Week 2: Threatening sandwich shops, going fishing, and meeting the whole cast of Bambi

 I suppose I will start this blog post by explaining where I'm currently sitting to write it again, as that is how a started my first post. One of my favorite locations that I have found to do work is a couple of tables situated by a garden outside of our apartments—I'm currently sitting here... and I am freezing cold in 84 degree weather. I suppose my goosebumps are telling me that I have acclimated to the DC swamp pretty quickly coming from New Hampshire. 

The week started on a good note with hybrid work, catching sunsets with friends, making our way through the Pirates of the Caribbean series... and also threatening the owner of a chain restaurant. At ACP on Tuesday, a couple of SPS leadership and friends in the building ordered out at a chain sandwich shop, but the order came extremely late and incorrect. Let's just say that Janessa (the sock intern, as well as both my roommate and hero) took matters into her own hands. The day will live in infamy. 

Since my arrival in DC, I have gone on daily runs to explore the city. Now, let's be clear, I despise running in any other setting, but in these special circumstances it has been incredibly freeing and helpful to learn the city, and it's also my only real method of working out as there is absolutely no chance that I could afford a gym membership here. I usually pick a direction, and go wherever my feet take me. On Wednesday, I decided to go left(ish) from the apartments, ended up in what I believe to be Rock Creek Park, almost stepped on a baby fawn, ran into a bunch of rabbits, and pretty much met the whole cast of Bambi. I couldn't recommend this method of exploring more—it is a great time to go off alone, clear my head, learn more about surroundings—and have weird encounters with Bambi. 

On Wednesday, a few of the interns and I also successfully went fishing after work—there hasn't been a night thus far that I haven't done anything, and it has been an absolute blast. 

Thursday was an awesome day—all of the interns came into ACP for the day to meet and have lunch with John Mather himself! It wasn't only fun to have friends at work all day, but it was an incredible and unique opportunity to talk to such an inspirational role model and figure like John Mather. I got to meet and sit with John Mather during lunch—and found out that we have very similar upbringings being near farms/animals growing up, with our mothers being elementary or younger-age teachers, as well as the obvious interest in astronomy.  

In terms of work— I am absolutely thrilled to be working on the research that I'm doing! At the moment, I am working on teaching guides and outreach methods surrounding two women in physics: Katherine Clerk Maxwell (James Clerk Maxwell's wife, who you might know from color experiments, work with gasses, electromagnetism, or 'Maxwell's equations'), and Hypatia (one of the first known Egyptian female astronomers). It seems as though Katherine may have been extremely involved in many of Maxwell's experiments (particularly in his color vision and electromagnetism work), but she was never recorded as a contributor. So, I am attempting to uncover what her role was in James Maxwell's experiments, and to hopefully publicize her involvement and story of discreditation with a Physics Today article, Wikipedia edits, blog posts and a teaching guide for students to learn more. It has been a very interesting challenge for me to try to find footprints of Katherine's work through the context of her husband—she is really only recorded in some of James' letters to close personal friends, so I have been going through all of James' letters and other correspondence with friends (that were close enough for him to talk about his wife with), as well as looking at any of his existing records around times when I know that Katherine was doing the experiments with him. Needless to say, it has been a very tedious but extremely interesting task to go through all of James' letters, records, and works, looking for traces of Katherine (for example, in one of his papers there is an unnamed observer 'K', which was later confirmed by one of James' close friends to be Katherine Maxwell).

To put it simply, after work on Friday, it was gametime. Not only did all of the SPS interns and mentors get the fantastic chance to go to a National's baseball game together, but most of us also went to a midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture show afterwards, and do a whole weekend of other Pride and March for Our Lives events in the days after that. Going to Rocky Horror was an experience that I will not soon forget, and the pride events this past weekend were just as full of joy... and late-night tacos. It was a truly fantastic weekend, which was closed out with a whole festival and series of pride-themed concerts (including Joe Jonas and a whole festival) on Sunday night. I figure I will also include that attending a weekend drag brunch is anything but a drag. Poor Ben got singled out. Chaos ensued. I would highly recommend anyone attend pride-related events, no matter your orientation!