Reading this week:

• The Voltage Effect by John A. List (Chicago school…)

On the appropriate day my super amazing girlfriend and I got to go on the White House Garden Tour! It was interesting. We arrived in the line at the appropriate time and waited to be let in. The Secret Service had set up some metal detectors in the middle of a field and a dude in gloves carefully looked at my phone and keys to decide they posed no threat to the Rose Garden. Then we were on the tour!

What the tour was, specifically, was a self-guided thing where you walk along the paved ellipse (Secret Service agents were on-hand to tell anyone who strayed to get off the grass please sir) and then to the fountain they got there. I had previously gone on the interior White House tour so this was a whole exciting new perspective on the place. The outside perspective, specifically. There was also music, provided by an Air Force band on the portico. They alternated between light jazz and military marches.

Most of the highlights of the tour were various trees planted by various presidents and/or first ladies. This is a thing that you do, apparently, when you’re president, at some point you plant a tree. And then forever afterwards twice a year on the garden tour days they have a sign with a picture of you planting the tree for people to look at. I am writing this to sound very silly but I took several pictures of trees. The oldest trees they have were planted by Andrew Jackson in 1830 and are held up by wires. The other exciting part is looking at the kitchen garden that Michelle Obama planted, and the coolest part about that was the White House Beehives, in which there are Presidential bees. Besides the sign, however, they did not get special branding:

Anyways I was going to not write a whole blog post about this but then I noticed in the booklet they gave us that the south lawn is designed to create “a setting that gives the impression of a rural landscape, with winding paths and private spaces.” There are some other design features, like “a series of low hills that appear natural, but were created to provide security” and how a lot of the trees are planted in order to hide and further secure the perimeter, but I want to focus on the rural setting thing. That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean isn’t it? Here is the President in the very heart of Washington, DC, surrounded by a whole dense city full of people, and the White House is designed so the President can pretend he is in a bucolic setting somewhere? I mean the hills I get, that makes a great esplanade so you got a nice field of fire, but why are we going for rural? What I am getting at here is once I read that the view outside the White House reminded me of James Madison’s Montpelier, which was built at just about the same time and most importantly here was a plantation house. So is the White House going for a plantation vibe? Not great! Very ick. I didn’t like it.

But like I said the tour was fine. Besides the bees and the music and the trees, they also had “the Beast” out on display, which was probably the single most popular thing on the grounds judging by how it held up the crowd as people were taking pictures. It does indeed look pretty nice and I assume that no one ever minds that it is parked right across the road. After we had checked everything out we exited via the open-air gift shop, where my super amazing girlfriend got a bookmark and an exclusive Christmas ornament, and I got the exact same Christmas ornament, but for her mom. Then we hiked back around the White House to visit the White House Visitor’s Center where they had the centerpiece of my dreams.

Reading this week:

• The Golden Rhinoceros by François-Xavier Fauvelle
• American Eden by Victoria Johnson (fantastic)

Excellent news everyone we managed to go to the Renaissance Festival two years in a row! The lack of new pandemics helped. I am sure you all remember my last entry about the Ren Fest, but back then my super amazing girlfriend was but a flower crown newbie. Our visit this year was stunningly similar in many ways, especially because it was opening day again and my dad had visited once more to peruse the festival.

We had an absolute hoot. It wasn’t quite as hot as last year which helped a lot. We wandered around and played games and saw plays. I didn’t win her a super cool necklace she’ll cherish for the rest of her life by tossing a rat in a bucket this year, but I paid for her to launch some balls from a crossbow (as you can see from the picture at the top) because I thought it would be extremely cute and (again as you can see from the picture at the top) it was. She’s amazing.

Also in big Ren Fest gaming news they brought back the old ball maze. The ball maze was always my favorite game at the Ren Fest because I could reliably win it. I mean it’s not very hard but one time I literally did it with my eyes closed and a drunk guy bowed down to me due to my prowess. Used to be back in the day too you won an actual prize, like a $5 (now like $9) turkey leg which for $1 a play was an excellent deal. But last year they switched up the maze and had something real fancy with like a castle on it or something, but they have reverted to the old maze for reasons I didn’t inquire about so my nostalgic self had a blast. Also like last year we saw some Shakespeare, but this year there was a big epic swordfight:

The single biggest thing I thought about all day though was a pot. As I think I have mentioned elsewhere, my super amazing girlfriend has recently taken up the fine and ancient art of ceramics, so we made sure to spend a lot of time checking out all the ceramics at the Renaissance Festival. There were a good chunk! One in particular caught my eye. It was a brownish color in the base, with a special glaze that, if done just right, created beautiful crystals that were all unique and different. This is that pot:

What also attracted me to this pot was that it was useless. Like it was not in a useful shape. Like maybe you could put a spring sprig in there or something and it would make for a perfect piece of art to contemplate in a traditional Japanese tea house, for example, but you wouldn’t store things in it. There were other pots that maybe would work as a vase but this wasn’t it. Historically I am attracted to useless crystals, my independent study for my Chemistry degree was all about designing a useless experiment around crystals, so this pot was up my alley. But because it was useless it was very explicitly art.

I feel like I have bought a good chunk of art in my day. But usually it has some meaning. Like look I suppose all art has meaning, but specifically here I am thinking of art that is a souvenir of a place I visited where there are memories, or maybe a picture that my super amazing girlfriend liked so I got it because she liked it and I like her, or maybe a picture of our cat which isn’t useful but also is extremely cute. I visit a lot of art museums as documented on this blog and there are these people out there who do everything they can to buy art, more than they could ever display, just because it is art and art contrary to what I have just said isn’t useless it is an expression and brings beauty to the world and maybe supports an artist (though I met an artist in grad school who very explicitly made unsellable art (it wasn’t lewd or anything just like physically immobile, she did frescoes, but not the kind you are thinking of)) but I don’t think I am that kind of person??? Or at least I wasn’t sure if I was??? This had me thinking all day while we were otherwise looking at a dude with a bird:

He was nice but frankly his show wasn’t as good as the last bird show I saw at the Renaissance Festival! Anyways! All day I was grappling with whether or not I was a dude who bought a useless thing purely for its aesthetic beauty, as opposed to some other property of the thing, intrinsic or extrinsic. And more importantly would I do that for $40. After hashing it out with my super amazing girlfriend over some mead, I decided to bite the bullet and we went over there and did it. Except it turned out they always took cash, like it was 1540 or something. So I had to go find an ATM and that cost more money but I eventually bought it and proudly took home what I believed to be my very first piece of ceramic art that I owned.

But then I got home and remembered the two pieces of ceramics I got in Rwanda:

Turns out I am a ceramics collector! So there was no need to go through all that existential crisis, collecting ceramics is just something I do. At the Ren Fest we also got lost in that same maze again and took a very similar picture to last time. It was a great day! Highly recommend.

Reading this week:

• Son of Old Man Hat, told by Left Handed, recorded by Walter Dyk

Recently, as part of a lovely Saturday afternoon out and about in DC, my super amazing girlfriend and I went to the Phillips Collection.

The Phillips Collection is a bit outside of our normal museum circuit. This is primarily because it costs money, and in a town like DC that is frankly a very steep hurdle. Specifically it cost my super amazing girlfriend $16 and me $0 because veterans get in for free, and although in the end I offered to go 50/50 on it she hasn’t sent me a Venmo request yet. So there you go.

Also a little outside our usual paradigm is that the Phillips Collection is a Museum of Modern Art. I have a very well documented (on this blog) like of very old things, so the items in this collection are from my point of view young whipper snapper upstarts. The museum itself however is 100 years old so Modern is a bit of a stretched definition. Their collection had a few of the classics too. You got your Van Gogh, your Mondrian, Renoir, Monet, etc. But after cruising around the museum the items I liked best were the most modern. In fact the oldest item I bothered to take a picture of was the below picture from 1922 and that is mostly because it had boats. Specifically, a regatta’s worth:

To flash forward a bit, when we finally left the museum I overheard a dude on the sidewalk complaining. He said something like “I can appreciate a good scam; if you can roller some paint onto a canvas and sell it as art good on ya.” Look I gotta say a lot of the art doesn’t quite speak to me. They got a room full of Rothkos here and his art has never really moved me. A long time ago now a friend of a friend took us to see a whole mess of his black-on-black works and they were… fine. But like man, first off the joke is old. “My toddler could do that” well they didn’t and if they could you would be a terrible parent because a lot of these oil paints I am pretty sure are toxic and you don’t want your toddler playing with them. Second dude like, clearly some people find meaning in this. Maybe you should figure out what that is.

The paintings I liked best on this trip were the ones where the materials gave them a very different depth and texture than the paintings I am used to. One piece of artwork that I really liked but didn’t photograph was “Untitled 598” by Florence Pierce. I didn’t take a picture because I knew it would be flat and the picture on their website doesn’t do it justice either. The black spot in the middle is like a rough, textured black, but very black indeed. Like you had painted sandpaper with the blackest black. The rest of it is resin put over a wavy metal sheet, so throughout the piece it has different depths and the light travels through and seeks out different paths through it. I found another piece of hers for sale online for $20,000 so maybe I should cash out my retirement, I dunno. Then again my super amazing girlfriend just took a ceramics class, and she brought home a bowl that is absolutely gorgeous because the clay on the bottom wasn’t smooth, and had a spiral pattern from being thrown on the potter’s wheel. When she glazed it the glaze settled into the grooves leaving peaks with different depths of glaze that did nearly the same thing. So maybe I can save the $20,000 (+$450 shipping) and admire the beauty that both she is and brings home instead.

The next paintings that really caught my interest were by Kate Shepherd. The above one is titled “Black Tiles.” I am very used to the look of oil paint on canvas, but a major thing I saw on this visit was the use of glossy acrylic paints. A lot of the paintings in the museum took advantage of those materials I thought to really interesting effect. In Kate Shepherd’s paintings (the ones on display at any rate), what she has done is used high-gloss acrylic paint and covered a wood panel as a background. She has a series of these and the acrylic gives the wood panel a very shiny, very smooth surface that is the opposite of the texture you see with oil on canvas. On top of that background she paints white lines in geometric patterns. The other paintings that were on display consisted of mostly straight lines, but in “Black Tiles” she uses curvy lines to give a 3D effect. Combined with the glossy background as I walked towards or away from the painting, with the reflected light changing, it gave a sense of motion that was a tad mesmerizing.

Finally and just to round it out was “The Charming Statesman” by Federico Solmi. This is done with white pen on black paper and it took me a second to figure out what was going on. I thought it was by an African artist with African themes and then I stepped back a bit and realized it was ole’ GW (I think?). Quite the effect nonetheless and the horses’ eyes match the peoples’ eyes and there are flags and it speaks to jingoism (maybe?) but through the eyes of like uh, well maybe the horses or something? I dunno dude, it’s art, and I don’t think my toddler could do this. I liked it at any rate. The Phillips Collection is worth a visit, especially if you can get in for free, but even if you can’t. I had a good time.

As you can tell from my myriad blog posts, my super amazing girlfriend and I are working our way through all the Smithsonians. This is a wonderful hobby and I recommend everyone take it up. As you can tell from the title, this of course brought us to the National Postal Museum!

I had myself been to the Postal Museum once before in my ongoing quest to visit a bunch of Atlas Obscura places. This museum is lucky enough to house Owney the Postal Dog, who is a 125-year-old stuffed dog that was once an enthusiastic mascot for the postal service, having trained himself to ride the rails and collect various postal badges. My poor super amazing girlfriend has heard me wonder aloud about this several times at this point, but between Owney, my favorite stuffed goat, and the stuffed mascot of our most recent alma mater (I didn’t know about this one until she told me about it), there must have been a trend at some point to hand beloved animals over to taxidermists once they died. It makes me wonder if, as is the case with all fashion, the great wheel of trends will come full circle once again one of these days and we shall see a resurgence of dead animals gracing our hallways. One can only hope (one way or the other). Anyways here is Owney:

Back to the museum! It is split into two approximately equal parts, with one part residing upstairs and the other downstairs. The upstairs part is all about stamps. Stamps are a pretty robust technology and last time I visited I remember not being so interested in the stamps, but this time I had a new appreciation after seeing the exhibit. The postal museum’s stamp collection is very robust, and going through every single stamp they have on display would take quite a while. I petered out after opening two dozen or so drawers and slide-out displays, but all the stamps are very neat to look at, especially the famous ones like the inverted jenny. Appealing to our Global Affairs hearts, the museum also has a robust display of historic international stamps. Speaking of stamps and international stuff, one time long ago I was in Singapore, having ridden a submarine there. We (the officers and crew) didn’t know we were going to go to Singapore before we set off on this underway, and there is no internet on a submarine, so we were entirely unprepared for what we were going to experience. There was a robust rumor going around that there was a place where you could pay money to fistfight an orangutan. That was, again for better or worse, untrue, but what was true is that the ship had to post a special watch at the “Four Floors of Whores” to keep sailors out of trouble. I relate this to say that when me and a group of my friends saw a sign pointing to the “Singapore Philatelic Museum” we had no idea what kind of wild, depraved, or frightening things we would see there and therefore charted a wide path around it. Later, when we learned what “Philatelic” meant, we were embarrassed. Anyways here is a misprinted stamp I liked from the Congo Free State (only about 40 of the misprinted stamps survive):

Once you get your fill of stamps at the postal museum (and who could, really), you head downstairs where the displays are more about the history of the postal service and how the mail is actually delivered. They had a lot of interesting stuff! I kept teasing my super amazing girlfriend that they have a Massachusetts simulation, which is a little faux-wooded are meant to represent the New York-Boston Post Road circa 1673. They have another display on the history of mail trucks, and a riveting portion on sub-contracting. The postal service apparently sub-contracts out a lot of especially difficult mail delivery, and they have displays of people carrying mail via donkey or sled dog and the like. This portion also include a big-rig truck you can pretend to drive, which is a hoot. All in all, quite the interesting portion and gives you a solid appreciation for the mail.

Having learned a great deal about letters, stamps, mailboxes, and all the other bits that make those things useful, we ticked another Smithsonian off our to-do list and re-emerged into the hot DC sun. Then we got out of the sun and onto the metro to go find a nice cup of tea. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

Reading this week:

• Do Not Disturb by Michela Wrong
• The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier

One of the best places in DC to go is the US National Arboretum, and I finally got to go with my super amazing girlfriend. For many years I had wanted to go to the National Arboretum. When I was a kid and my family drove into DC to visit the museums and the like, we would always pass by the arboretum on the way. As a kid I wasn’t that into trees, but eventually, as I have discussed many times, I went to the Naval Academy. One of the things about the US Naval Academy, or USNA if you will, is that as a midshipman you are normally only allowed to wear “spirit” gear. On weekends during your 1/C and 2/C (Senior and Junior) years you can wear normal civilian clothes, but during the week you gotta wear USNA-themed clothes. At the time I thought it would be hilarious, just knee-slappingly funny, to get a shirt from the US National Arboretum, or USNA if you will, and wear it as spirit gear. Alas, I never achieved that dream while it would have been particularly funny, but years later (and about five years ago now), I did manage to go to the arboretum and obtain an USNA shirt and I wore it to death while in the Peace Corps. And now, although I was down a shirt but up a super amazing girlfriend and we went to go see the arboretum.

One of the most impressive parts of the arboretum is their Bonsai and Penjing Museum (penjing, as we learned, being a Chinese version of miniature landscapes that bonsai also represents). Although I am not normally a museum-book-buyer, last time I visited the arboretum I thought they were so gorgeous I actually bought their book about the collection. Besides their sublime beauty, one thing I like about the bonsai and penjing collection at the arboretum is its efficiency: the whole arboretum is literally about trees, but instead of hiking around and seeing a bunch of big trees, you can walk a far shorter distance and see a whole bunch of tiny trees. That is mostly a joke but it is an extremely impressive collection and is placed in a walled-off and peaceful garden area and would be a wonderful place to spend a whole day just in quiet contemplation. Of course what I especially like in museums are the especially old things, and at the museum they boast a number of 19th-century trees while the one pictured above has been in training since 1795! And it isn’t even the oldest, with that honor being held by very-nearly-400-year-old tree from 1625! Despite the tree being relatively tiny it still makes you feel small.

Although it is easy to see all the tiny trees, seeing the whole arboretum would take many afternoons. It is a big and impressive place. After the bonsai and penjing museum we walked over across the street to the National Herb Garden, where we admired all the National Herbs. You can see above me admiring them. Although the whole arboretum is massive just this garden must be a huge amount of work, given the size and number of specimens. They had a whole section just dedicated to peppers and another labelled the “Beverage Garden” dedicated to things you would find it drinks. They have shadier and sunnier portions and nestled in and amongst the herbs and throughout the entire arboretum there were plenty of picnickers and groups and couples sprawled out and enjoying the lovely and extremely sunny afternoon. The only downside of the arboretum is that it is relatively poorly served by public transportation. I personally thing it would be well worth it to spend a few billion bucks to run a metro station out there just so more people could enjoy it.

Although the sun was nice my super amazing girlfriend and I decided to get out of it and drove to the far end of the park to check out the Asian collections. She was particularly interested in all the camellia plants because they are of course closely related to tea. We hiked around the trails and the best part was probably the few moments we spent relaxing in the above pavilion, taking a forest bath as it were and listening to the sounds of nature there and admiring a squirrel jumping about. I tried to trick her into thinking there was a panda walking around but she didn’t fall for it. Nonetheless it was extremely peaceful and, you know, anytime I am hanging out with my super amazing girlfriend it is a nice time. If I can do it around trees all the better. Satisfied with having gotten back to nature, and an especially gorgeous example of it, we head back home to hang out with our cat.

My super amazing girlfriend is, as I like to mention here, super amazing. One facet of her super amazingness is that when you read this (admittedly you are likely her, hi hon!) she will be working for NASA!!!! This is super cool, and is a reflection and not a cause of her super coolness. But seeing as when I am writing this she is not yet working for NASA, we decided to see if we couldn’t learn a thing or two about the coolest space agency and so we went to Goddard Space Flight Center to check it out!

The visitor’s center for Goddard is small but mighty, much like the rockets they have on display in the backyard. I had been to Goddard once before, when I was but a wee little lad in the Boy Scouts but didn’t remember much of it. Admission is free and when you go in it is almost entirely in one large room full of space stuff:

In addition to the one large room there is a “solarium” which is playing videos of the sun’s surface, and another movie theater which is playing videos that are about space and stuff. I assume they are somewhere in Goddard’s surprisingly impressive YouTube channel.

The special treat the day we visited is that they were doing rocket launches. Unfortunately the Delta rocket they have in the backyard stayed put (it could use a coat of paint), but what they launched were a bunch of model rockets. This was the first time they had done it since the pandemic, but it turns out the first Sunday of every month you can bring your model rocket and they’ll launch it off for you which is an extremely fun way to do model rocketry and have a nice day at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Only a few of the rockets wound up in the trees. Here is a gif of the first launch for your pleasure:

I have failed to find a way to fit this in narratively but I wanted to say that my clearest memory of my childhood visit to Goddard was the story told by the guy (one of the fellow Scouts’ dad) who brought us there. He worked at Goddard (hence the visit) and he was telling us that some of his fellow satellite designers were trying to figure out how to design a fluid ring, which is a uh ring of um fluid that somehow helps satellites stay stable when they’re up there is space. They used to be used all the time on satellites but NASA had gone away from them in favor of more advanced technology or something (look I was a little kid and I don’t work at NASA unlike my super amazing girlfriend the details are sketchy). But they were going back to them due to budget cuts or something, but everyone had forgotten how to design them. But this dude (the dad) mentioned to them that one of the satellites hanging in the visitor’s center had one, so they marched on down there to check it out and it saved the day or something like that. Anyways this is a good excuse to always keep old junk around.

Of all the objects at the visitor’s center I think the one I was most fascinated with was the above piece of equipment, which fitted over a component of the Hubble Space Telescope they needed to repair or replace and was used to capture screws. I dunno, just like, kinda neat, and also it is a perfect piece of NASA engineering, for better or for worse. Also excellent colors! Some really great craftsmanship went into that piece and all to capture screws. I was impressed.

Besides that the other thing I think I learned the most about was probably the James Webb telescope. They spent a few decades building it right there at Goddard and so they were fairly proud of it. I hadn’t actually quite realized what it looked like until I saw a scale model, nor realized how far away from Earth and the moon it was really orbiting. They also had full-sized mirror mockups and the dang thing is just extremely impressive and I am excited to see the images it produces. I think by the time this is published those photos will have been published which will be cool.

And then finally our trip concluded with a visit to the gift shop, where they had a surprising amount of cat-themed souvenirs and a bunch of other cool NASA stuff. I noted the other day to my super amazing girlfriend that just given the relative volume of Space with everything that is Not Space, most museums should in fact be Space Museums and this visit solidified that sentiment for both of us. Going to Goddard doesn’t really take very long but it is an excellent visitor’s center and it was a hoot checking out space stuff with my super amazing girlfriend. I am very excited to see all the cool stuff my super amazing girlfriend learns actually working for them. Gonna be a blast!

It has been a long six years since I wrote Fort McHenry I, and now I’m back for seconds. That’s not really quite how it happened. I didn’t even remember I had written an article already about Fort McHenry and I had to google my own site. So there you go. A lot has changed since that first blog post. I joined the Peace Corps. I went to grad school. And most importantly, I got myself a super amazing girlfriend who had never been to Fort McHenry and likes history and stuff. So off we went!

Not a lot has changed since that fateful day six years ago. There is still a very nice video, still a dramatic reveal of the fort at the end, still the dredged-up cannonballs. So that all is very cool. I included the above picture because I noticed there is a dearth of centuries-old hardtack or bread, which I now know, with my age and wisdom, are essential parts of history museums. I also took a picture of the funniest line in the museum, which was (after the War of 1812) “The United States never again attempted to conquer Canada.” That could change, Canada! Watch your back.

The biggest weakness I noticed about the museum this time around however was its pretty uncritical stance on Francis Scott Key. He is still firmly in the Good Guy category by almost all counts. Back during my Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy, we took a YP up to Baltimore for a training event. On the way into Baltimore harbor there is a star-studded buoy to mark the spot where Francis wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner.” As we passed the buoy, we all manned the rails and saluted and stuff to honor such a literary triumph (to get even more side-tracked in my complaint here, they also laud Key for being like, a fantastic poet. The original title of the poem called it “Fort M’Henry.” He couldn’t even figure out a way to rhyme properly the thing he was talking about! Anyways).

But man was Key not an all-around good guy. This Washington Post article outlines all the ways both the anthem and Key were fairly racist. The Land of the Free firmly did not include Black people. The best the museum musters, however, are a few paragraphs off to one side where it notes “Francis Scott Key was a man of contradictions,” saying such deep things like he was against bloodshed but also wanted to defend his country, and as a lawyer he represented both slaveholders and free African Americans. The “man of contradictions” argument I think is a pretty lazy way of avoiding having to take a firm stance on whether slavery was okay or not even if it was 1814. They can do better.

But after the museum we went out to explore the fort. Once again of course we went o’er the ramparts (such a great poet) and enjoyed what was just an absolutely gorgeous day. My super amazing girlfriend had never been to Baltimore before and this was a great way to see how and why Baltimore is still such an important port, and get some sun, and admire some cannons. Although there is an admission fee for the museum and the fort, the grounds are open to the public, and people were using it to walk their dog and read books while eating lunch and lounge in the shade and it was just such a fantastic public space.

Fort M’Henry though was just the first stop in a whole Baltimore adventure. From there we got some lunch and checked out a used bookstore, and then went up to Federal Hill to admire the city and nearly get the car stuck on a dead-end street. After a stop by the wonderful Neighborhood Fiber Co., we finally made our way to the Walters Art Museum.

Baltimore actually has a stunning bevy of art museums, and most at an extremely convenient price of free. The Walters started off as the private collection of um the Walters, and so much of it has a rich person with a hobby vibe, but they have since branched out and the collection is impressive, overwhelmingly so if you have already had a full day of adventures. One of my personal favorite parts of the Walters is the wunderkammer room, pictured above, which is where I draw most of my decorating inspiration from. As you can clearly see from the photo my super amazing girlfriend agrees and we will start doing our own apartment up that way as soon as possible.

Another huge and excellent part of the museum is their collection of Asian art, which is really what the hobby of the Walters was. They were big into southeast Asian art and man it must be wild to be rich, and just let a lot of people know you are willing to buy some Buddha statues, and next thing you know you have hundreds and hundreds of Buddha statues. Now that I think about it though my mom decided one day that she was into otters (this was to fend off her mother’s previous notion that she was into teddy bears), and now she has quite an extensive collection of otters (like, pictures and statues and stuff, not real otters), so maybe we can all glimpse that lifestyle if we really try. Anyways this whole paragraph was just to have an excuse to display the above picture, “Lovers near a Duck Pond,” which, you know, speaking of decorating, I always wanted to have a duck pond.

Anyways I should note that when we were there their big temporary exhibit was the wonderfully named “Majolica Mania.” Majolica is a type of pottery and they really went wild back in the day with the designs and it was extremely impressive what they could do with it. The really exciting part was the extremely colorful lead glaze. My personal favorite pieces was the above set of tea wares because they look like they are tiki and I do love me a tiki aesthetic until I think way too hard about colonialism.

After that we packed up and went home, having had a wonderful day in the wonderful city of Baltimore. It won’t be our last day there, since there is still an aquarium to go to and several boats to visit, but until then, it was a pretty excellent day!

I had the opportunity, late last year, to visit the White House, and I avoided it because it seemed like a hassle. But just yesterday (as of writing, weeks ago as of posting) on a not so bright Friday morning I visited the White House! I didn’t see Biden, or more importantly Willow.

Entering the White House was a bit nerve-wracking. It was all very straightforward, less security than I thought there would be quite frankly, and the Secret Service guys were great, but I was flanked by off-duty cops sporting Blue Lives Matter gear and that made me uncomfortable as heck. There was a much bigger crowd than I had been expecting given the fact that you have to ask your Congressperson to be able to go on a tour, and I was the only one to dress up. I was going to the White House! So I wore a jacket and tie. The rest of the crowd was much more a t-shirt and shorts vibe, however.

Anyways upon entry you walk past some pictures, in my case of the Bidens’ dogs and again Willow, and you turn the corner after peering out into the Kennedy Garden and then find a gift shop. More like a gift stand, but I picked up a lapel pin for myself and a bookmark for my super amazing girlfriend. I only mention this because I like the thought of the President popping down to pick up something real quick if he needed an easy birthday present or something. Most of the tour would be a lot funnier if the president popped by real quick.

I almost never read ahead, so I wasn’t expecting anything, but the tour is actually very short. In my case it was self-guided, though there was a dude in the ballroom saying stuff about it (it would be weird if he was talking about something else). The big thing in that room was that the chandeliers took a full day each to clean and it required a crane. The public areas of the house are pretty limited. There is a ground floor with a variety of rooms you can peer into, like the China room (which makes me think of that scene where he calls it the dish room in The American President) and the library pictured up top. When was the last time you think anyone read a book from there? Actually my big thing with all the rooms is I wonder if the look will ever get updated. Like it seems Teddy Roosevelt managed to do a major remodel, but when Truman did his remodel he made sure to keep everything as close to the same as possible. But now that it’s like, the way it is, there is no way that President Ocasio-Cortez in 10 (or 2?) years could go in and give the place a minimalist vibe, you know? Can you imagine? This is probably a deeper problem with American institutions but all I’m trying to say here specifically is when my super amazing girlfriend becomes President she is stuck with the wallpaper.

Anyways you eventually proceed upstairs where the rooms go from being functionally-named to color-named. I’m trying to remember if I had any deep thoughts about these rooms. These rooms felt a lot more functional, in that they seem to often have functions in them. The carpets in all the rooms were partially rolled up to prevent us plebeians from walking on them, but it was clear they could be unrolled and then people could stroll about having state functions or whatever. The artwork was mostly focused on portraits of presidents and their families. There were a lot of portraits. In the ballroom was that portrait of Washington Dolley Madison saved, Kennedy looked sadly at some flowers, and Carter and Johnson are next to each other in the main hallway there. There was some other artwork however that was much more my vibe (though I will note again here besides the portraits there was nothing that looked more recent than like 1900 that I remember; when my super amazing girlfriend is President I am going to put up something scandalous) (and maybe even more pictures of boats also):

Anyways after looking at a few more rooms you are almost done. There is what seems to be the designated selfie spot (not pictured) where you can get your picture taken by the friendly guard between two flags, and then you turn around and more or less head out the door. The below photo with the piano is from just inside the door. You can tell the piano came from Roosevelt’s remodel because he really liked eagles and everything he had added came with gigantic eagles (he also had buffalos put into one of the fireplaces). I am supportive of this aesthetic but when I am in charge of decorating I will try to round out the animals included.

But yeah anyways the tour was neat I suppose. I guess things happened in these rooms, but going on the tour didn’t really make me feel any closer to like, the seat of power or anything. Maybe it is because you enter in the side, scurry through the basement, and then hop out what I think is technically the back door to the place. Still, nice they let us American citizens come and check the place out, though an invite to an actual party would be nice sometime, Joe. Anyways I want to end on the note that as I was exciting I spotted mushrooms growing out of the lawn. My only thought there was that if my dad was President, he would still probably spend 10 minutes every time he got out of the Beast picking weeds.