Wildlife and Writing

I'm writing outside today.  A hummingbird, amethyst cuirass around its throat, has just buzzed me to see if I am going to get up and chase it.  Satisfied I'm not going to move,  it zipped over to the fountain and danced in the air in front of it as if it were a Venus Flytrap that eats hummingbirds.  Eventually, it settled on the fountain's basalt column and took furtive sips.

I'm hoping to get some writing done; right now it's overcast and not too hot out on the deck (the sunlight bouncing between the deck and the sliding glass patio doors spikes the heat around the time the sun passes through the meridian).  I'm going back and forth between typing out a draft (which feels more productive) or writing longhand in a Newly Minted Book of Art (which can be a good starting point when inspiration runs dry--as long as I don't devolve into channeling Atlantian Glyphs)).  With any luck, the Lycanthropic Tea Time Ritual Children will not come out to shriek their incantations.   

Now a pileated woodpecker is examining our cherry tree and occasionally peering at me from behind a trunk.

Yesterday, Mark cleaned out the garden shed.  It had succumbed to entropy and most of the contents were in a disorganized clutter.  He also confirmed that rodents -- either small rats or large mice -- had taken up residence in the shed.  He cleaned out the shredded insulation and shopping bag they'd used to make a nest and swept the shed's floor.  To Aoife's great excitement.  

I'm pretty sure she spent a solid three hours running into the shed, out of the shed, behind the shed, and back into it, all the while sniffing wildly and whining.  Based on how they would scamper toward him, Mark was of the opinion that the varmints weren't very bright, but somehow they managed to evade the dog.

A different, plainer hummingbird has arrived, and is sampling the rosemary for any early autumnal blooms.  

I spent most of the day persuing the Visual Arts:  practicing construction of pentagons and practicing the construction of Middle Kingdom Egyptian Heiroglyphs.  Later, I did some homework for my Egyptian class, translating simple phrases involving gendered singular, dual, and multiple possessives.   With any luck (and effort), this will allow me to read inscriptions of some New Kingdom artifacts that will arrive in the Portland Art Museum next month.  

Now a squirrel has dislodged an apple from the branch it was on, causing the branch to spring upward and launch the squirrel into a kind of frantic pole dance as it tries to hang on, which has released some more apples.  Thudding apples provided uneven rhythm.   This is probably a message from the universe about story submissions and rejection letters and a reminder that blogging isn't writing speculative fiction (much).

Autumnal Equinox 2021

Happy Equinox!  

Earlier today I focused the sun's light onto a candle so we'll have Equinox Fire! in the evening.   I may even burn some frankincense and myrrh outside so Mark doesn't smell it.

My current Book of Art is full, and today feels like a good day to start a new one.  

It's pleasant out:  the sky is mostly clear, the sun's not too hot, and there's a slight breeze.  We're still benefiting from the weekend's heavy rains in that the ground and air aren't so desiccated and various doors have become easier to open and close.   

Raptors & Artistic Legacy

The other day I visited the Cascades Raptor Center with my camera.  A rain front was looming, and it would be the last day of the hot and dry weather.  I figured if I waited to go, I'd be flitting from aviary to aviary, hunched over my camera while trying to take photographs of raptors huddled away against the rain.  

Some of the residents have afternoon walks or at least sessions where they are brought out.  Taking pictures of them is always easier when this is so because I don't have to contend with the mesh of their enclosures.  If a resident is mewed up and I get close to the mesh and the resident is on the other side of their aviary, it's possible to blur out the bars, but there's always some kind of interference pattern superimposed over the raptor I'm photographing.

I've become enough of a regular over the last few years -- between my long hair and long-lensed camera apparently I stand out -- and I was chatting with one of the handlers and he asked, "What do you do with all the pictures you take?"  

The question gave me a little pause.  "Oh, I said, mostly I store them on Google Photos."  I thought a little more.  "I like to tell myself that I will use them as resources for drawing birds, but I'm pretty awful when it comes to illustrating them.  I am interested in seeing how they inspire the shapes for Middle Kingdom Egyptian Hieroglyphs; if you look at their legs --" 

"--their pantaloons?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "and also how their wingtips and tail feathers come together."  And then the conversation veered onto hieroglyphs.  

Later, at home, the subject of photographs came up.  Mark said, "You know, honey, nobody is going to look at those photographs -- especially after you die.  So if you want people to see them, you'd better start arranging a funeral slideshow now."

"Why wait for a funeral?" I asked.  "Once COVID is under control (fingers crossed on that one), we can have people over for a little salon and we can have wine and cheese and set up three projectors in rotation and people can wander in little groups between the screens."  

"Honey, that's called 'a home slide show,' and people hated them back in the 1950's."

"Yes," I said, "I believe I've heard that referenced as 'The Bore Wars.'"  (And I do remember my folks having little get-togethers and bringing out Slide Carousels of Their Adventures Overseas.)

The question about that I ultimately do with the photos has lingered, especially as I uploaded them to various social media sites.  I enjoy taking pictures of the raptors for the same reason I enjoy taking pictures of MET artifacts or the Moon or other astronomical phenomenon:  the thrill of collecting.  It's more than just collection, though, it's also marking a particular time or space -- akin to the attitude behind the phrase, "what is remembered, lives."  Additionally, there are cathartic elements of being a participant-observer of something outside of oneself.   But these answer the question of why I take the photos, not what I do with them afterward.

I suppose what I do with them doesn't matter so much -- except that if that were true, I'd go through my photo collections and erase everything.  So keeping them is important; but my feeling is that they're more than just mementos validating my duration.  I suspect that this is a manifestation of the Art versus Craft question -- once you've made something creative or artistic, what are you going to Do with it?  

I think this is the point where I go an find a copy of the "Art For Art's Sake" manifesto.... 

Moon and Antares

The other night I went out and photographed the Moon near Antares.  As usual with photos taken of the sky when the Moon is much more than five days old, the moon is over-exposed in order to get Antares to show at all.   

It turned out that while the Moon was near its North Ascending Node, it was still below the ecliptic and low enough in the sky that I had to go into the street to capture it with my camera.

Since Antares is one of the so-called Royal Stars, I decided that I could us the position of the Moon on Portable Stonehenge to mark Antares' position on the Wheel of the Year.  Thousands of years ago, Antares would have been near the sun during the northern hemisphere's autumnal equinox  but the procession of the seasons has shifted things around and now it's closer (relatively speaking) to the sun during the winter solstice.

And yes, the song "Beyond Antares" is playing in my head now.

Writing Difficulties

I'm finding it difficult to write.  The problem has been going on for at least a year.  It might not have started with COVID lock-downs and the coincidental advent of a new job in Spring of 2020, but those events may have laid the groundwork.   

I noticed that I was stuck writing political revenge fantasies, mostly involving either angels or cybernetic beings carrying out judgements and exiling The Evil Ones to Pluto (or else a thousand years of stasis).  Occasionally, I imagined a Romanesque march of the wicked as a warning to children and delinquents.   Then I would worry that I was some kind of monster or fanatic... and I'd hear Gandalf the Grey saying, "Yes, that's how it would begin."   

When I did manage to break away from the revenge fantasies, the stories I did write were focused on an idea or the setting, but were light on actual plot.  

My mother's sister died suddenly (not from COVID, but from complications of MS).  

Then, last year we got hit by the forest fires' smoke; the Mordor-level of air quality kept us all indoors.  I couldn't go out to exercise, and we all got a bought of cabin fever.   When the smoke finally cleared after about two weeks, the rains came and there were extended periods of grey.  And I got sad and tired and listless.  

And then the elections picked up and I spent a lot of time doom-scrolling.  I was relieved when Biden won the presidency.  And then my father's elderly sister died (after a fall).  And then the insurrection happened.  More doom-scrolling.  The problem with doom-scrolling is that it tunes the mind to 150 character vignettes--this would be fine if I were composing (or reading) haiku, but most social media posts are variations of "Hey! I'm over here!" or "Intruder Alert!"

I thought writing would be easier once May First and the obvious return of light occurred... and I could start stories, but they stalled.  Maybe not all stories, but a lot.  At least I could smile when I saw a meme captioned, "Tell me the truth; I can take it. / World building isn't enough--you have to actually write a plot with characters who make choices and act."  

I did write some flash pieces.  They made the rounds through critique and have gone out to various markets.  And... I feel like I should be writing more, but I've got all these dead-end story starts piling up and sometimes it feels like all I do is write enough of something to get stuck after about 1500 words.   

Sometimes I think I get stuck because I'm trying to work from an outline of plot tokens based on a particular market's research--I'm trying to tell a magazine's story and not my own.  Other times it feels like I'm not connected to something I want to say--the story's heart--and I can't envision it clearly enough to be able to communicate it.  Or maybe I've passed some geriatric milepost and my mental capacity for story has diminished.  

On bad days, trying to write is like being in a sad Annie Lennox song.  On worse days, I feel nothing and write nothing.  On okay days, I blog, or read old favorites (partially for fun, partially to look at how the words are put together).  On not enough days I submit manuscripts.  I think if I can get back into the swing of things, I'll be okay.  

On The Brink of Autumn

Writing outside this morning, I have to wear a sweater.  The mug of tea when I hold it melts back the dampness in my hands.  Low grey clouds hide the mid-morning sun.  Last week, I noticed the change in light when we got back from New York.  While the perception that the morning light creeps over the hills at a later moment is slight, there is no missing how much earlier dusk became night. 

The plants seem tired.  This is the time of year when weeks of heat and no rain have us anticipating autumnal rains -- when will they come?  Before the equinox?  By the next full moon?  Will they wait seven more weeks until Halloween?   The neighbor's apple tree hangs heavy with fruit; it's not yellowing yet, but other trees in the neighborhood are.  The grapes, the sunflowers, the cosmos, are tinged yellow along some leaves.  Acorns and maple-wings are accumulating along the dusty sidewalks. 

The sun's broken free from the clouds and is tinting the yard yellow-orange.  I can't decide if the overcast is regular clouds or if there's some smoke from the nearest forest fire in it.  It's still early enough that the arbor vita cast fingers of light and shadow across the dried and patchy grass.  I've swung the deck's umbrella eastward to shade my eyes from the glare; my left forearm, bathed in light, feels like it's wrapped in a heating pad.  The breeze is still chilly, though -- and when a curdling of cloud gets in front of the sun, I'm glad for the sweater.  This afternoon will get into the seventies, and I'm sure I'll be able to ditch the sweater (and lap blanket).  

Kunstkammer

I was reading "Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe," which is an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I came across the term "kunstkammer," or collections of oddities / marvels / wonders.  It turns out kunstkammer can be made up of naturalia, artificia, scientifica, exotica, memorabilia, and sacralia.  It looks like they left out things like erotica.  

Various 16th C through late 19th C rulers and princes became collectors of curiosities.  Other folks might assemble mere curiosity cabinets; the powerful put together rooms or whole houses.  It was propaganda:  who had the most magnificent toys?  Rulers would even ransack rival princes' collections in times of war.  

There was a practical side, a kunstkammer could have an alchemical lab or machine shop connected to it for a ruler's scholars to pursue ore and glass production, for the production of artillery calculators and clocks, or for the renaissance equivalent of the 3D printer, the rose lathe (which supposedly honed one's mental and ruling capacities).  

As I paged through the book, I recognized many of the items (I don't spend all my time at the MET in the Egyptian Wing, it just seems like it).  It appears that all these years of going to the MET and photographing brass, silver, and gold mechanical objects has been a subconscios attempt to build my own, virtual kunstkammer.  

And, in fact, considering the sorts of of knick-knacks I keep wanting to display on my shelves (along with the books books books books books!) I can only conclude that in some past life I must have been a curator.  

What I see now is that I need to have little niches for naturalia, artificia, scientifica, exotica, memorabilia, and sacralia.   Perhaps things could rotate.  That might mollify Mark's anti-clutter instincts.  

Observing

I went to the Cascade Raptor Center last Saturday with Mark.  What struck me the most is how Mark spends from five to ten minutes just looking at one bird.  It's a long, steady look.  He stands aside in one spot and is still while other Center goers ebb and flow around him.   All that time, he's looking at the raptor; watching it sometimes stare back, or swoop to a new perch, or how it might ruffle out or smooth down its feathers.  Whereas someone like me looks at the snapshot patterns of the feathers, the curve of the beak, or the configuration of talons, Mark is collecting a long exposure picture of the animated whole.  

The Center has been moving various residents around, so we missed Archimedes the Snowy Owl and Dante the Golden Eagle.   Most of the other residents were in their usual aviaries. 

We saw one of the newer additions to the resident population:  Nyx, a barred owl.  She was brought to the Center with a head trauma after a collision with a car (very common with owls).  The Center had to teach her how to be an owl, how to strike food, and even what food was.  When we saw her, she was bathing.  

What struck me this time around was how the raptors resembled or differed from various Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs:   𓄿   𓅐   𓅓   Mostly, I was looking at leg feathers and (surprise) profiles.  I have a fantasy of using the Cascade Raptor Center residents as models for a rendering of some sort of inscription, but so far it's just a fantasy. 

 

Lepec Dragon

One of the advantages of having a mobile device is that one can use it to research cool items in the MET (like dragons) and save which galleries they are located in into a list for later visits.   This dragon is a boxwood carving by Charles Lepec, from 1886/7. 

Technically, this is might be a wyvern; the hind legs aren't evident, although they could be hidden behind the portrait.  I like how the dragon's head is a cross between a boxer's and a cat's.  The wings are not natural, but they read that way; and the intricate carving on them excuses their artificiality.  I like the baroque feel of the carving, which still manages to have robust and aerodynamic qualities.  The heraldic pose of the dragon doesn't feel antique -- it looks like an animal one would more likely find on a carousel than on a knight's shield.  

Okay, and the tiny Eros on the dragon's sphere is just enough over-the-top Art Nouveau to enchant.

If I had the means, I would expand the frame, get rid of Eros, take this dragon, twin and mirror it, and then place a mirror in the free claws and tails.  If I was feeling particularly Victorian / allegorical,  I would name one dragon, "Vanity," and the other "Validation" and carve their names into their crowns.  Or possibly have miniature, exchangeable banners that read, "I'm Beautiful, Damn It!", "Beautiful Like Me,"  or simply, "Behold!" 

Unseasoned Traveller Moments

We woke early.  The previous night we'd packed before we went to bed.  

We picked up The Child at Mark's Mom's house, and said goodbye to everyone.  

After we dropped off the car, Mark decided that The Child needed to navigate to our gate as practice for future solo air-trips.  He did fairly well getting us to the air train and the TSA Pre-check line.  I think we might need to work on reading signs, but I could be projecting my own inadequacies onto the situation.  

Several unseasoned traveller moments later we were boarding the plane.  We were the next-to-last folks to get onto the plane, with the result that all of the overhead bins had been inexpertly packed with Other People's Stray Items That Should Have Fit Under Seats.  The Child's carry-on had to be checked in on the concorse.  My carry-on started to be checked-in, but the flight attendent found some spare space in first class; then she forgot to tell me where my luggage was and I had to make inquiries.

There were a lot of families travelling with a lot of kids.  Large families.  And at least two Very Angry Babies.  I was surprised by how irritated I was -- I don't know if it was luggage arrangement, or the child behind me kicking my chair seat, or the random shrieks, or not getting enough sleep, or Covid anxiety, or a general combination of airplane travel anxiety -- I had to keep reminding myself that travelling with kids is hard and that I should thank The Child for being a good travel companion for so many years.  

I put in my (battery depleted) ear buds and cat napped for as long as the seat would let me.  

The Child had the window seat, but I did manage to take a photo of Mt. Hood as we were flying into Portland.  I know that it's late August, but Mt. Hood was looking brown and dried out as we passed it.  Ursula LeGuin had a prescient vision of Mt. Hood when she wrote "The Lathe of Heaven" nearly fifty years ago.  The haze smudging the other mountains and filling in the valleys was a sad reminder that forest fires were still burning and hadn't magically gone out while we were away.  I thought it had rained while were were on the East Coast, but I guess it hadn't.

We survived baggage claim, located the car, and I drove us south and home.  

Mark had promised The Child that we would stop about halfway home to get food at In-N-Out.  It should have been called "In-An-Hour," because from the time we entered the driveway to the time we received our food, it took us 70 minutes.  The food was fine, but I think I would have ordered ahead (not, judging by the line of foot-traffic folks, that it would have helped).

Probably the funniest thing about the wait was a discussion of 90's gay club music:  I complained that at one point, dance music devolved into a series of frantic boops with no melody, designed to tickle the limbic brains of dancers who required an extra hit to their limbic brains in order to dance.  "Explorer," by Clubroot was playing at the time, and I snorted because I realized it was only slightly more refined than the frantic boops of the '90's (but it at least pretends to have a melody).  

"It's your kind of boops," The Child said.

This led to a discussion of how most dance music in the 90's wanted to be Darude's "Sandstorm" and the realization that The Child was really into "Sandstorm" because it was good for gaming to.

We got home at 7 PM and fed cats who were grateful that we did not have the dog with us.

That was the next day.

A Gathering Pause

Mark wanted to go on a short hike through some woods near his old high school.  I wanted to write, so we went to Java Love,  and I stayed behind there while he went galavanting off.  

I was glad that I had my earbuds, because, true to my coffee shop experience, they played some really irritating music.  

This was a laid-back, rest day, and our last full day in Suffern.  The sort of day where you are mentally packing and making sure to gather all the stray objects and mementos.  

In the afternoon, V flew back to Florida.  Mark and The Child drove her to the airport.  There was an adventure involving Castle Burgers, and a long wait for what I gather was greasy and cold food.  

When Mark and The Child got back, we spent time playing Apples to Apples and listening to Grandma Mary tell more stories. 

MET Adventure 2021

Thursday was MET day.  We got up bright and early and managed to get to Dwyer Manse by eight-twenty.  Mark had ordered tickets several weeks ago for our timed entry.  V, The Child, Mark, and I climbed into the car and we were off.  

The drive into the city was mostly uneventful -- contrary to rumor, NYC drivers are relatively nice, and will make opening in the traffic and allow one to merge.  When the NYC skyline came into view, an orangey haze smudged it.  So many new buildings that are taller than the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building have gone up that it's difficult to see them.

We parked at the MET.  I wasn't expecting the checkpoint into the lot:  there was a little hut for the security guards, and a plate in the road angled up to prevent cars from moving forward (at least it didn't have little spikes on it).  A Very Cute and Ripped Guard came out with his Very Cute Golden Retriever and asked Mark to pop the trunk.  I was too distracted by the sheen of sweat across the top of his pectorals to read the text tattooed across them.  As the guard and dog circled around our car, he was telling the dog to look for things -- my window was closed so I didn't catch what he said, I think it was something like "Seek, Rusty, seek."  The dog looked like it was having fun.  

Since we didn't have any contraband, we got waved through.  V, Mark, and I all said something about how the Very Cute and Ripped Guard could search our car anytime, and The Child was mildly mortified. 

We were early, so there was a side-trip around a block to find a coffee.  I took a few shots of the architecture, which amused V.  Eugene is so frumpy and post-modern brutalist / farm shack that visiting New York City's Art Deco / Art Nouveau is like Dorothy Gale and Company stepping out of the dark forrest and seeing the Emerald City.  

If I had the means, I would take a year to research, locate, and photograph architectural details on New York City buildings.  While staying in a secret garret room in the MET.

Getting into the MET was hassle free.  We were all set to have to show proof of vaccination, get zapped by a heat gun, and everything.  But we simply showed our tickets and waltzed in.  Now that I think of it, I don't recall a bag check the way that we've had to go through in the past (although none of us had a backpack).

We made it to the Eighteenth Century Decorative Arts wing, and managed to stay together as a group until the Faberge Eggs, at which point Mark went off to look at portraits.  Portraits are Mark's Thing (and Madonna and Child -- he could look at Madonna and Child after Madonna and Child all morning), and he enjoys them more on his own.

In the 18C French gallery, I found a huge malachite vase with over-the-top angel handles that made me squeal loudly enough to be heard two galleries over.  V said it was fun going through the MET with someone who enjoyed it as much as -- if not more -- than she did.  Apparently I was adorable as I went from exhibit to exhibit pointing and squealing, and occasionally channeling my inner History Chanel host.  The Child was a good sport, and tolerated going along with us on our scavenger hunt fairly well.  There was a teen-level of disinterest, but every now and then he would snap a photo with his mobile. 

After an early lunch (The Child was hungry) in the cafe, we went to the Egyptian Wing.  The Middle Kingdom "Hetep di wesir" offering formula was everywhere, and I could read snatches of other inscriptions.  It was like going into a kindergarten room and being able to read "cat" and "dog," and I took a five-year-old's delight in being able to read.  

As I was pointing out bits of inscriptions to V, and stumbling a bit, this Very Tall, Handsom Black Man sidled up and began pointing out signs and sounds.  V insists that he was batting his eyes and leaning in toward me in a very flirtatious manner -- which I was totally oblivious to.  When he shared a printout of book information he was recommending (Papyrus Ebers, Die groBte Schriftrolle zur altagyptischen Heilkunst; by Popko, Lutz; Schneider, Ulrich Johannes; and Scholl, Reinhold), she almost thought he was giving me his phone number.  While I did sense there was some subtext I was missing, I mostly thought that it was a case of one exited student of Ancient Egyptian Writing meeting another.  Mark, who wasn't there, reminded me later that the flirting of my Canadian Boyfriend at Ocean City was probably overblown by his family (and that I get very focused on geometry or hieroglyphs or whatever and completely tune out social cues).

The three of us re-connected with Mark while on a quest to find George Washington Crossing the Delaware for The Child.  He regaled us with the Tale Of Blood in the Medici Exhibit (a woman tripped over the Very Low Art Barier Wire -- I think she was okay in the end, but the fall precipitated a nose bleed of titanic proportions).

We walked through more galleries, saw Edwin Church landscapes, Madame X, hookers, and Monets.  We also had to stop for a moment to visit with Mark's Lover, Captain George K. H. Coussmaker.  Mark has known Captain Coussmaker since 1985, long before he met me.  I am familiar with the captain, as a miniature of this portrait floats between various places in our home.  As we were paying our respects to the captain, we noticed Aoife's likeness in a nearby portrait.  

We took a detour through the music rooms to see The Cow, the Lamasu, and a quick browsing of the Mesopotamian Wing, and then it was time to go to the Gift Shop!

The hope while in the gift shop is that one will stumble across The Perfect Gift (on sale!), one that will encapsulate the experience of viewing  Or at least a Really Cool Book.  The trick with books is to find one that's not too introductory, not too specialized, not too secondary/trashy/sensationalist, and not too expensive.  

There was a book on Egyptian Magic that I was tempted by, but it looked too secondary.  There was a survey of a Egyptian archeological site that looked too specialized.  I wound up buying a gift book for our cat sitter, a gift book for my folks, and a bunch of other general survey books on stain glass, mechanical wonders, and The Cloisters.

The Child purchased some Egyptian cat figures for his friends; V purchased gifts and practical things like Persian rug coasters, a sweater, and fancy thank you notes. 

Then it was off to meet Lime Green Larry for a light snack outside the Hemsley Building, and afterward Mexican cuisine with Dwyer Family Friend, D (from Ireland).  

Stirling Hill Mine

I'm not sure how Mark found out about the Stirling Hill Mine.  It was on top of a short hill, mostly basalt and granite, upthrust at a thirty or forty degree angle.  Brightly painted abandoned mining tools were scattered along the perimeter of the parking lot.  And a lot of statues of hunky, shirtless miners -- okay and a few that weren't quite so Boris Vallejo.

It was about 85F out, and there was very little shade.  

Thankfully, the tour started earlier than advertised, and we were whisked from one tour site to the next.   The old shower building had minerals and fossils of trilobites and crinoids among the displays of old mining lamps and clothing.   I'd say the iron candle holder that pinned into a miner's hat was the most intersting, although the bowling ball sized spheres of amethyst and the glowing rocks were cool.

Then it was off to the mine, or at least the top part of it.  The mine complex stretched down about two Empire State Building lengths into the earth, but when production stopped in the 1990's, they stopped pumping water out of it, and only the top galleriers were unflooded.  While our tour guide knew a lot about mines and mining practices, she didn't know much about the folklore and superstitions of the miners (so no stories about Tommyknockers).   

Probably the most interesting part of the mine were the glowing rocks and also the standing car that would lower miners down a slanted shaft.  It was kind of like a slanted bookshelf, and the miners could sit (or more likely stand) on the shelves while the car sped down.  The car operator was outside of the mine running the geared wheel that would raise or lower it; the miners used a series of bell signals to say which level they were going into.  

I didn't realize it at the time, but looking at photos of the car a few days later, I'm struck by how the elevator car in the mine Wednesday was similar to the rope/escalator of Tuesday morning's dream.   

At the end of the mine there was another re-purposed building.  This one was dedicated to glow-in-the-dark rocks.  It turned out that some gravel Mark had picked up in the parking lot was flourescing under the black lights -- as were the age spots on my arms and my fingernails.  

Eventually, we left and drove back to the waterpark, and then back to Suffern. 

That night, as Mark and his family played poker, I surfed around the MET web site and wrote down the names and galleries of various objects:  gallery 556, gilt boxwood penel with wyvern; gallery 553, orrery clock;  gallery 551, fire screen with dragons....