Treehouse Dreams

When I was growing up I nearly had a treehouse in my backyard but before my father and I had a chance to work on building it a tree fell right through the place we had intended to build the treehouse. Ever since I have been obsessed with treehouses. I have several of Pete Nelson's treehouse books and I watch Treehouse Masters enviously. Having lived for years in a forest it seems only natural that I should one day live in a tree...

Someday, this is the crew I need to build my dream home in the trees!

And then one day I realized that even though I live in DC just next to a National Park forest but in an apartment, it might actually one day be possible to purchase some forest property in the Maryland or Virginia suburbs and commission the building of a treehouse. Living in DC, the trick will be finding affordable land close enough to the city, since the last thing I need is to be living next door to work in order to avoid a commute just to have a ridiculously long drive to my treehouse getaway, especially since I would love to be able to bring the cats sometimes or for long weekends. As a kid living in the Northern Virginia DC suburbs, I often drove 10-15 minutes down the road to hike the VA side of nearby Great Falls National Park, just by the CIA in Langley. If only I could find a small affordable plot of land with perfect treehouse trees neighboring Great Falls, on either side of the Potomac, I would be set to save up and eventually live my weird little dream of living at least part-time in a treehouse!

Redford Walks into the Woods

I decided that although the majority of the favorable reviews for this movie were from people over the age of 65, I had to go see Robert Redford's new movie "A Walk in the Woods", bringing to life a book by the same title written by travel author Bill Bryson based on his adventures on the Appalachian Trail. After all, there are two actors I would see in any movie - Robert Redford and Jodie Foster. So glad I saw this one - a very enjoyable movie that I certainly recommend, at least to anyone over the age of 35.

Another Year Older, Though Not Necessarily Any Wiser

I turned another year older today. Unfortunately I had a very busy day at work - so much so that I didn't realize it was after dark until the tiger that likes to visit me when I am in my office once again visited my office window, swimming up and bumping into to it from within the moat. I actually had plans to take a short walk in Rock Creek Park and/or go to Chinatown to see the new Robert Redford movie about Bill Bryson, both thwarted by my after-hours attempts to get work done.

because this first experience with the tiger office visit caught on 

camera was too great not to include in a second blog post...

My keepers at work brought me donut holes and gave me this painting made by one of our orangutans, which I happily added to my ever-growing collection of animal-made artwork:

Thankfully I was off the past 4 days and while I spend most of it coding gorilla videos for an upcoming study, I did return to the MD Renaissance Festival again this year with my mother.

 love this wooded location for a Ren Fare

a unique shop that sells vultures, rats, bats & a few other unusual creatures 

all made out of shells and other recycled natural materials

As always, my favorite thing about the festival was the shopping. I didn't buy as much this year, but I did come away with a few odds and ends, including this little fairy guy crouching on the log between the gnomes in what has become my gnome garden (I seem to find them everywhere--the one behind the plant is from England, the one on the left is Scandinavian and the one on the right I picked up at the National Cathedral) that I found at one of my favorite shops, Feywood. 

My mother framed a hand-written thank you note that Jane Goodall wrote me after I gave her a tour of the Ape House last Spring, since it seemed that this was something that should be preserved:

So the lesson I learned is that if I don't take off work on my birthday as I did last year to do a little self-contemplation in the forest and get my free birthday frappacino at Starbucks, I ought to at least make a greater effort to leave work before dark (living next door one often forgets to pay attention to the time when they often only see the inside of their office for any length of time after work hours), since not doing so is a recipe for a very sad birthday, made even more sad by the lack of forest time or a movie about forest time! At least this year I had mentally prepared myself for the fact this year that only two of the hundreds of people who I was connected to on Facebook (which I haven't been for nearly 2 years now) reached out to me on my birthday compared to the vast majority of whom wrote to me when I was on social media. Oh how different life was about a decade ago...

This beautifully summarizes how it feels sometimes to be someone who for a very good reason can not be on social media and who doesn't necessarily miss the medium of social media communication per se compared to phone calls and snail mails, but very much misses many of the people who remain on it (I am in no way judging those who are on social media, only what the culture of social media seems to have created, which you can really only fully appreciate and experience if you once had an active social media account and then had to suddenly and permanently terminate it):