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):