#q?rius

Random Thoughts: Pokemon Go Kilometer Tracking, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, & Voting

Pokemon Go is a great motivator for my son (who is in pain after 30 mins walking) to go for miles with me but the app’s kilometer tracking needs fixing.

My fitness tracker app tells me that I walk/run a minimum of 3.5 miles (5.6 km) daily but often walk/run 8 miles (12.9 km). Some of those miles are just moving in circles through my day, obviously.

But the last 2 days, my son and I were walking, running, & longboarding (10m or 16km each day) through Arlington, VA & around The Mall of DC. Pokemon Go was running almost entire time. When we stopped moving, we were at the hotel with the phone on charger.

The 10k egg that we started 3 days ago still only has 8k on it from last 2 days of constant “break out the pain meds mobility”.

Though, of course my kid was having a great deal non-Pokemon fun. It’s still frustrating that 20 miles/32 kilometers of pedestrian speed mobility can’t hatch a 10k egg.

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Aside, if you have a kid/teen who is into science and you are in DC: check out Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Q?Rius room. They have lots of good microscopes which are set to feed info to a monitor so your whole group can ooh and aww. They also provide many drawers of samples to examine (birds, flowers, fossils, human artifacts, minerals, fish, much much more).

We spent about two hours in that room we could have spent hours more but we let to make room for others when the room was getting crowded.

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My 9 year old kid now wants us to move near DC so he can constantly visit Q?Rius and longboard through DC.

He doesn’t want to live in DC though… because he doesn’t want me and his dad to lose the ability to vote. (So much love for my kid. 🤗🤗🤗🤗)

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Curious at Q?rius Gallery at the National Museum of Natural History

Thanks to my long time mentor Brian Hogarth for planting the seed that I needed to visit Q?rius at the National Museum of Natural History on the Nation’s Capitol Mall. My heart wanted to be in the relative quiet and cool of the art museums nearby, but I braved the crowds and heightened security check at the door to get inside Q?rius. 

What they did right by me: I got to “touch” actual specimens of creatures I’ve never heard of and will likely never see in the wild. I was moved to tears by this experience. Why? I’ll admit the gorgeous little white long tailed weasel was what drew me in the most. But why get weepy? I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the mission implied in this little corner of the museum. A place intended to inspire kids for whom the space was clearly designed, and their adults, to discover for themselves the majesty, plurality, and wonder of creatures in the natural world. So many of us see less and less of nature with each passing year. We feel helpless against the inevitability of the ongoing destruction of our planet by humans. This gallery made me feel connected, reminded me of how relational nature is.