What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Ten weeks off from school. Wow! It really helps not to have a lot of snow days. 

Ten weeks…and now it’s over.

I actually had a mostly busy summer with some stretches where I had very little to do. 

I sold my home and moved out. That was a LOT of work!

We bought a new condominium but had to wait 26 days from the time we sold our house to the date we could move into our new condo. We spent 26 days living in a hotel, waiting for our new place. Ugh.

That’s a long time in a hotel room with two adults and a dog. I had a lot of down time, so I

went to museums. 

I visited the Custom House Maritime Museum in Newburyport. I love all things related to ships, so this was a museum I had wanted to visit for a long time.

I visited the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, NH. This was okay, I was hoping it would be a great place for a field trip, but it's geared to elementary-aged kids. 

I visited the Warren Anatomical Museum in Boston. Gruesome and fascinating. Lots of skulls, bones, skeletons and other body parts.

I visited the Hart Nautical Collection at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.

I visited the MIT Museum obviously at MIT in Cambridge. They had a lot of really cool things - like mechanical sculptures that moved on their own.

I visited the Umbrella Cover Museum in Portland, Maine. Honestly, I didn't even know what an umbrella cover was until I stopped in there. 

The two highlights of the museums were:

• Finding a mistake in a display at Hart Nautical Collection. They misidentified a ship in a display. I emailed the curator and pointed out the error.

• Seeing the skull of Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was the victim of s gruesome accident. A four-foot long iron pole was blasted through his head, leaving part of his brain destroyed and two gaping holes in his head. The pole landed several yards
  
  away.  And he survived!

Then, it got busy again - we moved into our new home and that was a LOT of work, too!

Finally, it was time to prepare for school.

And here we are….