Mr KT Goes to Washington

It's been mostly a working weekend. I've been working in my hotel suite, but I should probably have gone into the office as the internet connection is frustratingly slow, and I've been using some quite large files. It's more relaxed here though and I can work in just my pants (if I wanted to - I don't: I like to work in a suit and tie).

I did get out to see a bit of DC though on Saturday afternoon. I got off the Metro near the White House and wandered around. I'd loaded my GPS receiver and PDA with all the local Geocaches, so my wandering was driven by that. I meandered around looking for caches. Because I was in an area where hidden boxes of treasures would probably be eyes with more than a little suspicion the caches were all "virtual" caches. That is, instead of finding an object like you would with a normal cache, the coordinates lead you to an interesting place or monument, and you have to answer a couple of questions to prove to the cache owner that you've found it. These aren't as exciting as finding real caches, but was a good way to see the National Mall (to which I've been before) since it lead me to interesting places some of which are off the beaten track.

I went to the Natural History Museum. It was quite good. I first went to the mammal section and that made me miss ThingOne. Every animal I saw I imagined ThingOne getting excited and doing the noise of the animal (or sometimes doing a weird sound which she somehow imagines is the noise the animal makes; for example giraffes seem to make the same noise as elephants).

I then went into the dinosaur section. This made me miss Anne, since I remembered how a few years ago, on a day off from a conference in Washington, she made a bee-line for the dinosaurs in this very Natural History Museum, when a proper girl would have hit the shops, and bought shoes.

I caught a 3D IMAX movie on sharks which was pretty impressive. The intro was a very sincere rant about how mankind is destroying the habitat of sea creatures and driving many species to extinction. As if to drive home just how screwed the oceans are the whole audience was cackling throughout this intro and trying to touch the on-screen jelly fish.