The Urban Pantheist

I'll be darned if I can remember where this is (a short ways from Rancho Palos Verdes) but by gum there was no passing by it without taking a picture. Thank god it was snapshot time too! Otherwise these would be a string of pictures of my brother my father and I in bars and in cars.

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I have one more day's worth of photos to share, but there's a lot of them and I don't want these two to get buried:


Here's my pal rockbalancer taking a picture of a very active scolopendra. This genus of centipedes is large, fast, and bears a venomous sting in its front legs that reportedly hurts like a bastard. I'm not allowed to have one as a pet.


This little wolf spider is packed with personality! She's only about an inch and a half in scrunched-up diameter.

A lot of people--unless they have little kids--don't go to the zoo when they go on vacation. I'm really glad we did. I definitely recommend the Los Angeles Zoo if you like venomous snakes. I saw so many hot snakes that I completely lost track of what the species were.

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Giant pinned beetle! This is at the monstrous mountaintop Getty Center. We walked through and looked at some of the art, but we were really more interested in the grounds of the place, which are well worth the 15 dollar parking. (15 dollar parking, but free train ride, museum admission, and admission to the grounds!)

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The first thing I noticed about Los Angeles was the birds! (Actually, the first thing I noticed was the weather--good February temps between 65 and 80 and brightly sunny every day we were there.) This is a western gull: Large size, medium gray wings, pink feet, red spot on the bill. Larus occidentalis. By the way, this is Long Beach, which isn't even really Los Angeles, but it's close.

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Well after posting on the second day of my vacation I've utterly failed to keep up with it. Hopefully when I get back I won't be so totally overwhelmed that I get completely behind on it. We went to one of the Channel Islands (Atacapa--not Jersey this time) and the Zoo, so I've taken a few million photos.

I've been playing message tag with my new friend who is a secret lurker here on my journal, and she has been exceptionally giving and generous. It will be a real treat to meet her in person tonight, as we will see her singing with a group at a show we're going to.

It's a tremendous relief to be on the other side of the cold I've had for the past week. I still cough up minor demons a couple times a day, but the fever and fatigue are gone. Those symptoms were helping to make me a very unpleasant travelling companion, as my sense of humor and patience had been reduced to nothing at at all. My poor brother and father, trying to placate me while being their goofy jovial selves.

Then tomorrow First Friday at the Natural History Museum--I miss my friend Lila so much! We became very close over a very short time in 2006, and my heart aches to know that she is nearby but I can't see her. It will be a miracle if I don't burst into tears when we finally hug.

And as great as it is to get away, it will be so much greater to fall into the arms of Alexis again. The weather and landscape are beautiful here, but I yearn to be back at Contentment Cottage with my Beloved Wife. Only a matter of hours now.

I woke up very early this morning thinking about how much I've benefitted from generosity. The world has been very kind to me, and specific people have been very very kind to me. I feel sad that I may not have been as appreciative or generous enough in return, but happy that I have time ahead of me to try.

I am meeting an LJ friend (reader only, no LJ account) on my trip, and she got me and my family tickets to a couple shows. I am grateful, but have no thank you gift. I thought I could find some copies of The Urban Pantheist Zine, but they have been archived all too well (future generations may enjoy them). Mostly I'm happy to meet new friends and have new experiences. I've always been rotten at gifts, but I justify it by saying that material things aren't that important.

I'm really looking forward to this trip! It's a whole new environment of things to discover--the closest I've ever been was San Diego, and that was back when I was thinking about comic books more than anything else. I don't think I saw the city during the day at all, and didn't see it at night sober.

Fresh new mind, open and excited. La Brea Tar Pits, Southern California Hills and Beaches, city streets teeming with coyotes and kit foxes (well probably not), mountain lions creeping through mansion estates. It took me 25 years of living in Boston to visit New York City. Now Los Angeles a year later. Next year?

In our last hours in Puerto Rico, we went to the Jardin Botanico at the University of Puerto Rico. I took more pictures there, in a few short hours, than I did on any other day of the trip. We do love botanical gardens, what with their conveniently labeled plants and attractiveness to wildlife. This one was a bit undermaintained, with some crumbling bridges and neglected pathways, and we pretty much had the place to ourselves. Nonetheless, it was a great ending to our vacation. I'll break this into two or three posts, so as not to overwhelm you.

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I have an immense amount of photos from our last day in Puerto Rico, so I thought I'd break them up a little. Here are some doorways.
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My dad likes lighthouses, so I found one on the map: Punta Tuna. We followed yet another tiny winding road to a locked gate: the lighthouse was closed for the holiday week. A rough footpath through some scrubby woods along a drainage ditch seemed to go in the right direction, so we took a chance and went. A short while later we found ourselves on a beautiful beach, with this lighthouse overhead.



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