We saw "Roving Mars", about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, at the IMAX theatre at Air+Space. I really liked it because the film is mostly about actual science and engineering: the difficulty of designing the rovers and the landing system, the scientific goals of the mission, and some of the geological discoveries made in the first few weeks (such as the likelihood that Mars was once much wetter). It contrasted with the space station IMAX film, which is about building the station and how cool it is to be in space; actual science, not so much... Bonus: "Roving Mars" has a reasonably good Philip Glass score -- not an outstanding one like "Dracula", but not a boring generic-Glass one either (like oh, most of his operas after the first three...)
I also wanted to go to the Sackler gallery to see the "In The Beginning" exhibition of Biblical manuscripts from 100AD up to 1000. It's amazing that some of the manuscripts can be read at all; the paper is now almost as dark as the ink, and portions of the pages have crumbled away. One display case had two tiny scraps, about the size of your little finger, that held a fragment of the Gospel of Matthew from around 100AD. There was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, two pages from the Lindisfarne Gospels, and a variety of other illuminated pages -- not as fancy as the lavish books of the later Middle Ages, but still beautiful.
Back home I set about making dinner. Menu:
- Store-bought: Tofurky roast and gravy. We like the Quorn roast better, but Whole Foods was out of them.
- Garlic mashed potatoes. Usually I make curried mashed potatoes, where I saute some diced onions and curry and then mash them in with the potatoes, but this year Barb suggested this recipe, which adds only 10 cloves of garlic.
- Cranberry-stuffed squash. The cranberry sauce recipe is interesting; the berries are heated up in a mix of apple sauce and maple syrup, but there's also onion and celery in the mix, though I didn't really notice either of them in the final result's flavor. I made the sauce a bit sweeter than necessary, but it tasted very good with the squash. The squash is bisected and the seeds scooped out, then you bake it half an hour and fill the cavities with the cranberry sauce, and then you bake it some more.
- Three-cheese bread: gorgonzola, mascarpone, and parmesan. Tasty, but I found I didn't like the gorgonzola flavour very much -- I found it vaguely metallic and not very pleasant. Barb was happy, though.
- Store-bought: berry pie and ice cream.