We set to sail on a packet full of spice, rum, and tea leaves

(. . . but first, a word from our sponsor.)

Dear brain. You know I don't write slash. We both know I'm already working on yet another story involving the sea. So why did you give me dreams about a shipful of drowned sailors and rough trade? Please, cease and desist. I don't want to have to scrub you out with bleach again. Thank you.

So. Yesterday was a really good day. As part of their continued incentive to move to New England, greygirlbeast and humglum drove up from Rhode Island to visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History and I took the bus into Harvard Square to meet them. I hadn't been to the museum since a field trip in sixth grade, from which I turned out to remember only Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka's glass flowers and the immense sea-dragon skeleton of the Kronosaurus, so for all intents and purposes it was a new experience for me. And it's an excellent museum; Cait likened it to a church, and I won't disagree. I was particularly taken with the two-story room from which you can look up into the suspended bones of a right whale, a fin whale, and a sperm whale, like cathedral architecture with their great backbones and Jonah-ribs. And because the collection was put together in the nineteenth century, it's the kind of museum where the label card for the porcupine includes Malaysian folklore about its quills and the small South American deer comes with hunting instructions—like eighteenth-century knuckledusters, this charms me. Not all the specimens have been kept up as well as perhaps they should. The iridescent wings of hummingbirds are dusty; the monk seal's fur looks as worn as a well-loved carpet; the leather of a rhinoceros' neck is cracking to reveal papier-mâché. In some ways, that's as much a token of their age as anything else: it's not flash and interactive, and it makes the difference in time real . . . It probably still wouldn't kill the ambience if someone dusted the hummingbirds.

So we wandered around the fossils and the bones and the stuffed and mounted wildlife pretty much until the museum closed and kicked us out. We hadn't even seen all the permanent exhibits. There was a trayful of beautiful little carved wooden creatures in their gift shop, ojime beads, so I got Cait an octopus as a very early Cephalopodmas present; I believe Spooky picked up a nautilus.* And then we had dinner at Mr. Sushi in Arlington Center before Cait and Spooky returned to the wilds of Rhode Island, and I went home and watched two episodes of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with my family and fell over for the night. And you already know about my dreams. Er.

It's always strange to meet people whom you have previously known only through their words, published or exchanged, so this is my verdict. If ever again I need an afternoon of natural history and really good conversation, Cait and Spooky are the people for it. Thank you, both of you. This was like an extra day of vacation.

And there was even a platypus.

*What I really wish they'd sold were little replicas of the model of Tiktaalik roseae on the third floor, but maybe that was too geeky even for a museum shop?