Natural History Museum Instameet

Friday, 20 February 2015Friday, 20 February 2015 Starr4 Comments

(Photos in this post are mine unless otherwise indicated.)

I was selected to attend my very first Instameet today at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History!

I was so surprised to be selected because I really only applied as a “couldn’t hurt!” type of deal, trying to go for opportunities and really get myself into the DC community. I only recently opened my own Instagram account to the public and, spoiler alert, the content isn’t really great. I know that I’m not a cool photographer on #igdc but hey, a girl can dream! So imagine my shock when I got the email confirming my attendance! At first I thought “Maybe not enough people applied so everyone who applied got in!” But I saw some people lamenting not being chosen — some of whom had way more followers than me and way better content. Who knows what made them pick me but I’m glad they did!

Even though it was ridiculously crazy cold. Remember polar vortex season from last year?

That is degrees Farenheit. Don’t even look at what that is in Celsius; you’ll cry and then your tears will freeze right on your face.

I’ll admit, I was pretty intimidated when I showed up. A lot of these Instagrammers were very familiar with the DC Instameet scene. Several brought their DSLRs. A handful had multiple cameras with them. One even had a vintage twin-reflex camera with him!

Featured: Dave (@beingdave) Photo credit: Adil (@elektron9)

Along schleps me, in my panda hat and my Android phone. (Creative types always seem to have iPhones, so I was definitely in the minority here…) In answer to the most DC question you can hear (“So what do you do?”), people’s responses were wildly impressive: working for Facebook or Instagram itself, social media at NatGeo… and then there’s Starr and her panda hat.

I got some good shots though, and I’ll be sharing ones that I didn’t get to put up on my Instagram account because you are all very special to be putting up with my posts.

“Happy Year of the Goat, mofos!” – what I imagined this one was thinking

The famous Hope Diamond. Could’ve used a polish and shine, but I guess it’ll do.

This is the African Moon Moth. It has no mouth when it emerges from its cocoon, doomed to face death after just one week of life. During that week, their only purpose is to mate.
I guess I’d look pretty sassy and mad if that was my fate, too.

The Butterfly Pavilion is easily one of my favorite parts of this museum. It’s warm and humid to keep the butterflies and moths comfortable, and they flutter by freely. People are generally really respectful of the butterflies, and I like that we as a species acknowledge the delicate majesty of these little creatures.

Plus, you get magical moments like this!
Featured: Andy (@andymstone) and a lacewing. Photo credit: Sarah (@smithsonian)

We were given time to roam about the museum freely, but it was nice to have the whole group gathered in the Butterfly Pavilion. It paved the way for us to see what Instagrammers are really like to get the perfect photo.

Instameets, am I right?
Featured: John (@johntassparker) and Priya (@onomatopriya)

This fella is pretty popular at the museum because a) he’s always willing to share and b) he’s in front of a bench.

Some Rothschild moths doing like they do on the Discovery Channel. The rest are awkward third wheels. (Third and fourth wheels?)

If I didn’t make it clear earlier, I was incredibly intimidated by everyone else in attendance. I have a “lifestyle” blog and Instagram account, just little tidbits from my life that I feel like sharing. I’ve never been a very visual or artistic person, so seeing these folks roll up with their DSLRs and their #igdc status (the founders of @igdc were at this Instameet, by the way) made me really nervous. I was also nervous that they’d be just so ah-tistic that they wouldn’t be terribly friendly. While some folks were quieter than others, there were plenty of extroverts and everyone was generally really nice! Phew!

Here are a few photos from the #NMNHphoto Instameet from my fellow IGDCers (check the caption for their accounts):

Henry the elephant welcomes all to the museum.
Photo credit: Joe (@jbano1)

Got buns, hon?
Photo credit: Holly (@golightly) (what a great name!)

Photo credit: Andy (@someguy)
Check out his great photography site: ihitthebutton.com

Starting to get overwhelmed by the photos so I’ll leave you all to discover the rest yourselves. I’m sure more will continue to be uploaded as folks edit their beautiful photos. (I felt like I was obligated to upload as I went along, it was pretty stressful. I wanted to read all the signs!)

I had a really great time and am looking forward to getting more involved with the DC Instagram community and beefing up my photography skills!

Not sure who took this one, but it’s up on the @smithsoniannmnh account with loads of other great photos. This is the closest we got to a group photo.

Have you ever been to an Instameet? If so, how was it? If not, where would you like to attend one?
Have you ever been to the National Museum of Natural History? What are your favorite exhibits?

Birthdays & Bar Crawls

Wednesday, 23 April 2014 Starr5 Comments

This was one of the more eventful and social weekends I’ve had in a long time. Being the extrovert that I am, I was really glad to get to spend time with friends.

FRIdAY

I guess we can kick off with happy hour on Friday. One of my coworkers unlocked a work achievement, so we had sangria and bread and hummus at Levante’s. It was a bit chilly, but we asked to be seated outside. The waiter seemed completely bewildered by this request, but I don’t know, my group wanted to sit outside. It was nice to wrap up the week with some work buddies, and I’m glad I have work buddies to hang out with!

During this time, I was checking with some friends about a birthday dinner I was going to later. I had checked the map and thought I got the location wrong. No way we were going to the Biergarten Haus that was a 25 minute walk away from the nearest metro station? Really?

Yes, really. After about 5 minutes of bickering on the phone, I decided that my boyfriend shouldn’t wait for me at his place (where I was going to drop off my work bag and lunchbox) and that I would meet our friends at Union Station, where we would all walk to Biergarten Haus together. I wandered around the mall of Union Station, admiring the architectural details (it’s a truly beautiful building) and had some guy tell me that “they’re coming, don’t you worry” only to then see about a dozen Chinese tourists round the corner.
Oh yes, this man thought I was waiting on Chinese tourists because why not. -____-”

Anyhow, the walk wasn’t so bad with everyone together. I would’ve really hated having to walk there by myself. You go a mile through this residential area in eastern DC (keeping in mind that southeast DC is one of the most dangerous areas in the country) and finally stumble upon a very lively street. That is completely not metro-accessible. Even the buses don’t go out here. (WHY)

BUT Biergarten Haus is pretty authentic as a German beer place, and everyone really loved their brews. There was German music playing and I had schnitzel and the environment felt good. There is a lot of outdoor seating and the patio is supposed to be heated, but it was chilly that night. I liked it but it is really out of the way.

My drink of the evening was the Erdinger Kristall Weiss, here pictured with the three wurst platter of bratwurst, bauernwurst, and knackwurst and the Jägerschnitzel with sauerkraut and spätzle.

From there, we went to FM Karaoke, which is a Korean karaoke/noraebang joint that I have not been to before. My boyfriend’s best friend really wanted to sing “All of Me” by John Legend, and he claimed that while our usual karaoke place didn’t have it, FM Karaoke did. I always notice one interesting thing with my boyfriend’s group of friends and that is that even though it’s all Asian guys (I was the only girl in the group) every time we hang out, there are almost never any Korean people in the group. However, we still go to Korean BBQ and Korean karaoke relatively often. Both are places where it’s helpful to have a Korean person available to translate and interpret and butter up staff.

2014-04-19 00.46.00 — Singing “Careless Whisper” set to some Korean drama/music video, with “Let It Go” on queue and soju in people’s bellies.

REGARDLESS it was a bangin’ good time. I have noticed some very major differences between karaoke-ing as a bro (I’m a half-decent bro when I put my mind to it) and karaoke-ing with girls. There is a lot more rap (I mean a lot more) and a lot less Taylor Swift, Spice Girls, Ke$ha, etc. And when I rap to impress potential new bros, I go hard. I only know a handful of songs, but I do pretty well considering I have negative street cred and have a children’s sing-along voice.

You think this is a game? I memorized the lyrics to this song when I was 11, with exactly zero idea of what they meant.

I get to combine my ability to sing Rihanna and my admiration for Eminem here by doing the entire song on my own.

This song is weirdly popular with my boyfriend’s friends, so I had a lot of exposure and time to learn the words.

I don’t typically sing these at karaoke, so it was a special treat (slash torture) for my new bros. I sang “Let It Go” and couldn’t belt that note that early in the evening, but I managed fine for “Titanium” (David Guetta ft. Sia) and we had a tambourine so I think the night went well.

Korean karaoke does hold the distinct advantage of understanding the importance of a tambourine.

ON SAMEDI (SATURDAY)

My boyfriend and I met one of my closest friends for the DC Bunny Hop Bar Crawl. Some of you may remember I don’t drink much, but I wanted to explore the DC bars a little bit and i thought this was just a nice occasion to get out and hang out.

We started at The Front Page at around noon to pick up our 21-verified (but you still get ID checked) wristbands, souvenir mugs, and a ticket for a free beer after 4 PM. We started at Mad Hatter, an Alice in Wonderland-themed bar that I’ve visited before for my college roommate’s birthday, for some brunch. Even though there were some brunch specials for bar crawl participants at other places, we wanted to just sit down and have a nice brunch nearby, and this was the closest participating bar to us. I got me some eggs benny (well, technically I splurged on “eggs Chesapeake” because I wanted crab cake) and we got to catch up on life.

Not wanting to limit ourselves to once place, we headed to Ozio to get our $3 mimosas, which didn’t turn our color-changing cups a different color as promised. It was really quiet at Ozio, and we could hear something electric crackling… so after nursing our food comas and spending a long time catching up on life even further, we headed to Sign of the Whale.

Yo. This place was packed and bumpin’ and it was 3 PM on a Saturday. Lots of people dancing to loudly playing “Forget You” by Ceelo Green when we showed up. We each had a jelly bean shot, and I’m not sure what is in it but they tasted pretty good. (That’s a good bet that the alcohol content wasn’t very high, just the way I like ’em :P) We were in and out of Sign of the Whale, as it was rowdy and also getting a bit on the late side.

Our next stop was The Mighty Pint, where we had each had a Captain Morgan & Coke. At this point, we found that our color-changing cups did, in fact, change color with cold drinks and we were glad our cups weren’t defective. We took our time with our drinks and by the time we finished, it was close to 4 and we were able to head back to Front Page to pick up our free beers.

After a quick coffee stop for my boyfriend at Panera, we headed back to Front Page where we each kicked back with a free Bud Light and tried to guess what the relationships between other people in the bar were. Girlfriend meeting the guys friends for the first time? Honeymoon-phase couple? First day-date?

THEN we stopped by Hello Cupcake for some yummy cupcakes. They all looked so good and inviting but I settled on a cookies-n-cream one, which tasted like a cookie but had that cupcake texture and was topped with a teeny cookie. So good. I haven’t had Hello Cupcake since someone brought me one my freshman year of college and this was my first time in the shop.

Mollys “you tart”, Bens red velvet, and my cookies-n-cream cupcakes from Hello Cupcake

My brother also came home this weekend, so it was nice to spend some time with him. All in all, it was definitely a good weekend. 🙂 And significantly less traumatizing that my Easter Adventure of 2011, which I wrote about on my Xanga and may share with you again next Easter.

How was your Easter?
What are your favorite happy hour bars? Dupont Circle in DC is an area just crawling with bars and not a whole lot else, really.

Muse @ Verizon Center (09-11-13)

Sunday, 15 September 2013 Starr3 Comments

If you would like to see a recap of my Red Lobster Yelp event, check out my review for the event on Yelp, because I made sure to be nice and detailed and include my photos from the night. I am usually not THAT active on Instagram (I typically do a maximum of one photo a day) but they were giving out gift cards for the social-media-ly active.

BASICALLY I holla’d for a dolla. And I got a gift card so it paid off! It was an amazing event, I had the BEST time. It would’ve been the sole highlight of my week.

That is, of course, if I didn’t attend the amazing Muse concert Wednesday evening.

I bought the tickets on April 11, 5 months prior to the actual concert date. I was SO so so very excited. I started listening to Muse relatively late, my freshman year of college, but I immediately loved them. I don’t really listen to any rock bands, but Muse is my favorite band. For an indecisive person, it’s nice to know I have a favorite band.

I’ve never been to a big proper concert. I’ve been to performances at school before, which are big and feature big artists, but it’s not quite the same, you know? And I saw Turquoise Jeep this past spring, but it was a small intimate venue and, admittedly, their influence is no where near as wide and impactful as Muse.

It was a struggle to get in though. I purchased my tickets through Muse’s website, as a member, earlier than the general public. I learned that the concert was using paperless ticketing, but that I was paying shipping. I guess that means I was getting a paper ticket. That ticket never came in the mail, so a few frantic emails later, they informed me that I could pick up my tickets at will call.

That service was NOT Ticketmaster, the company that takes care of will call at the Verizon Center. So when I showed up, all eager and bright-eyed, they couldn’t find my tickets. It took about half an hour of me sitting without my driver’s license and trying not to cry on the phone with customer service as the will call folks scrambled to figure out what was going on. FINALLY they figured out why they had trouble finding my tickets.

My tickets were listed under my name. But as “Last initial. First name“. Starr is my first name, but they had it as my last name, so obviously they weren’t pulling up a match. What I don’t understand is why they didn’t just use my invoice number or seat numbers to check the first time I went, since that’s obviously what they had to do to find my tickets in the end. I’m sure if you saw someone named “Thomas Jones” but the reservation was made under “Jones Thomas” for those exact tickets, it isn’t a coincidence, it’s an error. (Fun fact: I do have a friend whose first name is Jones and last name is Thomas. Apparently, many people get confused by this.)

IDIOTS AREN’T GOING TO GET ME DOWN. I made it in time to catch the opener, Cage the Elephant. Now, I hadn’t heard of them before, but I certainly have now. The frontman is… a character, to say the least. He’s very energetic (likely under the influence of… something) and lively. Their music was good, though. I was feeling it. The enthusiasm of frontman Matt Shultz helped a lot. It was pretty infectious, although I spent a lot of their set looking like this: O.o

Here's Matt Shultz standing on the crowd while crowdsurfing — Here’s Matt Shultz standing on the crowd while crowdsurfing

Their set ran for an hour, and we had to wait for another 30 minutes before…

… Muse ascended the stage.

I don’t have the words to describe… how elated I was to see my favorite band in person. I kept marveling at the fact that I have only seen Muse through my computer screen, so the fact that this experience was surrounding me blew my mind.

The laser show was amazing. The stage was magnificent. And Matt. Oh Matt. I had a confusing crush on Matt when I started getting into Muse that helped me understand why girls throw their underwear at rock stars. I was never the kind of girl who liked rock stars until Muse entered my life. It needs no mention how cool and amazing Chris and Dom were, too.

ALSO. They had some fancy video equipment, if they were playing live footage on the screen. So much editing within the live footage, it was amazing. If they use the DC footage for the tour DVD, it’s going to look SO FANTASTIC, seriously. Just the footage that was played on the screens would suffice.

Here’s the setlist from the show, courtesy of Peter Hutchins on Tumblr:

The 2nd Law Tour Setlist:

The 2nd Law: Isolated System
Supremacy
Supermassive Black Hole
Hysteria (Star-Spangled Banner intro)
Panic Station
Resistance
Knights of Cydonia (Ennio Morricone’s Man with a Harmonica intro)
Monty Jam
Feeling Good (Leslie Bricusse & Anthony Newley cover)
Follow Me
Plug In Baby
Liquid State
Madness
Guiding Light
Time Is Running Out
Unnatural Selection
Uprising

Encore:
The 2nd Law: Unsustainable
Starlight
Survival

I had the most amazing amazing time that could only have been improved if the couple in front of me spent less time making out and more time enjoying the concert. I think I wished that they interacted a bit more with the audience, but you know, I would rather have more music than waste time with people going up on stage or them trying to tell jokes. The music is ace.

PERFECTION.

Starstruck

Sunday, 16 June 2013Sunday, 16 June 2013 StarrLeave a comment

Last night, I had the unique opportunity to attend Astronomy Night on the National Mall.

There were astronomists and astrophysicists all around with impressive telescopes pointed at the sky. I just missed viewing the sun through a special filter, but I was able to view the moon several times last night. I could see all the craters of the lit parts of the moon and it was beautiful, and this was at dusk. Its brilliance only grew as the sky darkened.

I wish I was able to photograph what I could see through the telescope’s lens, but I wasn’t able to maneuver my camera properly.

It was incredibly humbling to walk past the Washington Monument, which is undergoing some large-scale renovations to repair the damage done by the 2011 Earthquake.

As it grew darker, we started to see a few stars emerge. I was able to see Venus and Mercury peeking at us through the still-red sky as the sun was setting. Another star would start twinkling at us and then my friend alerted me to the fact that people were focusing their telescopes on Saturn.

Saturn, the 6th planet from the sun and the second largest planet behind Jupiter. It has been my favorite planet for over a decade now; I used to doodle its astronomical symbol in the margins of my classwork. () According to some of my friends, it’s strange to have a favorite planet. Um, my name is Starr, it would be strange if I didn’t have a favorite planet. Or favorite nebula. Or favorite constellation. But I digress.

I love Saturn because of its extraordinary rings and its moons: Saturn has over 60 moons, losing the moon game narrowly to Jupiter. (Although its difficult to accurately count all of either planet’s moons.) I have been fascinated by Saturn since I was first able to name all the planets of the solar system (including Pluto, way back then…).

I stood in the growing line to see Saturn and found myself getting anxious. Would it be just a shining speck like Venus appeared? Would I even be able to see it with my lifelong struggle to look into scopes correctly?

I wasn’t at all disappointed. I looked into the eyepiece, and even though Saturn was moving rapidly out of the field of vision, I could see it. I could see Saturn’s rings, and I could see the shadow that the rings cast against the planet. I could see the Cassini division (the large gap between the rings), and I could see moons. Titan, shining brightly to the left and a few smaller moons behind it.

My view of the heavens from Earth — This is what I could see… but my view was even more spectacular.

It was more spectacular that I really could have hoped and I stepped away from the telescope in complete awe. I felt my eyes welling up with tears, and I struggled for a while to understand why I was getting embarrassingly emotional about being able to see Saturn. One of my friends started teasing me: “Is STARR getting STARSTRUCK by the STARS?”

But I was. I was so awestruck by the beauty of Saturn. Was this how Galileo felt when he first saw the rings of Saturn? What was greater, I wonder: the feeling of seeing a planet for the first time and discovering that this celestial body had rings? Or admiring said planet through other people’s eyes for years before being able to look directly at it for the first time?

Even after a minute, I was still stunned speechless. I laid down on the grass, staring up at the gleaming dot that I now knew to be Saturn. The word “mortal” kept entering my mind, as in “How can a mere mortal such as myself behold such beauty in my eyes?” I was still tearing up as I gazed at Saturn, knowing that I was able to see its rings. I eventually got back in line twice for two more looks, and its magnificence wasn’t lost on me a single time.

As I walked away from the event, my thoughts shifted from the magnificence of the heavens to the marvel of mankind. We, as humans, were able to construct a tool that allowed us to look at the multitude of sparkling somethings in the sky and see. I was able to see Saturn, 887 million miles away from Earth, because of the amazing telescopes that were forged by humans, some of which weren’t even automated. Trying to track Saturn as it blazed through space was fascinating in and of itself, but there were telescopes that were programmed to track Saturn as it sped across the sky.

Not only was mankind capable of creating instruments as wondrous as the telescope, but the people at this event were so kind. They traveled from far and wide, many of them citing jetlag from long flights or cramps from hauling their telescopes in their vans. The larger telescopes each cost over $10,000, not including the modifications and maintenance and any repairs. And these scientists allowed the general public to look at the heavens for free. They answered my friends’ questions about why stars twinkle and how did they even get so much cheese on the moon anyway?

I sat on the subway leaving DC thinking about the magnificence of the heavens and the marvel that is mankind.