Archives crawl! Two libraries, the state archives, and a museum all had an event going on today and ash and I went to check it out! We had a plan laid out to get to all of them, but made that plan knowing that it probably wasn't really going to happen, and then the tour we caught at the first spot (the state archives) was an hour long and that pretty much guaranteed we weren't going to catch everything. So we hit up the archives and did that tour (very interesting! But also a lot of standing and walking, and I feel like they should have done a somewhat abridged tour to better enable people doing the crawl part of the crawl to get to other events). We wanted to try to get to the tour at the State Library, so we took a break to sit down for maybe ten minutes and then walked there, where we were told the tour was like twenty minutes and in not-too-long so we figured we'd hang out, check out the displays, and then catch the tour. The displays were very interesting, one of them had a bunch of historical recipes to take home so we grabbed all of those, and learned about the woman who established the first county library system in the state (and was asked to come to Russia to help fix their library system, and then during the Cold War had her passport taken away because of it), and learned about the design of the state seal (for unclear reasons but probably something to do with some conflict happening at the time, the man who designed the seal had someone else present it and pretend to be the designer, that second man got paid for it and then later came back to attempt to get paid a second time).
The tour was a little disappointing. The three tours being offered over the day were apparently three separate tours, which means if you wanted to catch all of it you would need to hang out at one location all day which, again, not great for a crawl event. The woman doing the tour was very unknowledgeable about the history of the building and kept excusing herself with not being from here. The "tour" was confined to one of the rooms in the building, and just about that room (which, nice to sit down the entire time, but not really a tour per se? More of a lecture) -- there are four portraits painted on each of the corners of the ceiling, and before the tour started a woman asked the guide if the one in a particular corner was Sutter, and the guide responded 'One of them is'. I feel like she should know which portrait is who?
There was also a man who asked a very long, winding question with a lot of lead-up and turned out to be asking where specifically Gerald Ford almost got shot by Squeaky Fromme, and then a follow-up question about if the governors can ever be seen walking the grounds of the Capitol, which is. Very suspicious, I think! (The guide did not know the answer to either of these questions). He then took a phone call in the middle of the talk. I expected the guide to ask him to take it outside but she just tried to talk over him for a minute and then waited for him to hang up.
We were both tired and hungry at that point, so we went to grab some food and then go home. I would have liked to have done the other two crawl stops, and to have spent more time at the displays and in the museum at the Archives, but I feel like the events weren't coordinated enough to really allow that. Maybe next year we focus less on the tours and more on the displays, if we go
We picked up some dumplings from a little place near where we were, and Erik kindly picked us up from the light rail station and drove us the rest of the way home. The dumplings were very good and we'll have to go back some time, even though they shorted us one dumpling and were out of one of the things we wanted to order (they were decently busy when we were there)
I wanted to watch Phantom of the Paradise with ash but couldn't find it streaming anywhere, and the DVD-quality version I downloaded didn't come with subtitles and none of the subtitles I could find synced up with it, so I had to get a higher-quality version that would probably work but also take longer to download. (We did try it on the internet archive first but they didn't have subtitles and subtitles were extremely necessary for us to be able to understand what was going on). So first we watched a Worst Cooks and then once ash had dinner thoroughly going we watched Phantom of the Paradise. It's a fun movie! I'd never seen it before (neither had ash) but I heard a lot about it. I felt the script could really use some tightening up, but it's extremely weird and I love that for it. It's very Shock Treatment, before Shock Treatment. It's also Phantom of the Opera, Faust, Picture of Dorian Gray, Rocky Horror,,,
We watched a short youtube after that (on ancient jokes) and then went to bed. I was up early for the crawl, so I was pretty tired by then, and decided to take a nap for a couple hours. Now I'm awake again and going to eat dinner
Tomorrow we have to take Cael to the vet in the early afternoon, and then after that will be video games with Erika and Dave, including a tour of our Satisfactory game. I'll be recording it so ash can also see at some point, and I think Dave also wants to be able to send it to his friend he keeps tormenting with screenshots of our game. ash is going to put dye in my hair and I'm going to put dye in his. And I need to do my homework for this week!
