The Urban Pantheist

A glance out the side door at the pre-storm world.


When I first woke up, taking the temperature of the day.

So that bookmark was maned wolf tracks. I am still willing to trade to zookeepers for other tracks.

I let my beard get pretty big. It's hard to want to cut it when it's cold.


Wet muddy soil sometimes freezes into these ice spikes.


As much as I dislike the cold, I love looking at ice.

The view from the kitchen window on xmas day 2012. Alex came over around mid-day, and when the snapshot alarm went off she was out getting Chinese food. I spent most of the day from 1-5 standing by the fire and a little bit playing with dogs. I felt pretty gloomy most of the day--I always want December 25th to be an anti-celebration, reveling in not belonging, but it's hard to pull off unless you have others who want to indulge those feelings with you. Alexis was gloomy too, but I think she was partly preoccupied with the puppy's health issue, and partly in a deep funk about the weather.

Alex was good company even though she was feeling a little under the weather herself. Jim and Turtle played most of the day, and the big dogs joined in but wimped out of the cold pretty quick.

I called my dad, who was not traveling on xmas for the first time in 15 years, and he seemed okay with being home alone. His plan for the day was to call all his relatives.



I was inordinately pleased with myself for having spent much of the previous half day preparing firewood and storing it in the shed to keep it dry. The gloom broke after dark, Alexis and I cuddled and watched John Carter. This weekend we will probably do some kind of xmas thing with the Vermont family, and my dad may come along too if the weather isn't too shitty.

I took a short hike with some zookeepers (first time I've been in a group of all-male zookeepers since I've been in the business) to birdwatch near Spot Pond (part of the Middlesex Fells). We saw common and hooded mergansers, but not the bald eagle pair that's been seen lately. Apparently the eagles fly over Stone Zoo pretty often these days.


A very small part of the pond is iced over, which is unusual for this time of year.

Five years ago today it was cold enough to...

But we went to Deer Island anyway:

Honey locust pods.

Pretty bleak out there yesterday. I started walking Charlie along the Muddy, and just got disappointed by how cold and colorless and ugly it looked. That's probably a reflection of something inside me rather than an accurate depiction of the park. So I left the Riverway and went behind the apartment buildings that border it, but are separated by the trolley tracks. Still pretty colorless, but at least there were some things I hadn't taken pictures of before. As nasty as it was out, I'm thankful to be spared the two feet of snow that other places got.

It's been a weird spring so far. We had a handful of genuinely hot days (80 degrees +) in April and May (including the day before my mushroom class, when it caused a problem for me), but June has been almost uniformly cold and gray. By "cold" I mean 50s and low 60s, and by "uniformly" I mean probably half the time or more. Everyone kind of expects June to be the beginning of Summer weather.

My dad is thankful for this unusual pattern, because he teaches in a public school building with no air conditioning. The kids aren't staring longingly out the window at a day better spent at the beach, and he isn't sweltering in his shirt and tie.

"We need to evacuate everyone south of the pink areas."

"What about the people north?"

"It's already too late for them."

The weather here in Boston has reached a new stage this week, for the first time in months. This stage is called TOO COLD. The evergreen plants look like they are reconsidering their risky evolutionary gamble, vincas and English ivy and rhodies all cringing in the morning light. "We're alright!" they claim unconvincingly. I see you shivering! The cedars do look a bit like they're gloating, however.

Fortunately, there is no precipitation associated with the weather yet, since the air mass that brought the cold is nosebleed-inducingly dry. I'm going to need a refill on my asthma inhaler toute (de) suite; and likewise the notion I floated a week or two ago, of ditching my car and its many expenses and returning to the road as a cycle commuter, seems ludicrous if not downright suicidal. I'd make it a tenth of a mile from my house before collapsing in a heap of chilly wheezing--right now just from walking to get Alexis' car from the lot I sound like an accordion with torn bellows.

I needed this to remind me why it is we are looking to move. Now I can put a date on it: third week of November--can't breathe outside; steering wheel feels like cold iron bar; all clothes inadequate must buy new ones and wear all of them at the same time. And this is actually behind schedule by a few weeks.

Forgive me, but I wanted today's weather to be worse. It snowed for some short time during the night, and then switched over to rain for the morning. The morning was fairy miserable, for those of us walking around in puddles on ice with insufficiently waterproof boots. But at the moment it is glorious. In January in Boston, a sunny day in the high 30s feels like as good as we can hope for. You want to throw your gloves away and leave your coat forever unzipped.

Nasty weather would make next week's vacation all the more sweeter. But the forecaster assure us that nasty will be the order of the day on Sunday and Monday, so at least I have that.