Greetings from the Franklin Park Zoo

We had a busy awesome Sunday with Cheryl, starting with a drive to the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill, where we met Adam and Haley to walk around the fairy houses and see the sheep and goats brought in to trim the daffodil fields. Then we went to Panera in Leominster for lunch before going to see Coyote vs. Acme, which is a joy -- lots of Looney Tunes in jokes, lots of actors having fun, lots of swipes at Applemazon. 

We had dinner at The Friendly Toast in Chestnut Hill, then drove into Boston past the arboretum to the Franklin Park Zoo for the Boston Lights lantern exhibit, where we met Marilyn by the entrance. Inside, we saw leopards, penguins, jellyfish, horses, lemurs, and many other light animals, plus cranes, kangaroos, and camels who could be spotted sleeping in their enclosures behind the light displays. And my dad is out of the hospital!

Greetings from Zoo Lights

Poetry posts may be erratic until I move. I spent most of Monday packing -- first little collectibles that came in their own padded boxes, which we'd had saved in our storage unit and retrieved on Saturday, then games and oversized books, which have to be fit like jigsaw pieces so they don't slide around in medium boxes. We're letting the moving company pack the breakables so they're all covered in case of disaster, but I can manage the books and boxes. Anyone know how to keep built Lego sets intact in transit? 

We walked to the park in the late afternoon and were surprised to see prunus blossoms already -- hot pink ones! -- along with many ducks. Then we came home, ate leftover Indian food for dinner, and watched a few episodes of History of the World Part II, which is pretty ridiculous rather than clever satire but that suits my mood at the moment. Now we're watching F1, which is...fine? There are cars and men who drive them, don't ask me more. Wild Lanterns at the zoo, glowing at night and over for the season in daylight: 

Poem for Thursday and Wild Lantern Garden

Love Poem, Lampyridae (Glowworms) 

By Fiona Benson 

The female born again with little changed

except she has no mouth and may not eat,

except she has this urge to climb, and a light

she must raise and twist; the male born again

with little changed except he has no mouth,

except he has this urge to search, and wings –

oh she must twist and turn her tail’s green fire

like bait, its little stab of brightness in the night,

and he must search with wings through troubled air

to find her pinhole lure, its single, green,

seducing star .... All night she signals him in:

come find me – it is time – and almost dawn;

all night he looks for her in petrol stations

villages and homesteads, the city’s neon signs:

where are you – it is time – and almost dawn....

Once were humans wandered in the lanes,

led astray by fairies, foxfire, who found

their stranger selves and brought them home.

Now the dark is drowned, but some things

you can only find beyond the light,

and it is time and almost dawn and love,

my love, there is no finding then. 

-------- 

I did some computer work Thursday morning, and in the afternoon I had to work on the Big Upcoming Project, though that did get me out of the apartment (and I also stopped at Kohl's to pick up some huge post-holiday bargains, and took a walk to see the waterfowl in the lake). We ate leftover noodles for dinner, then I had Thursday night chat. 

After chat I watched this week's The Pitt with Cheryl, then the new episode of Starfleet Academy with Paul (better than the first episode but I'm a long way from sold on the show). Now we're watching some more Lower Decks which at least makes me laugh. Flowers and pollinators from the Woodland Park Zoo's Wild Lanterns:

Greetings from Woodland Park

On Sunday we went to Green Lake and spent most of the day with older son, starting with lunch at Gao Lhao Bangkok Noodle Shop (we thought about Kitanda but I was in the mood for drunken noodles). Then we picked up Theo and Thandi to walk around the lake -- it was Pokemon Community Day, so we also caught a lot of Grookeys and evolved some Rillabooms and I got lots of shinies and special backgrounds. 

After dropping the dogs back off at home -- son's wife was having a girl's day out with friends -- we then went to the Woodland Park Zoo for the last night of WildLanterns, the zoo's winter light display, which is all about nature...animals, plants, and underwater life. It was a chilly, beautiful evening after a clear, gorgeous day. When we left the zoo, we went to the Jewel Box for crepes both savory and sweet.

 

Once we got home and fed the cats, we watched the first two episodes of Starfleet Academy. I took lots of notes, many indicating places where I rolled my eyes and snorted in disgust, so I think I will give it another couple of episodes before I post them -- I mean, maybe it'll become less dependent on tropes and cliches and I'll stop wondering why there's energy for a whole colony of photonics post-Burn.

Poem for Thursday and Electric Blooms

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs 

By Renee Nicole Macklin 

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i've donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

               ribosome

               endoplasmic—

               lactic acid

               stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills --

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can't point to anymore, maybe my gut --

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it's the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can't believe—

               that the bible and qur'an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths "make room for wonder" --

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

-------- 

This award-winning student poem was written by Renee Nicole Macklin, later Renee Nicole Good, murdered this week by ICE. Here is the fundraiser to support her wife and son. 

I was up half the night with an upset stomach, so I slept late on Thursday and kind of dragged all morning reading, then showering. It didn't help that it stayed deeply overcast and dark all day. I did some cleaning after lunch and eventually we walked in the gloom to the park, which today had more ravens than ducks on the beach. 

We watched the Fiesta Bowl, which was an exciting game and I'm delighted that Miami won! I had my usual Thursday chat, and now we're watching more of The Winter King, still extremely violent and bloody and the same Merlin who supports baby murder in the name of the gods opposes abortion. Flowers at Bellevue Botanical Garden d'Lights:

Lyrics for Friday and Light Animals

Here You Come Again 

By Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil 

Here you come again

Just when I've begun to get myself together

You waltz right in the door, just like you've done before

And wrap my heart 'round your little finger

Here you come again

Just when I'm about to make it work without you

You look into my eyes and light those dreamy eyes

And pretty soon I'm wondering how I came to doubt you

All you gotta do is smile that smile

And there go all my defenses

Just leave it up to you and in a little while

You're messing up my mind and filling up my senses

Here you come again

Looking better than a body has a right to

And shaking me up so, that all I really know

Is here you come again, and here I go

-------- 

January 2 was a quiet day around here, though we had football on a lot of it so it wasn't literally quiet. We saw parts of the Armed Forces Bowl in the morning while I was uploading and filing all the end of 2025 photos (Adam spent a summer doing an internship at Texas State), and the Liberty Bowl in the afternoon around walking to the park in the mist and eating samosa chaat for dinner (I like Navy's quarterback). 

In the evening we watched this week's Fallout, which is too dark for my current mood. So afterward I put on Dumplin', which I had read a good review of somewhere recently though it's several years old, and it is glorious -- the entire movie is about body positivity, women (particularly trans women) lifting up other women, and the music of Dolly Parton. Light creatures at Garden d'Lights at Bellevue Botanical Garden:

Greetings from Bellevue Botanical Garden

Most of my Monday was busy work, enlivened by visits from maintenance to fix one of our burners and someone else to look at a leaky shower, until late afternoon when we drove to Bellevue and parked at Wilburton Hill Park to walk to Bellevue Botanical Garden, which is in the last days of the annual Garden D'Lights show. We got hot chocolate in the coffee shop there and walked around the winter light garden, which isn't a holiday show but a recreation of elaborate gardens in string and cluster lights, with some animals and a dragon too:

 

We ate our leftover Christmas Swedish food for dinner, which was still yummy, and watched the end of the Rams-Falcons game (for the sake of the Seahawks, I rooted for Atlanta, who fought hard and won despite being out of playoff contention). Then we put on Always Be My Maybe, which is a few years old but I'd seen a good review of it somewhere and it always amuses me how Asian family-and-romance movies remind me of good Jewish family-and-romance movies (shit like Nobody Wants This does not count). It's funny and Wong and Park are sweet together.