For the bird must flee the winter, sir

I don't know how cold it is outside, but it is too cold for June. ladymondegreen sent me a black overshirt which is seeing a lot of use right now. The Guardian has given a very nice obituary to Tanith Lee.

This afternoon I accompanied my mother and my niece to the Museum of Science. It was Charlotte's first visit. She's seventeen months old. She loved the dioramas of New England; she pushed all the buttons to make the shorebirds light up and pointed at the stuffed black bear that visitors can touch and shouted, "Ba!" In the butterfly garden, she ran back and forth after the brightly closing wings (and the brightly colored flowers, one of which she tried to eat—my mother and the docent stopped her simultaneously), displaying incredible restraint for a toddler by obeying when told not to touch. I took dozens of pictures, some of which I can even identify. I don't know why ayaya means "butterfly" in Charlottese, but it very clearly does. I worried very much that Mathematica had been shut down, but it's just been mysteriously relocated from the main hall of the Blue Wing (its former gallery now occupied by "The Photography of Modernist Cuisine") to the back of the Theater of Electricity, directly behind the Van de Graff generator. The mockup of the Apollo Command Module has also moved from the last time I saw it. It's being saved for the next visit, along with more time with fossils. Her reactions to the Tyrannosaurus rex were equivocal, but she really liked the Pteranodon, suspended against a painted Cretaceous sky.

( A selection of butterfly pictures. )

Most of my evening went toward making Käsespätzle with derspatchel and schreibergasse. We were working from a German cookbook from the 1960's. I didn't think we had translation problems, but we must have missed the line where it said "feeds one small standing army." So much spätzle. So much. We covered them in a mix of Emmenthaler and Chorherrenkäse (of which I had never heard before seeing it in the European cheese counter of Dave's Fresh Pasta) and an experimental sprinkling of paprika in the overflow dish. They were terrific. Chewy, cheesy, the weird sweet spot between egg noodle and dumpling that makes me want to put a meat gravy over them. Schreiber' puts nutmeg in the batter, which goes very well with the basic dairy profile. They were also filling to the point of causing me to question the life decision of ever eating again. And it's not that making spätzle is strictly a complicated process—there are five ingredients in the recipe and they cook in boiling water until they're done—but it is somehow a consuming process, so that earlier we joked about Cleaning All the Things and then we really had to. Without Schreiber's spätzle maker (Spätzlehobel), I'm not sure we'd have survived. I remember washing at least two bowls and two pots and an infinite number of spoons afterward anyway. I regret nothing. Except maybe thinking about food at all since.

Autolycus is grooming on my lap as I type. The presence of a small warm cat is greatly appreciated in endothermic times like these.

Do you see the water and watch it flow and float an empty shell?

I just found out that my all-time favorite of the Smithsonian's exhibits, "Life in the Ancient Seas," ceased to exist in 2013. The fossil halls are being completely remodeled. It looks like a considerable, thoughtful undertaking. It is probably even scientifically necessary. At the moment I'm too stunned to appreciate it. I loved the fossil skeletons swimming before the full-scale murals of which they were the stony echoes, the shadowiness of its corridors and the sea-lighting, the petrified corals and the shells. The diorama of the Paleozoic reef. I wanted to swim in those waters, all the different millions of years of them. Ammonites, mosasaurs, armored fishes, euryptids, dugongs and diving birds and kelp swaying in the bubble-blue light. In 2005, I rejoiced that it still existed. I wish I had known in time to say goodbye.

[edit] Ely Kish, the painter of the murals, died last year. She gave me a wonderful dream of the sea's deep time. I would have preferred not to learn both of these facts within the same half-hour.