Worn out by museum

Yesterday wasn't a good day: julian_tiger woke me early, and I never got back to sleep, including an annoying bit where I started brooding about not getting back to sleep. An afternoon nap helped with the tiredness, but the bad mood lingered until bedtime.

I woke this morning at a reasonable 7:45, feeling quite a bit better. Tea, conversation with cattitude and adrian_turtle, a long, comfortable hot shower, Scrabble, and lunch. Then we went down to the Museum of Natural History, which has all sorts of interesting exhibits and has the advantage of being indoors. We still had the cold walk through the park, but once we got to the subway station, we were indoors until we got back out of the subway at the same station after the museum. (I am inordinately fond of the subway-level entrance to that museum; the museum has been there quite a bit longer than the subway.) I was particularly glad of this because, after a block or so of the walk to the train, my chest was feeling tight--no other symptoms--and I suspect I am not 100% well. Not coughing, I don't think it's worth a doctor's visit, but I may be wrong, given that bronchitis is one of those things where having had it before is a risk factor for having it again.
(I was fine on the walk home after the museum.)

Rather than wearing ourselves out trying to see everything, we aimed specifically for the current special exhibit on the Silk Road. It's nicely set up, with the displays arranged partly by geography: starting at Xi'an (once capital of China) in the east, through Turfan and Samarkand, to Baghdad in the West. It talks about silk, about pottery and glass and spices and other things carried along the way, about camels, about the cities, about different kinds of writing and different things people wrote on (from cuneiform tablets to bamboo slats to papyrus to paper made of hemp and mulberry, and Chinese paper money), about the alternate route by sea. And somehow I was less than impressed, but that may be because my back started hurting halfway through. Cattitude thought highly of the exhibit.

After that, we stopped on the first floor to see the piece of cloth woven in Madagascar from golden spider silk, a very attractive piece meant as both a proof-of-concept of working with spider silk and an attempt to revive weaving in Madagascar. The label there noted that they can't raise these spiders in captivity, because they are aggressively cannibalistic, so they captured spiders, used a specially made devise to extract the silk, and then released them.

While we were waiting for our 2:30 admission to the Silk Road (we got to the museum around 2), we stopped in the gift shop, where I found a small calendar (to keep at my desk) but we didn't find a full-size wall calendar we both liked. We may have to visit a bookstore together. The souvenir shop for the silk road exhibit didn't grab us. So, a pretty inexpensive outing: we have 30-day unlimited metrocards, and a museum membership.

Home, with tea, and I suspect I'm not going to be making an apple crisp this evening.