Spring is Wonderful

After a generally cold April, spring is finally here. Spring has always been my favorite seasons. While other people love fall, I never liked it as much, it was about death and loss to me. Spring is better, it is about new life and rebirth and baby leaves and flowers and birds nests. It is wonderful and magical to see how quickly everything can change. Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the last few days.

Same tree on April 22,

April 28

and today

Same tree April 29

and today

April 29

and today

Spring doesn’t last forever, and these first few days where everything comes to life come and go quickly. Its wonderful and amazing, and even warm enough for my grandma to go outside.

Sixty-five Years Between Us

My grandma doesn’t like when she has to go to the bathroom. She says there is to much stuff you have to do. The fumbling with clothes, sitting, washing hands. She thinks that’s a lot. Why can’t she just sit in her chair. Who wants to do all that work?

When she says it I encourage her that she still has to make the trip, but I also laugh a bit inside, because compared to all I do in a day one small trip to the bathroom is nothing. The ride on the train (which ended up being delayed and got me to work late) the frantic setting up, taking to hundreds of people while I also researched dinosaurs, wrote some e-mails, brainstormed ideas for new activity guides and how to better engage guests. Then I cleaned an exhibit, handled a last minute lost guest issue, walked along Lake Michigan, caught another train, got off the train, drove home, had dinner (which my awesome mom had already prepared), cleaned the kitchen, found yet another episode of Monk for us to watch. And this was a slow day.

And to clarify it was also an awesome, amazing and super fun day filled with some great people. I simply point out how busy I was because that is what my life is like right now. Its full of running and multitasking and my brain is always split into different segments all working on different projects and trying to figure out what’s for dinner, while helping children uncover a dinosaur fossil, and keeping track of how many minutes before storytime.

My grandma’s brain is much slower and foggier than mine. I’m still in that youthful part of my life where its hard to imagine that there may well be a time when my mind is just as tired and foggy all the time as hers. Yesterday she spent about 15 minutes thinking about what she would like to watch on TV, and then fell asleep instead. We are in different phases of our lives, sixty-five years between use. She is full of (probably forgotten) history, I am full of youth and vigor and excitement. She likes nothing more than sitting in her chair watching her favorite shows day after day. The same daily routine would drive me crazy, and has on some of the days where I have spent all day on the couch with her doing exactly this. My parents have come home to find my strange and loopy.

Yet we are both happy, doing what we want to be doing.

23 and Happy

Today is my 23 birthday and it was wonderful. I tried to write a post about my birthday earlier in the day and it just wasn’t coming to me, which typically means that what I am supposed to write down on (digital) paper just hasn’t come to me yet. Then I went out to dinner tonight and it was wonderful. I already knew that I was going out to dinner because my mom had told me that I was NOT allowed to make dinner and that there was already a special “going out” outfit picked out for my grandma. However, I thought it would just be my parents, brother and grandma.

Instead, we went to Culver’s for a birthday party surprise. Anyone who might think a Culver’s party is strange clearly has never been there before and certainly doesn’t live in my town, where Culver’s just opened two weeks ago after months of great anticipation. Before long lots of other people in the family and some of my best pals started showing up and pretty soon all my grandparents and other important people were there and we feasted on butter burgers and custard and it was fantastic.

Part of the group

It was so great that by the time the oreo cake showed up we could hardly eat it.

We all had a great time surrounded by love and happiness and cheese curds. The (almost) year since I graduated from college has not been a year of far flung travel or adventures to new places, but it has been a wonderful adventure returning home and being surrounded by the love and happiness that I took for granted when I was younger and didn’t yet realize how wonderful and unique and difficult to find it was. Before I had realized that love and happiness were the only things that truly mattered.

The only disconcerting thing was the silent TV behind us, detailing the FBI and Boston PD slowly closing in on Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Just like the rest of the world I know very little about Dzhokar and his brother, and what could have led them to do such terrible things. But I do know that he must have never been truly happy like I am, and that is one of the few things that makes me sad.

Dirt and Spring and Belonging

“Where did the T-Rex’s skin go?” the child asked me, trying to make sense of the skeletons she was seeing.

It launched us into a short, but interesting conversation that I really could have only had with someone 3-4 years old. A conversation about how when things die their skin falls away and blows off and then it just turns into dirt, and one day we will die and our skin will blow away to and then we will just be dirt. And this is not something to be worried about, its just something that happens.

Yesterday was a very quiet day at the museum, although I obviously was still able to meet some very interesting people. The weather had started out cold, windy and overcast, and I had regretted not wearing a coat as I made the short but very cold walk from the train to the museum. However, when I walked out later that day the world had changed. It was over 70 degrees, and all the people that had been missing inside were outside running, walking, adventuring and instagramming and it was wonderful.

The world had changed (as it is constantly changing) and it reminded me of when I traveled to London and how as soon as I got off the plane everything was (sort of) green when back in Chicago it had been snowing.

And both times I was surrounded by the arrival of spring and happy people and how I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Then I looked at The Field Museum again, surrounded by green and people.

And I thought about how many people had walked by the museum over the nearly 100 years it has been standing here, and how many people walked by it when it was located where the Museum of Science and Industry is today, and how many people walked by and interacted with the the artifacts and specimens inside the museum in the thousands of years before they came to live at the museum and how most of those people have now turned to dirt. And this is not something to be worried about, its just something that happens. But before these people turned to dirt they (hopefully) explored and adventured and saw beautiful things and felt happy the way I feel happy, and that is why we are here.

 

I promise there were people, even though my pictures are strangely lacking in people, since I often don’t like to actually take pictures of strangers

Space Exploration from Inside my own Home

Recently I have become (re)enamored with space and how absolutely amazing the universe is and how I am just one little speck on one little planet in a place so big that no one can fully grasp it. Then two interesting things happened that seemed to solidify that this was something I should be thinking about.

The first was that George Takei posted a link on his facebook page (which if you don’t follow him, join the rest of the world in viewing his daily posts) to Col. Chris Hadfield’s facebook profile. Col. Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who is currently Commanding the International Space Station as part of Expedition 35. Col Hadfield uploads pictures taken from the ISS several times throughout the day and they are absolutely amazing. I think it is easy for us in this day and age to quickly over look some of the amazing images that astronauts send back from space, it is easy to forget that it was incredibly recently that we were able to see these pictures at all. Most people in the world lived and died never knowing what the rock they lived on looked like from far up in space. And this rock looks pretty incredible to me. I also quickly discovered that Col. Hadfield also uploads videos to the Canadian Space Agency youtube page and lots of other astronauts upload lots of other things as well.

Are peanut butter and honey sandwiches a Canadian thing?

Then the second thing was getting to see some pieces of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, the one that landed in Russia a few months ago.

Over 200 pieces were donated to the Field Museum to be saved and studied so that we here on Earth can learn more about the big giant world around us. They are little rocks that just a few months ago were soaring around space going places and seeing things that I will never see or experience and now somehow they are here with me and I can go look at them and its incredible and exciting and fantastic.

I may be just a little speck on a planet that is no more than a slightly larger speck, but being a little speck around here is pretty amazing because even though I am not in space I can sort of experience a tiny part of it and people that aren’t even on Earth can send me pictures and video of what life up in the sky is like. I think I always knew that you could see the ISS from space, but never really thought about viewing it before, but I have also learned in the past week that there are listings for when the ISS will be flying over various parts of the world, so hopefully on a clear night sometime soon I can watch it zoom past.

Also my youtube page recommendations are now pretty much entirely space, Field Museum, and Parks and Rec related.

Watching the Birds

Today my grandma and I had an adventure at the Field Museum. She wasn’t sure why we were going or what we would be doing there. It was raining, weren’t we going to get wet? No, don’t worry, we will be inside, we will have a chair to wheel you around, you won’t have to walk far.

Adventuring in the car

I wanted her to go because she needs to get out of the house and see the world more than she does. Keeping her active keeps her healthy, but I also worry about over exerting her and putting her in situations that she is uncomfortable. At first it wasn’t going so well. The two temporary exhibits, which I absolutely love, were simply to much for her. They are both a bit dark and a little to abstract for her to understand. Afterwards we were out in Stanley Field Hall and she was looking around at the half-dozen families and adults and the handful of school groups walking around.

“Is it this busy all the time!” she asked.

I laughed a bit, “No, this is a really slow day I said.” The past few weeks have been so busy with spring break crowds the poor building could hardly breath, its only this week that the building has slowed down and it feels empty to me. However, my grandma is only used to seeing and interacting with around 10-15 people total and most days only talks to three or four people. Merely being surrounded by several dozen people at once (when she was never a social person to begin with) was almost overwhelming for her. I wondered if maybe we should just go home after lunch so she could take it easy, but then after lunch we went to see the birds.

My grandma has (recently?) become fascinated with birds. She sits and eats her breakfast in the morning and watches the sparrows fly around, wondering what they might be up to. “There’s a bird! What’s it doing? Oh, there it goes again!” The birds hall at the museum is beautiful and has recently been remodeled. She spent the afternoon looking at owls, ducks, cardinals, hummingbirds, turkeys and even an ostrich. And it was awesome. So much awesome.

She said the turkey looked sad because we were going to eat him

The Ostrich is bigger than you are!

 

Watching the birds

I think I will have to look to see if Animal Planet/National Geographic/the library have some bird documentaries. We also have lots of birds that like to nest in the yard and hopefully it will warm up soon and we can sit outside some days and watch them fly to and from their nests. We could spend a whole day happily watching some birds.

 

 

Magic is Always Worth It

This morning I got up before six, read a book (more on that some other time), helped my grandma, ate breakfast, made lunch, and then off to work I went. I stood on the train because it was crowded, worked all day, dug up a few (casts of) dinosaur fossils, talked to hundreds of people, helped make a grumpy little boy happy, had to clean some extra corn, worked on some new programming and checked out a new exhibit. Then I got on the train and stood all the way home because it was super crowded again, which is good because it meant that lots of people visited the museums and had other exciting adventures today.

Then I got home and sat down to eat dinner. And then I realized I was exhausted. There was that little moment when I thought, “Gosh, I have to get up and do all of that again tomorrow!?!” Then I remembered all the wonderful reasons I was tired and hopefully all the wonderful things that will happen tomorrow, and how many of the magical things are things that I create myself. The best thing about childhood is that you believe in magic, the best thing about adulthood is that you get to create magic. Today I created magic by giving kids a place to explore, play and adventure. I read stories and talked about alligators. Tomorrow I plan to create more magic. I have plans to talk about dogs and cats and show off some canine and feline skulls and maybe get some botany specimens out to talk about plants and flowers and how magical and amazing it is when everything starts blooming in the spring. There is so much amazing fun and magic to be had.

A little while back I posted about The Importance of Believing in Magic and how amazing bioluminescence is. Here’s another video about how amazing and magical it is. Because when you live in a world with carnivorous deep sea sponges, your world is pretty amazing.