The Urban Pantheist

The zookeeper conference this year was in Memphis, meaning a new city for us to explore!
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I sure would like to be able to link my Livejournal and Tumblr accounts. It's easy to link Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and some others I don't use (to tumblr) but LJ always seems a bit more difficult. I guess LJ is supposed to be used differently, but I'd like some of my tumblr content to come over here automagically.

Livejournal is a little harder to use than the others--it just hasn't kept up with the way people use the internet, I guess. I will still use LJ because it feels more permanent (and is way easier to search than the others) but less frequently I guess.

Anyway, due to my dad's health issues (vertigo--this is apparently a thing) I was in four states in 6 hours yesterday.

Also this morning I posted this on Tumblr:

I was showing the curators a dead dove (window strike), carrying it around, absent-mindedly resting my finger in its mouth, in its crop. Miraculously, it came back to life!

Note to self: don’t try this outside of dreamland.

This is the archway entrance into the Old Burying Ground (also called the Old Center Cemetery or just the Old Cemetery depending what source you consult) off of Mountain Road in Suffield Connecticut, the town where I grew up from age 7 to 17.


It's right up the hill from where the high school I went to used to be, but I don't remember ever exploring it.

My dad is one of Charlie's most favoritest people. I refer to him as "Poppa Doc (papa doc?)", the name that my brother's children called him when they were younger, and Charlie knows who I'm talking about.

My dad came to visit last Saturday and we went to a place with the problematic name of Squaw Rock Park, in Quincy. It was right above the beach and high enough to give us a nice view of the city across the harbor.


The only real "nature" picture I took on the walk was of this lovely line of white birches at the ridge of the park.


I set the googlemap app to find us a "pub," and it found us "The Irish Pub." I was a little tentative based on the outward appearance, but it was perfectly fine inside. We were the only people in there who were not 1. Irish or 2. playing Keno. I love my father's Saturday visits!

On Saturday my dad visited, so I took us over to the Esplanade, the park that runs along the Charles River. There were lots of college students picking up trash for Earth Day.

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This is me at the Charleston rest area on the Mass Pike. I'm kind of hungry, but a busload of UNH track athletes arrived just before me, and are creating huge line-ups at all the restaurants.


I spent the morning with my Dad. Here he is talking on the phone with my brother as we stop for a drink at Jonathan Pesco's.


We stopped along the Connecticut River to look for bald eagles--didn't find any, but saw lots of giant ice floes.

Despite how he looks, Carlisle doesn't really have that bad a life with us.


Sometimes my dad comes to visit!


And Charlie is there to teach him how to drink from a frozen bird bath.

Pocket's face! (My dad and Pocket).

What follows is lots of photos, mostly of Pocket. Mostly taken with my phone, in the dark, at a party. Not great quality. Imagine if you followed me on Instagram (@urbpan) you would have had these spammed to your phone in real time!

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It's good to get some pics of the three of us together, since it doesn't happen all that often.


And then one last pic of something that normal people would think was not worth taking a picture of: an almost perfect disc of moss on a palm stump.