This morning I woke in the Wii room near 6:30, rose, got ready, and dropped S and N off at school just past eight. Rain was falling and for some reason the carpool lane was bogged down in traffic so I kicked the boys out of the car at the bottom of the hill and sent them sprinting through the (fairly light) downpour into school. They survived. Then I drove down to the Milwaukee Public Museum for the Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, after finding good parking I was early so I had the rest of the museum pretty much to myself. The Milwaukee Public Museum sucks. Just to be clear, this isn’t the Milwaukee Art Museum, which I like quite a bit, this is the historical museum or whatever. The “Old Milwaukee” section is hilariously weird. It’s like a Disney animatronic ride except you have to walk and instead of singing pirates or children you have, like, a German lady cutting sausage. Let me image search. Here we go:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3382/3587088133_885156a2e2.jpg

and

http://image.absoluteastronomy.com/images/encyclopediaimages/s/st/streets_of_old_milwaukee.jpg

I also walked through the section with taxidermied (is that a word?) animals and weird historical scenes with traders and Native Americans. What a sad museum.

The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit was pretty cool, though, especially since I followed a group of retirees and was just before the school group tidal wave. At the start the exhibit was mostly about the scrolls’ discovery and some historical context, then a short movie on the excavation, and then a little more on the containers that held the scrolls and some facsimiles of larger scrolls. Then you go into a cool dark room with the tiny papyrus fragments and their origins and translations above each fragment. Hm. I can’t find a picture, you’re going to have to trust me. I stood in front of a 2,000 year old piece of Ecclesiastes. Very cool. I bought the museum catalog and drove home in the rain.

Later I met Barb and Amanda at a coffee shop in West Bend. We talked/gossip about the university, etc. for a couple hours before I returned home and made the pie pictured below.

N’s calling. More later…Piratefest this weekend…have a lovely Friday night.