Bead Museum of DC

For you beaders out there, I went to the nicest little museum last Thursday, The Bead Museum in DC. It's a tiny little place, free, it has a library for browsing, they sell some beads and bead jewelry, and the exhibits are great. One is called The Eternal Bead. The 12-page “Eternal Bead” exhibition booklet details how beads are used to account, acquire, believe, celebrate, create, enjoy, identify, and protect. You can download the PDF of the exhibit booklet. The other is a bead timeline, tracing the development of various types of beads from prehistory forward. The website is fabulous, go and look.

It was part of what they call "Third Thursday." The third Thursday of the month, area art galleries open to the public. They offer assorted nibbles and the chance to examine the latest exhibits. I went to four galleries and saw two with fabric wall hangings, one with metal wall hangings, and one with rather odd paintings. They reminded me of nothing so much as Guatemalan folk art crossed with the Crying Game.

It's a civilized way to spend a couple of hours. Plus there's a farmer's market held weekly on Thursdays, so you can pick up all sorts of things to continue the evening.

And in other news

I spent Saturday with my sister and her son, celebrating her birthday. Took them out to lunch, and then we played miniature golf. I was hoping she'd choose Revenge of the Sith, but she took off work the day before to go and see it.

Sunday was laundry/cleaning/yard day. I spent two hours raking and weeding, filled a whole bin with leaves and branches. You couldn't tell I'd done a thing. I did find some lovely wild raspberries and a few things I thought were weeds turned out to be lovely flowering vines.

My newest mystery addition is Jane Haddam's True Believers. I really like that author. This particular book was a bit squicky because it dealt with the priest/pedophilia issues that the Church is having. She handled it well within the context of a very clever mystery. I like her characters - very memorable. One of her main characters is a fantasy writer. She wrote another series under the name of Orania Papazoglou where the heroine was a romance writer. If you can find those, read! They are hilarious. The titles are things like Sweet, Savage Murder - sendups of romance titles.