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The ocean comes to fill my cup
So most of today has been a ball of stress and errands and I appear to have dealt with it by reading, with great enjoyment, a reprint of an Ace double reprint of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947) and The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946), but yesterday was wholly lovely.
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derspatchel came out on the buses to meet me; for my birthday, he gave me the sea. We had to run an inland errand first, but we came back by way of the harborwalk at Rowes Wharf, had lunch at Legal Sea Foods (it was their annual oyster festival, so I made out like the Walrus and the Carpenter), and then spent the rest of the afternoon at the New England Aquarium. I hadn't been in two years. There were sharks and rays, fur seals and sea lions, leafy sea dragons, newborn seahorses, anemones and sea cucumbers, the long, spiraling walk from the top of the three-story reef tank down. There was a moray eel swimming. The octopus exhibit is being renovated. I don't remember the lobster and shark nurseries from our last visit. We don't know which species the penguins of the damned were, but they made an unearthly racket. Blue light wavering everywhere and the smell of salt. Things with fins and gills and translucent skins and the branching sway of live corals and the cold tide-braid of kelp. I miss the black light on the wall of shark-shapes, but I'm glad the electric eel has a real habitat now. We stayed until the aquarium closed and kicked us out into the pouring rain, for which I had brought the pink-and-black Marimekko umbrella I need to return to its rightful owner someday. And then Rob had to work, so I left him at the Somerville Theatre and joined my family for dinner in Lexington. My parents gave me books. Out-of-print books, academic books, titles I had been looking for on my own time with limited success, considering what my own time has been like lately—Glenn Markoe's Phoenicians (2002), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000), Alice Notley's Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), the aforementioned two suspense novels by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man (1963). My brother got me the collected first Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novel, Gene Luen Yang's The Promise (2012). There was hazelnut cake.
I had a skullcrushing headache by the time I got home and did not sleep anywhere near as much last night as I wanted, but it was worth it.
Oh, and in case you thought only Monty Python and bored classics students invented hilarious Latin names: meet Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas. I had actually heard of this couple before, but I hadn't known they have their own booze now. That's no small achievement for people whose inn hasn't been open in two thousand years. Optissime!
derspatchel came out on the buses to meet me; for my birthday, he gave me the sea. We had to run an inland errand first, but we came back by way of the harborwalk at Rowes Wharf, had lunch at Legal Sea Foods (it was their annual oyster festival, so I made out like the Walrus and the Carpenter), and then spent the rest of the afternoon at the New England Aquarium. I hadn't been in two years. There were sharks and rays, fur seals and sea lions, leafy sea dragons, newborn seahorses, anemones and sea cucumbers, the long, spiraling walk from the top of the three-story reef tank down. There was a moray eel swimming. The octopus exhibit is being renovated. I don't remember the lobster and shark nurseries from our last visit. We don't know which species the penguins of the damned were, but they made an unearthly racket. Blue light wavering everywhere and the smell of salt. Things with fins and gills and translucent skins and the branching sway of live corals and the cold tide-braid of kelp. I miss the black light on the wall of shark-shapes, but I'm glad the electric eel has a real habitat now. We stayed until the aquarium closed and kicked us out into the pouring rain, for which I had brought the pink-and-black Marimekko umbrella I need to return to its rightful owner someday. And then Rob had to work, so I left him at the Somerville Theatre and joined my family for dinner in Lexington. My parents gave me books. Out-of-print books, academic books, titles I had been looking for on my own time with limited success, considering what my own time has been like lately—Glenn Markoe's Phoenicians (2002), Elizabeth Donnelly Carney's Women and Monarchy in Macedonia (2000), Alice Notley's Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011), the aforementioned two suspense novels by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Dorothy B. Hughes' The Expendable Man (1963). My brother got me the collected first Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novel, Gene Luen Yang's The Promise (2012). There was hazelnut cake.I had a skullcrushing headache by the time I got home and did not sleep anywhere near as much last night as I wanted, but it was worth it.
Oh, and in case you thought only Monty Python and bored classics students invented hilarious Latin names: meet Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas. I had actually heard of this couple before, but I hadn't known they have their own booze now. That's no small achievement for people whose inn hasn't been open in two thousand years. Optissime!
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They are minute! But perfectly formed. The adults were all wound round the same clump of seagrass, their tails entangled, like a seahorse-king.
For your birthday, let me show you the bird with archaeopteryx claws on its wings, which I learned about from heliopausa: the baby hoatzin.
Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you! How prehistoric and adorable. Last survivor of a 64-million-year-old lineage!
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like a seahorse-king
marvelous.