This book is 100% hope.

A week full of wackiness. Only one school group came to the museum on Tuesday because of the preparations going on for the annual Exploratorium awards dinner. Since the kind of NSF grants that we apply for don't involve the science of killing people in other countries, we seem to have been getting fewer these days. So it's recently become even more important that we massage the egos of the rich in the hopes that they can help bridge the increasing gap in federal funding. They seem to like awards. As for the awards themselves, I never really got to see them but I hear that each one comes with a lemon wedge and a shot of Cabo.

Anyway, the museum was really empty, it was boring, and afterwards I biked to the ocean again only to forget that Shanghai Dumpling King is closed on Tuesdays. The next day, half of the field trip explainers went on a field trip of our own to the California Academy of Sciences, where John Muir established the Sierra Club in 1892. These days, you can watch the Academy feed penguins every 3:00, which we didn't actually get to see, but heck: we did start the day at Starbucks and kicked back at the Metreon for lunch. The genuine downtown SF experience. And not to brag or anything, but guess who won a Pig Buck--good for one free drink--for a second place finish at The Pig and Whistle trivia night?

I kind-of got offered to kind-of get hired to kind-of continue building exhibits as an on-call developer through the summer. You can imagine how thrilling such a firm commitment feels. But it's cool; it's the next step in my progression towards an underpaid underappreciated full-time position in a non-profit institution.