Friday, June 26, 2015
By:
My 22nd birthday was on Wednesday of this week, which was cause for an entire week of celebration. I spent the weekend in my birthplace of Westminster, MD with my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin on my dad’s side. We went swimming and played frisbee and basketball in their pool and enjoyed turkey burgers from the grill - until it started pouring. We headed inside for some ice cream cake that evening to celebrate my birthday a few days early. I spent the rest of the night sitting (and napping) on the back porch surrounded by the sound of rain and thunder. It was nice to spend some time out of the city.
Returning to work on Monday, I continued picking apart oral history interviews with female astronomers that will be featured in the role-playing lesson plan I am developing. Most of my time this week was devoted to planning a tour of the library and archives for the SPS interns next Monday. 
Brean and I decided to pull items from the library and archives that are relevant to our work to showcase during the tour. This apparently has never been done by the interns before, but the staff was more than willing to help us pull this idea together. Melanie Mueller, the assistant director of the library and archives, has helped us navigate and browse the physical archives. She has advised us in developing other pieces of the tour as well, including a microfilm display and a showing of some books we are using in our research. We also printed some relevant and interesting photos from the Emilio Segre Visual Archives with help from Savannah Gignac, the photo librarian. We are very thankful to have great resources, both in the physical sources and the library staff!
On Tuesday evening, Aman, Shauna, and I headed to science night at the Argonaut in eastern D.C. The night was a team trivia and activity competition. For the activity, we were given two Dixie cups, a piece of foil, a wooden skewer, a bendy straw, a drink umbrella, and some duct tape to make a boat
. The boats were tested to see how many marbles they could hold before tipping over or sinking. Our boat held about 50 marbles, but we only came in second place. (If you're not first, you're last.) We didn’t win the trivia portion either, but the best team name won a bottle of wine, and we had that in the bag. Our team name was Zero Kelvin, because there’s nothing cooler. Everyone loves physics jokes! Also, it was Taco Tuesday, and this place had awesome fish tacos.
This was the first time that I have had to work on my birthday, but the SPS staff and interns made it a great day. A few of us got up early to drop by Bojangles, my favorite fast food place, for breakfast on the way to work. The interns surprised me with a performance of Happy Birthday on the boomwhackers, and Aman bought me a tiara and wand so I could play birthday princess all day. That evening, most of the interns went to see the Braves play the Nationals. It was my first Braves game away, and I was outnumbered by Nats fans. Even though the game went to an 11th inning and my Braves lost, it was a good time.
Connor Day