Surprisingly, fresh-squeezed orange juice is doing wonders for my hangover. Perhaps the acidity is having a homeopathic effect. Or maybe time + coffee = relief.

Rather an eventful weekend for a change. Friday night, my valiant friends stayed late with me while I edited a press release that had to go live first thing Monday morning, rather than jetting off to the Museum of Science without me. (Such a collective of  good eggs is a rare and wondrous thing.) I was tired and doing my best Madame Crankypants impersonation, but the Egyptian exhibit really cheered me up. Some highlights:

• We kept calling it The Quest for Immorality, and W. even used the expression as we entered. The guard didn’t crack a smile, but.
• The sarcophagus that was so detailed and beautiful that I actually gasped.
• The CAT scans of the mummy showing his broken bones — double the creep factor.
• My remembering that the ancient Egyptians pulled the brains out through the nose of the deceased with a special hook — thank you, Simpsons.
• The tomb you could enter and walk around in. All the walls were covered floor to ceiling with hieroglyphics and depictions of the soul’s journey through each of the 12 hours of the night, the serpent it had to battle (with a lil’ help from his friends like Anubis, Isis, Horus, and the gang), and its rebirth at dawn as the sun god Re-slash-a scarab beetle. (I’m a little confused on how the soul could be both — plus, does this mean that all souls converged into one godly being/beetle? The exhibit didn’t explain that part.)
• Y. saying that it looked like the Residents were helping the soul on its journey, and danged if several figures didn’t look like eyeball-head guys.
• Afterward, when Y., W., and I were hanging out by the store while T. went on a Quest for a Chemistry Set, W. & Y. discussed IMAX movies they’ve seen and loved. General consensus was that the beaver dam one (sponsored by a hydroelectric company, hmm) was the best ever. Y. wandered into the store to look at a frontiersy Lewis & Clark cookbook (though I doubt that L&C ate rack of elk in a lingonberry-port reduction), and W. called out, loudly, “See if it tells you how to eat a beaver!” High-larious!
• Feeding a dollar into a machine that printed my name (eagle-owl-feathery thing) in hieroglyphics, impressing the group of kids who surrounded it. (”Dad, can I make my name too?”)
• Y’s  recollection of the set of construction blocks he had as a kid — something called Elgo — which totally sounds like some Eastern European knock-off that the Simpsons dreamed up.

After getting our Egypt on, we tried getting into Helmand for luscious Afghan food, but they couldn’t seat us for like 45 minutes. So we ate at the South Indian restaurant next door. Oh so delicious — definitely up to Tanjore standards. Their bhel was less wet than Tanjore’s but equally delish, and best of all: a basket of free! free! papadums. (W. and I simultaneously burst into a Madonna-esque “Papadum Preach.”) I’d given up on New England Indian restaurants giving away yummy crisps to munch while perusing the menu.