Yesterday was Endangered Species Act Day. I spent the day at the US Botanic Garden, manning a table at their ESA Day event. They very generously gave us a free table. All we had to do was provide the educational materials. The two assistants were there with me. The naive one picked everything up really fast and wasn't much of a problem at all. The stupid one was....very slow. And tended to scare people off.
You know something is wrong when people REFUSE free stuff.
The event was packed in the morning. About five schools came cruising through. The high schoolers were all snobby teenagers who made a point of ignoring me and talking to their friends as I discussed endangered wildlife. They were blocking my table! Of course they all took free temporary tattoos as they left.
The ghetto school was awful. They tried to take everything we had. We were afraid we'd run out before noon. They took ALL our re-usable grocery bags. They took STACKS of our coloring book pages. After the first person took ALL our otter coloring pages, I had to stay alert and go, "Sorry, please only take one each. We need to share these with everyone." I got stink eye from the teachers for that. Sorry, but my job is not to subsidize the crumbling dc school systems. And then the kids kept running off with our display plush animals. I'd have to chase them down and go, "Sorry! That's for display only!" When the teachers gave me a hard time, I told them they could have the toys for $25 each. I got more stink eye for that, but I got my displays back.
By the afternoon, it slowed down significantly. Turns out I didn't need to worry about running out of materials. Most of the people who visited my table in the afternoon were foreign tourists (had some fun trying to remember my spanish and japanese) and other non-profits at the other tables.
Overall, the day was stressful and tiring, but it was really good to be out of the office. The US Botanic Garden is amazingly beautiful. I wish I had taken a picture of the Garden Court. It's the first room you enter. It totally made me gasp.
After the event ended, I spent some time walking around the garden, taking pictures. Of course my camera died about 15 minutes in. *Sigh* Guess I will need to go back. The place isn't very large though, only took me an hour to see everything, so I am sure next time I am in DC, I can set aside a little bit of time to take pictures of everything I missed.
Here are a few of the pictures I was able to capture.
( More pictures )There were a lot of other neat exhibits. My pictures cover maybe 25% at most. It was weird walking from the desert exhibit to the Hawaii exhibit. The desert was so hot, Hawaii felt positively chilly! And then I went into the primeval forest exhibit and was hot all over again.
The center of the large greenhouse was the jungle exhibit. It was pretty neat because you could also walk along the canopy. All the flowers were up at the top!
Then I went outside to the National Garden. They had a butterfly garden, but I guess it's not that time of year because it was mostly filled with bees. From there, the path went to the First Ladies Water Garden which was a fancy fountain. It was hot and I was tempted to splash in it, but there were people around who would have looked at me funny. After that was a long winding Regional Garden filled with plants that are native to the area. Some of them had signs indicating how native americans and early colonists used those plants. I thought that was neat.
The end of the path led to the Rose Garden, which is not what I imagined rose gardens to look like at all. I had in my head perfectly manicured rose bushes, without a single petal out of place. This garden allowed the roses to grow about as wild as the ones in front of my house. (I only trim them back when they start grabbing me along the walkway.) Not that there was anything wrong with that, but it was just very different from my expectations.
I liked how none of the roses looked like the sad, fragrance-less, tulip-like things that pass for roses at florists. And they all smelled quite nice. I did stop to smell the roses. And I managed to grab a picture with my phone. My phone seems to only be able to handle good photos in super bright light.
I decided to skip the final section, Bartholdi Park, because it looked like there was a lot of construction going on. I am uncomfortable around cranes and other large construction vehicles.
I still had time to kill before ben could leave work, so I decided to head over to a local yarn store and pick up some gifts for people. I walked all the way over only to discover they were closed! Their blog says they were closing early for their child's graduation. Pooo! Maybe next time I am in the area, I guess...
After that, I went home. While I was waiting at the bus stop for ben, the
Witch of the Wasteland hobbled over, wheezing and coughing with every step. She made the most awful breathing sounds once she sat down in my bus shelter. And then SHE PULLED OUT A PACK OF CIGARETTES and started to chain smoke. I don't know what is going to kill her first - heart disease or lung cancer.
I abandoned the bus shelter at that point because I like oxygen. I was annoyed because the shelter had stickers all over the place saying, "no smoking!"
Ben showed up not too long after. I was starving and tired, so we decided to go out to eat for dinner instead of making something at home. We tried out a place called Thai Tada, which is like the sister restaurant of another thai place we like. Some of the chefs at the original place wanted to try out their own recipes, so they split up and formed the new restaurant. The food did taste very familiar, but presentation was far more modern.
I ended up going to bed very early when we finally got home. It was a long day!
We're supposed to go to ikea today and get a bed for the guest room, but ben is still sleeping so who knows now if that's going to happen. It's already after noon!
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