downright amazed

Fall is shaping up to be a whirlwind of trips. Last week, it was Yakutat; now I'm in Seattle before heading off to Las Vegas on Tuesday. Yakutat Part 2 is on the agenda before the end of the month, home for Thanksgiving, and Europe for the winter holidays. If the leaves won't change colors for me in Juneau, I guess I'll change cities.

This Seattle four day respite from work obligations is filled with luxuries. I'm soaking up the sun in all its glory - undiminished by cloud cover, unsaturated by rain. I can almost feel my skin thanking me for the Vitamin E.

Another thing I needed to stock up on was a trip to a good museum. Sure Juneau has two, and the State Museum's not so bad, but the City Museum makes me want to throw crackers at people. I'm a nerd, and I love museums, so I have certain standards. Namely, that they shouldn't have racist introductory videos.

This weekend, I checked out Bodies: The Exhibit, comprising over 200 cadavers and explaining the complex layers and systems of the incredible human body. Some was a reprise of freshman biology, and the bones bit was not as interesting as my Human Osteology course in college, but the room with the human fetuses was creepy so this exhibit got the Valtrex Seal of Approval. Congratulations Bodies: the Exhibit! You're herpes free. You may think this picture is from the exhibit, but you'd be wrong. It's Seamus after we played BomberMan, and I'll tell you right now that he is not a teamplayer. That's me in the background grooving with a Guiness post-slaughter.

Today we saw "Deep Sea 3D" on IMAX and the traveling Dead Sea Scrolls Exhibit, which unfortunately was NOT 3D. Every movie should be done on 3D; it blows my mind. And Seattle IMAX goers are high-falootin' with their sturdy plastic 3D glasses and not just the flimsy cardboard kind that bends funny after being used a thousand times and makes your eyes cross-eyed after 10 minutes.

I did not actually take this picture of a dead sea scroll because the pieces we saw were encased in protective glass and special Japanese paper, and they were only (dimly) lit periodically because they couldn't be exposed to a lot of light. We saw scraps from Genesis, part of the Ten Commandments, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Book of War, and Psalms - the oldest found so far. Material history always fills me with a sense of humble awe. And now I'm all about archaeology again instead of law. Sorry human rights field. I'm a dirt digger at heart.