things i think about while powerwashing 163

Shortcut to anonymous subscriber submission link: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

More travel! Can you imagine that after traveling a lot, I decided to travel more!
But it was worth — for esteemed subscriber Alex Weliever's birthday, I decided to take the train up to Boston to celebrate her birthday along with esteemed subscribers Alisa Reynya and Peter Waller.

I am very tired after a long week of travel and a similarly long week of buzzing around Boston, but maybe I can give a short list of the things I did:

• tea time is actually quite fun! to celebrate Alex's birthday, we went to this fancy tea time place where they gave us rather delicious little sandwiches and biscuits. for the longest time i wasn't quite sure why tea time existed and now i think i would indeed embark on colonizing expansionist conquests.

• hung out in the harvard school of design with esteemed subscriber Seth McFarlane! It was cool being in such a brutalist building and among so many academics. Shoutout to whoever thought I lived in Napa.
• do not order too many fries. I accidentally ordered like four orders of fries on saturday night at the soviet-themed bar. You could say it was a spud-nik situation
• jet lag is rather insurmountable. i am still waking up way too early.
• we went through a cool graveyard as well! saw the graves of many important people.

• lion dances are very chaotic and everyone is super worried about getting the shot and was kind of pushy. In contrast with all the families on Friday in LIC watching the other lion dance that I went to with esteemed subscriber Emily Ding!

museum of the week

Everything in Texas is indeed bigger. The state mascot, I believe, is a star. Which is very big. Outside the Texas State History Museum there is a very big star. Giant, really. Exceedingly big, if I may say.

The inside of the museum does not disappoint as well — I think it might be one of the largest subject-focused museums that I've been. The Met definitely is very big, but I wouldn't count it as subject-focused. It's generally about art! This though is 34,000 square feet of pure Texas-history exhibitions.
Esteemed subscribers Kristi Nguyen and Ellie Wang and I spent about 2 and a half hours milling around the first floor or two and still did not have enough time to really soak in the second floor. That's how big it is. So we got a really really good insight into the Native Americans of Texas as well as some of the first explorations of Texas by Europeans. And, dinosaur!

For some reason (not complaining) there was a special exhibit on Tyrannosaurus Rex's that featured a plaster mold of the one in New York's Museum of Natural History. For some reason Ellie, Kristi and I really focused in on the ones with Chinese names. Like cmon, Qianzhousaurus is a pretty interesting name! Maybe it's because a lot of the new tyrannosauruses are being found in China?

I didn't know this before, but apparently the name "Texas" is derived from the Caddo word for friend — the Caddo being one of the Native American tribes in Texas along with the Apache, Comanche, Tonkawa and others. The Caddos in particular lived in the eastern part of Texas. Thanks to the tyranny of the American government, the Caddos now reside and have their trival governemnt in Oklahoma.

The biggest exhibit of the ground floor was of a recovered French boat: the La Belle. It set sail from France in 1864 with then intention of starting a new colony at the mouth of the Mississippi but ended up in Texas instead. This failure then spurred the Spaniards to accelerate their colonization of Texas.

Honestly you should reserve a whole half day for this museum. There's so much to see here that I haven't even touched upon or even been to yet! I'll definitely be returning.

anonymous subscriber news

i miss simba too! i can't wait to see him!

Submit here: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

• anon misses simba: I MISS SIMBA

animal of the week

Esteemed subscriber Emi Chan brings us a Mexican free-tailed bat — but in an unexpected location. I don't think I've had many animals in office buildings before least of all a bat but that is kind of cool! Good thing they got taken to a wildlife rehabber!

She’s just a girl! This Mexican free-tailed bat somehow ended up in the hallway of my office building and was taken to a wildlife rehabber. She was released later that day :)

Send me your animal photos at ryan@torrtle.co OR at this form https://forms.gle/NT3nSkKVbpkjCr1u8!