11 January 2004

So. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is bigger than I expected. It's also free every day; sometimes you have to pay to get into a special exhibit (as we did Sacred Symbols), but the rest is free. So we'll definitely have to go back, because we didn't finish the second floor, didn't even glance at the third.

The Americas are too large to have an unthemed exhibit about their antiquities, was my conclusion yesterday, and despite the title, they didn't do a very good job of focusing on religious significance of either the objects themselves or the decoration of the objects. So it was mostly "here are a few objects from each of several pre-Columbian American cultures." They were, happily, all whole; Timprov greeted us on our return with, "Did you enjoy your potsherds?" but in fact we saw no shards at all, just whole pots.

We also looked at 20th century Moroccan women's textiles, which was interesting, but I'm glad they put some of them on faceless black dummies (black, not African-in-descent), because otherwise they just would have been big rectangular pieces of cloth with very little indication of how they looked on. And we looked at Whistler's etchings.

I never did get my stuff to post yesterday; stupid internet. (I originally typed "stupid interent," which would be, I should think, a very slow communication system. Worthwhile, but slow.) It seems to be working much better this morning, though. And I'm further into Jesse Byock's Medieval Iceland, and hooray for that. Plenty of notes for The Mark of the Sea Serpent and beyond; plenty to just enjoy for its own sake. Byock does as a professional what I was fumbling towards as a sixteen-year-old with an independent research project, and then some. It's no wonder he's my favorite Icelandic historian.

Mark and I went up to Aaron's last night; Amber and Marte-girl were in town, and we also got to meet a bunch of Aaron's other friends (who are now 49% Em's as well, like the Socrates dog). And I played with puppies, and Aaron gave me some black muscat to drink, and it was lovely. Aaron's other friends are Festies, friendly types, muchly tolerant of geekage.

I don't really feel comfortable around non-geeks unless they're family. I can fake comfortable with the best of them, and my definition of geek involves all kinds of directions of geekage -- doesn't have to be SF, or hard science, or anything like that. But after a few hours, I start to get edgy if I know I have to keep from geeking out. Luckily, this is not much of a live issue in my life.

So. Plans for today include talking to the folks and heading out for dinner with Stella, Mike, and Roo. When Stella and I were e-mailing back and forth about dinner options, she said she wanted to take the Roo safest. But there was neither a hyphen nor a space, so I read Roosafest, and thought, huh, like Lollaparooza, maybe! Lollaparooza '04! Woooooo! (Timprov wanted to know why the New Deal wasn't called Roosafest. He thought that would have been a popular sort of name for a set of government programs. They would probably have sold more T-shirts that way, at the very least.) Also, an attack on Melvin The Laundry Monster is warranted, and lo, these many other tasks, putting away more Christmas decorations and Christmas presents, paying bills, balancing the checkbook, working on the Not The Moose, and collapsing in a Byock-reading heap. Sounds like a plan, right?