so tonight i accidentally crashed a meeting of the dc chapter of the sierra club, haha…

see, through the NASA juno tweetup and the tweetup i attended a few months ago at NASA HQ here in dc, i’ve become acquainted with some of the local geeky types, and we have fun attending different sciencey events and museums and so on. well, one of the people i met at the NASA HQ post-tweetup dinner is the audience engagement specialist at the smithsonian museum of natural history, and i think she helped organize the tweetup event today where selected people got a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum after hours and learned about mummies in ancient egypt. some people i knew attended, and though i wasn’t invited (i didn’t find out about it until just a week ago or so), i was invited to the post-tweetup dinner where thirst dc was going to be presenting.

they expected to finish around 8, so a little after 7 i biked down to the museum thinking i’d catch them as they left. once i arrived at the museum i got a message from one of my friends on the tour with details about the restaurant where they’d be meeting afterwards, so i headed to the restaurant figuring that i’d wait for them to arrive. once i finally locked my bike up and headed in, i tried looking to see if they had arrived already, and i saw a group of people sitting around one table and one of the people waved me over, so i came over since i thought i recognized one of them. as i was about to sit down i saw they had papers with the agenda for their sierra club meeting and was about to excuse myself, but they invited me to stay, hahaha. i was there for about 30 minutes or so before my group finally arrived. they probably saw me walk in with my bicycle helmet and thought “ONE OF US! ONE OF US!”, hahaha…

side note: i hate locking my bike up and leaving it. even when i’m doing it correctly – locking the back wheel through the frame with a u-lock, and running a cable through the front wheel – i feel like i’m not locking it properly, and keep thinking someone’s going to steal my bike. sigh. i suppose it’s just something to get used to. i also need to get a proper bolt for my seat instead of the quick-release bolt it currently has; i ended up removing the seat and taking it in the restaurant with me, and since there was grease all over the downtube i brought some tinfoil to wrap the tube in so it wouldn’t muck up my bag. anyway…

one of the people from thirst dc gave a presentation on how many calories santa claus would take in (a lifetime of calories in about 3.5 minutes), how much liquor he might drink if each house left him a shot of whiskey (he’d be dead within a second), how fast he’d have to go, how much weight he’d have to pull in his sleigh, and so on. afterwards we just talked amongst ourselves, so i was talking with a few new people (an anthropology professor and her husband) and several other people i already knew. my table finished off two bottles of wine, and then we wrapped things up and i biked back home. altogether i biked 11 miles round-trip, learned some new stuff, and got my drink on with some attractive and intelligent ladies… who i don’t think are single. still, that’s what i call a good night!