten which one- but I used to spin it a lot. Before that, there were mix tapes and soundtracks that got played until they were practically worn out, and I’m confident some of those had more plays than the count on that Muse song at the top of this post.
Third, this question doesn’t take into account things from streaming sources like Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon Music- and you’d better believe I use all three.
Music is life.
I checked my Spotify account, and while I can’t find actual play totals, I can tell what the two most played songs on my Spotify account are. The first is Shriekback’s “Nemesis,” which I love in part because it’s a dance-floor banger and in part because they managed to squeeze “parthenogenesis” into the lyrics and it totally works. The other one is Sam Palladio and Clare Bowen from Nashville singing “If I Didn’t Know Better,” which is an absolute smokeshow of a song.
Clearly, the most played song is flexible, frangible. It can be changed by time, or mood, or salinity, by life events and tragedy or triumph.
Sometimes I just like to hear certain harmonies, certain orchestrations.
I strongly doubt that this has helped you to know me any better.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
I have loads of favorite quotes, but the first one that came to mind when I was writing this post was-
“Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” The words were Yoda, but the delivery was Frank Oz. This line is from a four minute long scene on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back which contains a heap of Yoda’s most famous lines: “Do or do not; there is no try.” “Judge me by my size, do you?” “That is why you fail.” These are all lines from the same scene, but the one that always gets me is this one. If this movie is playing on television and I happen to be walking through the room, I will stop dead in my tracks for this line.
I feel like my explanation for why I like this quote so much is inadequate. I do believe in the shining potential of most people, though, and I think it sums that up pretty well.
What sound do you love?
Anyes already claimed rain, so I can’t use that as my answer. I guess I’ll have to go with the sound of a rolling suitcase moving over sidewalk- that roll-click-roll-click-roll-click sound.
My apartment in Germany was less than half a kilometer, about a third of a mile, from the city’s main train station. People would walk past all the time with those rolling suitcases. Since I had no air conditioning, I kept the window open through most of the year, and that rolling thumping noise became very soothing to me.
Now that I think about it, all the other sounds of the train station are soothing to me as well. On a clear, quiet night, the announcements on the platforms were audible from my apartment. I could hear the sounds of trains rolling in or rolling out in the distance.
I loved all of it.
Now it’s your turn. Care to answer any of these questions?
A few months before I moved up here, I learned that there’s a statue and memorial to Muppet Creator and alumnus Jim Henson with Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland. Jim created so much of my childhood that I knew I had to go see it when I had a chance. I made a note and tucked it away in my geographic to-do list until I could go to UMD.
Flash forward to last weekend- the weather was really nice, sunny and clear, so I decided to make the pilgrimage to Maryland. Even with the heavy traffic into DC for people celebrating Biden/Harris winning the presidential election, it only took me about half an hour to get onto campus.
I had the foresight to check a map for visitor parking before I left, and I was able to find a parking spot right across from the Adele H. Stamp Student Union, easy as you please. From the parking lot, it was a short walk back around to the front of the building, where the Jim Henson Statue and Memorial Garden is located. It’s really quite easy to find, not hidden away at all. You can see the sculpture as you approach.
A small plaque is visible on the low wall to the left of the sculpture. The memorial and garden were the idea of the class of 1998, after the 1997 event, “The Muppets Take Maryland” which featured an exhibit and workshops with Cheryl Henson. Some of the other classes from the 1990s helped with funding for the memorial, and the statue and garden were dedicated on September 24, 2003, on what would have been Jim Henson’s 67th birthday. There’s a great deal of making-of photos on the Muppet Wiki’s page about this sculpture.
The bronze statue is 450 pounds of bronze attached to a red granite bench. It was created by Jay Hall Carpenter after a national contest to select an artist and a design.
Here’s a closer look at the detail on the sculpture. It looks like Jim and Kermit are deep in conversation. I think this is just wonderful- I like to think of Jim still having these deep conversations even after his passing beyond the rim. Kermit touching Jim’s wrist is a really nice touch.
Here’s a little bit more of the detail… check out the frog belt buckle on Jim!
Of course since the sculpture is set on a bench, the whole place invites you to sit and join them for a little bit. Please excuse the mask hanging off of my ear; I should have just taken it all the way off for this photograph. (Or asked someone else to take the picture. I’m used to doing it selfie-style.)
Kermit is one of my favorites. I love his optimism in the face of unbridled chaos.
It’s a wonderful tribute to Jim Henson.
Since I was already at the front door of the student union, I decided to peek inside. Their Terrapin mascot is masked but their food court is open. The stadium was visible just past my parking lot, but I was there a few hours before their game against the Penn State Nittany Lions.
Have you ever been to the Jim Henson statue at UMD? Who’s your favorite Muppet?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 