My job often has strange things. I work at a natural history museum. I have oodles of stories, but I'll confine it to today.

1. The snowflakes I've been working on catching for weeks were finally ready. Over the last month, I've had my stuff in the freezer all ready to go, and whenever it snows I run outside with superglue, microscope slides, and other assorted accessories to capture and preserve the flakes. Then I leave them in the freezer for a long time to cure. Today, I took them out. It worked. The flakes have been essentially fossilized, intact, in the glue. Next, I learned how to use our fancy electric microscope to take some blurry pictures. Here they are for your viewing pleasure.


2. Christine walked in holding half a raccoon jaw. "Have you seen the top of my raccoon skull? It's missing, which is weird because normally the bottom half is what disappears." I hadn't seen it.

3. I then went driving around in a van covered in wooly mammoth art to a store that sells nothing but lamination machines and mailing machines and bought $100 worth of lamination material. Then I parked the van in front of my own house (which was on the way) and ran in the unlocked door and stole my own yoga mat before the dog started barking or my roommate noticed. Then back into the wooly van.

4. Next stop was the craft store, where I spent 30 minutes trying to identify the plastic plants and decide which ones might most realistically represent Utah's wetlands. I ended up buying fern things and some fake poinsettias, because they were $.99 and I figured I could cut off the leaves and use them for stuff.

5. I got this email from a co-worker:



6. I wrote a lesson plan where under "supplies" I listed "scientist".


7. I was the last one out so I did a little dance in the hall.


The end. Tomorrow I'm going snowshoeing and swimming in a crater with my coworkers, that too promises to be strange. But this, this was today.