Video Game Art

Sarah and I headed down into DC this weekend to see the video game exhibit at the smithsonian art museum (http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/archive/2012/games/).

The museum was more full than usual of 18-35 year old males wearing niche T-shirts, which I think was brilliant, as they made us walk through lots of proper art to get to the good stuff. They had some good exhibits up, with games through the ages, lots of screens for kids to play with, and a cool movie of people playing games. People look intense when they play games...

Spring Cleaning

With the weather turning beautiful, we opened the windows, let the fresh air in and did some spring cleaning. This involved finally sorting out some of the stuff we have moved from closet to closet for at least four houses. I also threw out some of my slightly more religious holy socks. This was pretty much all of them, so on Sunday I had all of three socks. Apparently, socks wear out....

On the baby front, we've assembled the cot/crib, and I learned that the baby can see it if you shine a flashlight on Sarah's stomach. I am teaching it morse code.

Orange, Virginia

Sarah and I went on a mini-holiday away this weekend, travelling down to Orange in Virginia, about 2 hours south of here. It's a really beautiful, quiet rural area, and the weather was perfect, as I found on my run this morning:



It's near Shenandoah park, and the mountains in the distance are the ones you can drive along on Skyline Drive.

We stayed in a very chill B&B and used it to explore some of the local area. Nearby is James Madison's house, which has exhibits on the constitution and a newly re-done house made to look like it did at the time Madison was president.






Last photo is Sarah in front of a ruined building near a winery. There were many more vineyards in Virginia than I expected!

Panda-tastic

We headed over to the DC zoo this weekend, benefiting from the fact that as the zoo of the capital, we get Pandas from China. We got a good view of one of the pandas, hidden in the distance:



The rest of the zoo was good, especially the reptile houses with many small, brightly coloured frogs for Sarah. We found a lovely place for lunch, reminding us how many places we still have to see in Washington.

We've also received our new piece of furniture in the dining room, which looks great:

Bring on the Swedish Meatballs

Sarah and I went to Ikea, the Swedish meatball restaurant/furniture shop, this weekend to buy some things to prepare our house for all the coming excitement.

Whilst there, we rapidly realised that our plan to buy two china cabinets would be slightly complicated by the 44 page assembly manual. I have had trouble putting together bookshelves from Ikea, so building a functional china cabinet with glass, drawers, shelves and doors was perhaps not a good plan. The ikea price includes the cost of the item, but not the cost of marriage counselling, tears and broken plates from my complete inability to build things.

Luckily, on our way home, we stopped off at the Amish market we bought our table from, and they had a perfect match for us. This seems a better plan....

Decorating the Nursery

This weekend, Sarah and I took a quick trip to Great Falls, on the Potomac, to enjoy the beautiful February weather.

We spent the rest of the long weekend decorating the nursery-to-be in our spare room with Dinosaur decals. The decals are awesome, and look really good in the room:

Biometrics

On Friday, Sarah and I headed over to a small innocuous building in a Mall somewhere in the urban sprawl of DC. The building, between a Pizza Hut and a Subway, had blacked out windows and an unimpressive look. I was excited, as this was where I was going for biometric scanning to update my green card. I like the science in NCIS and Bones, so I couldn't wait to see the approaches that would be taken to biometricaly scan me. I imagined DNA readers, retinal scanners, maybe one of those cool machines they have at airports now to scan just under your clothes. I imagined there would be blue lights and infrared cameras.

It was disappointing when, after waiting briefly in line, I was fingerprinted and photoed by a very pleasant federal worker, and sent on my way. This was neat and all, but I somehow felt my high tech science hopes had been dashed....