"Grandma, grandma! Look! It's a wizard!"

On Thursday night, I was one of the crazy millions jostling for a position in line to see the seventh, and final, Harry Potter film at midnight.  One great thing about living with a bunch of nerds is that I had plenty of company in this endeavor.  My friend, Anna, even dressed up as Dumbledore, complete with beard and all.  It was fun to watch people's reactions to her on the way to the theater, especially kids' reactions (see blog post title).

Friday night we went to this great rooftop bar in Columbia Heights to celebrate Andy's birthday.  I was happy because there was a great view of the full moon.  Yesterday, we visited the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space museum, which houses all the overflow crafts from the Air and Space Museum in DC.  We saw some amazing artifacts: the Enterprise space shuttle (I got to hold a space shuttle tile that was in space.), the quarantine chamber where the Apollo 11 astronauts stayed for 21 days after returning to Earth, the Apollo 11 module that carried the astronauts safely to the ocean surface, the first airplane that the Wright brothers sold to the military (NC, come on and raise up!) and the plane that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.  That last plane was difficult to look at directly; it's disconcerting to think about the role a simple mass of metal can have in human history.

The engineers and geologists on my program enjoy giving each other a hard time; the engineer says geology is a “soft science,” the geologist says the engineer isn’t a real scientist at all. A funny thing, though a generalization, about engineers and geologists: many of them have a perverse sense of humor, but lack the social skills to always understand when it's appropriate to joke around versus when it's just dangerous.  We went to our regular bar on Saturday night, RJ Bentley's in College Park, and a couple of the guys proceeded to do what they normally do on these occasions, which is to see who can perform the most outrageous pickup lines and receive a corresponding outrageous reaction.  Their favorite pickup line is, "Hey. I work at NASA.  Want to launch my rocket?"  (Yes, they actually say this out loud to girls at bars.)  One guy tried this line (and had already had a pretty rough day actually, earlier he'd passed out due to low sugar levels) and the girl was so upset she reported the incident to her (very large) boyfriend.  Needless to say, my friend was lucky to escape with just a beer being poured over his head.  

 Some of us in DC.

 So, we really like to take group pictures in front of our sorority house.  (We have special topic speakers at least twice a week and always take a group photo with them.)