Starry skies

I'm looking a four-day weekend in the face. The boys and I are going to Quartz Mountain on Sunday to spend a couple of nights watching the Perseid meteor shower. You just can't see the sky here in the city, and Grayson has never experienced a meteor shower. I remember from my days with the Oklahoma Arts Institute that Quartz Mountain is about as good a place as any in the state to see the night sky, so I thought we'd give summer one last hurrah and go check it out.
I haven't been back to Quartz since it burned down, more than ten years ago. It's a completely different place since I was there, and I hear it's really nice. It was a shabby, second-rate state lodge, smelling of disinfectant, with scorpions marching down the hall. Now it's a beautiful facility with a very nice restaurant, indoor-outdoor pool, etc. Even internet service, so Gray won't go into withdrawal or anaphylactic shock or something. We should have a nice time, swimming and hiking and exploring. I never got to show the place to Gray when I worked there. It will be nice to be there as purely civilian, though I'm sure I'll have all kinds of flashbacks.

We're going to take Grayson's telescope. We've really never used it, though he's had it for a couple of years. Again, there's just no good viewing in the city. But we should be able to see a lot out at Quartz.

Oh, I meant to mention that you can see my museum on some episodes of the new series "Jurassic Fight Club" on the History Channel. This coming Wednesday, the episode is about Deinonychus and Tenontosaurus and they did quite a bit of filming in my museum for that episode. Also some for the short-faced bear vs. megalion episode, so check it out.

Speaking of the museum, I suddenly realized that I haven't written about the museum drama taking place. Last month our director announced her resignation. She's going back to Milwaukee to be close to her mom, who is getting pretty old and needs care. We were all expecting a national search for another new director, but were told that an "internal" search was being conducted and the new director would be in place by Sept. 1. It gradually became clear that the "internal search" was really a reappointment of the old director, Mike Mares, who stepped down five years ago.

Now, I have nothing against Mike. I worked with him for several years and we got along just fine. But his autocratic style is just about a polar opposite from the consensus building we've all gotten used to under Ellen's leadership. It makes a lot less difference to me than it does to the curators who have power and autonomy issues that I don't have. I figure, hell, I'm in pr, I just say what they tell me to say. But the curators are in an uproar over it. To intensify the issues, Mike is already taking the reins and making changes. There are murmurings that he's planning to chuck the new logo we devised four years ago and have worked so hard to make recognizable. That he means to open the museum on Mondays again. That he is considering canceling certain exhibitions that have been on the calendar for months. How much of it is true, I don't know. And I don't think it matters. There's not much we can do about it. We will all have to adapt to a new World Order. But it has some people all wound around the axle. Some days, at the museum, the term "kicked ants nest" comes to mind.

It will be interesting to watch the transition and see what is fact and what is fiction. Only one thing is absolutely certain: things will change.