39 years

Today I turned 39 and pondered my existence as I tend to do on my birthday. One of my staff gave me this lovely print that she picked up at a recent local primatology conference that reminds me a lot of one of my favorite wild orangutans. I love it for that reason and because it looks like the orangutan in the print is also pondering her existence:

In the evening my parents came over from Falls Church and we went to eat at & Pizza, a wonderful pizza place I discovered when my friend Ruth was visiting during the recent AAZK conference held here in DC. The pizza place is right by Sticky Fingers in Columbia Heights and is fantastic. Later we went back to my neighborhood to see opening night of the remake of Stephen King's "IT", which was properly disturbing considering my lifelong coulrophobia and distrust of clowns. That said, I am now considering reading the book (which of course was published in 1986--1986 seems to be the year of all interesting/noteworthy things in my childhood--including Halley's Comet, the Challenger explosion, my interview at NZP with the woman who held my job for 34 years...) considering that Stephen King is an evil genius to come up with the idea of a clown that comes out of the sewers to terrorize the fictional town of Derry, Maine every 27 years.

Original cast from the 1990 adaptation of IT

  2017 cast from IT...loved the hypochondriac kid!

Tim Curry's Pennywise was disturbing...

...but Bill Skarskgard's Pennywise reaches a whole other level!

 

I even broke down and bought the book version of IT, since Stephen King is an evil genius:

Recently there was a very timely Frank & Ernest cartoon in The Washington Post:

My parents gave me some lovely birthday gifts, including copies of the full Chronicles of Narnia and a gorgeous book about dragons: