I Met a Sloth

Did I ever tell you about the time that I met a real sloth? It turns out that this is something that one can do simply by paying the zoo lots of nice money!

My older kid has always been the zoo's biggest friend, and the world's second-hardest human to shop for (her father is the world's hardest human to shop for, so it might be genetic), so her big Christmas gift from me last year was a day at the zoo with us, with the extra activities of a sloth encounter AND a dolphin encounter.

We met all the animals for Christmas!

But first: my favorite sea lion pose:

And, of course, at this zoo there are plenty of animals that you can meet without paying any extra money:

If you, a full-grown grown-up, don't leave the touch tank wet to your elbows, are you even a homeschool graduate?

As someone who has regular internal hysterics on the daily about the fact that all my family! Is not in the same room at the same time! Much less the same state!, just walking around the zoo together was my own favorite part of Christmas break:

Okay, I lied. My favorite part of Christmas break was THIS guy!!!

We got to hang out with him and coo over him and watch him eat snacks while his zookeeper talked about him and answered our questions--

(Look! He smiled at me!)

And then WE got to feed him snacks and take our photos with him! And then, THEN he curled up in a little ball!

He. Was. ADORABLE. 

Sloths don't seem like big thinkers, and there weren't really any thoughts apparent behind those big, brown eyes, but here he is scratching himself:

Oh, and here he is eating just one more snack:

Look how slowly he moves!!!

I swear I felt like I came out of a fugue state when we finally left our new sloth friend. I had no idea how much time had passed, what day it was, or what was happening in the outside world.

Might as well go visit the flamingos!

If nothing else, they'll scream you out of your meditative zone of contemplation!

We've seen free-range kangaroos at other zoos, but I think this is the first time we've visited since they've come to our zoo. There were very few people out on this cold late afternoon right before the New Year, so the kangaroos had plenty of room to hop all around in our vicinity and act like we weren't there:

I always forget that in December, the elephants and zebras and giraffes really aren't there, so we walked through a silent and empty African savannah--

--but the orangutans were around--

--and so were the dolphins!

After the dolphin show, my partner and kid went off to meet the stars of the show, while I hung out by the fire pit and got completely obsessed with the entity I call Twinkle Tree:

Every few minutes, it would do a whole light-up musical number, then go back to being a regular Twinkle Tree for another ten minutes or so. Even after the others came back from their encounter and wanted to walk around some more and tell me all about the dolphins they'd met, I was all like, "Shhh!!! Twinkle Tree is about to go off!"

I... may have sat there until I watched Twinkle Tree's entire repertoire. I don't even want to guess how long that took.

Eventually, my partner only managed to lure me away by wondering out loud if the Twinkle Tunnel also put on a show every few minutes...

It didn't, humph, but it was still pretty cool:

This turned out to be SUCH a good present! The kid loved it, of course, but I definitely loved it the most. We spent the whole day together, and although I sobbed miserably a couple of weeks later when we dropped her back at college, then spent another couple of weeks in a depression, pretty much just crying, listening to lavender country, and finishing the puzzle we'd worked on all break, I think all that together time shored up my emotional state so that I wasn't as much of a wreck as I usually am.

Yes, that was me NOT being as much of a wreck, ahem.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

To Philadelphia and Back in 22 Hours

How are we already here again? Two years ago exactly, my older kid and I were on a whirlwind tour to see one last college before she made up her mind about where she was going to go to school. 

That feels so long ago, but also like it was yesterday, you know? That kid I took on her last college tour before Decision Day was still a kid. Just two years later she's still my baby, but she's no longer a child. She finished growing up there at college when I wasn't there to see it.

Now I'm supporting my younger kid as she makes the same kind of agonizing decision, and she's simultaneously the most grown-up, confident, sophisticated human I've ever had the privilege to know and also my precious four-year-old in a thrifted velvet dress, butterfly wings strapped to her back, mashing dandelion flowers into a pretend pie in her backyard mud kitchen.

How can I let that tiny little sprite out of my sight, much less drop her off and leave her at a college 700 miles away? Wasn't it just last week that she sat on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted a kitten for Christmas?

How about we just try not to think that far ahead for a bit. Let's just think about not forgetting where in this massive Economy Lot we're leaving the damn car:

Then we'll just think about the following:

• airport security
• napping during the flight
• finding the SEPTA station at the Philadelphia International Airport and buying rail tickets for later (the station in the college town apparently doesn't have its own ticket kiosk? Because... reasons?)
• booking and riding in my very first Lyft (super smooth process, but our driver did treat us to an anti-Philadelphia screed while also spurning the highway in favor of only surface streets, making the ride take so long that the Lyft app sent me a push notification asking if I was okay or was I in peril)
• getting dropped off at the campus gates and then immediately hoofing it to the nearest Starbucks for caffeine and a breakfast wrap
• taking one sip of my chocolate cream cold brew and realizing as soon as the stimulant hit my brain that we were about to be late for the Welcome event
• hoofing it back to campus at double-speed

And then, of course, exploring this beautiful college campus and learning about the school and meeting some students and staff and watching my kid make friends with the other kids on the tour. 

This school has a literal cloister why?

The kid is more of a sucker for the Collegiate Gothic architectural style than I am. Who wouldn't want to have class inside a castle?

Just between us, and knowing what y'all know about this kid, I'm pretty sure the fact that this school is basically a poorly-disguised cult for worshipping Athena is its biggest draw for her...

Statue of Athena, at which the students leave offerings. Tell me it's not a cult.

When we were given a little free time, the kid and I OBVIOUSLY beelined straight to the library. College libraries are some of my favorite campus buildings to explore!

Check out the original statue of Athena up high where students from the rival college can't reach her, and also plaster casts taken from the genuine Parthenon metopes on display at the British Museum. I'm just gonna leave this right here.

So envious that they have a whole room of puzzles! They also have a craft club with its own permanent, dedicated studio and an art club, also with its own permanent, dedicated studio. 

I read this book in grad school!

I'm telling you, the owl iconography is INTENSE. I kind of wanted to ask how this impacted their enrollment of students from certain Native American nations, but I'd already asked soooo many weird questions that I felt I should probably leave some weird questions for other people to ask.

Tell me that this is not a shocking number of owls, though?!?

I am SO glad that I'm not seventeen years old and trying to figure out where I want to go to college. The amazing choices that she has are a blessing, a luxury, and a direct result of the hard work this kid has done and the phenomenal person she is, but it's also an awful burden to have to decide.

Let's spend the next few hours not thinking about it, and instead thinking about how to navigate the SEPTA system, especially because Jefferson Station booted us out into a shopping mall with no discernible exit, and it took us at least 20 minutes to find our way out to the street. Also, while I was standing at one of the big maps and figuring out our route, a kind stranger came over to gently point out that I was tracing the trolley line and not the rail line. Because apparently Philadelphia also has trolleys!

I'd wanted to see Chinatown, browse a couple of bookstores, walk around the Independence sites, etc., and we had plenty of time to do that, but I'd neglected to take into account that by the time we got downtown we'd have been up and at 'em for approximately 14 hours, and shockingly for me when confronted with a tourist site, I was starting to fade.

Imagine! ME!!! Forgetting to so much as take a snapshot of the Chinatown Gate as we walked under it! Unwilling to walk a few extra blocks over to the bookstore I'd Pinned! Too tired to make the extra effort to take a close-up photo of Independence Hall!

Not even the facts of my own exhausted near-tears and the kid who dances on pointe six days a week admitting that her feet hurt could stop me from paying my respects to Ben, Deborah, and Francis Franklin, though:

That was the last tourist thing we did, though. After that we trudged straight back to Jefferson Station, caught the train back to the airport, did the whole security theatre dance number one more time, and collapsed at our gate, where the kid proceeded to sleep as soundly as if she'd been in her bed back home for the remaining two hours until our flight.

I, on the other hand, finished my book (Peter Darling), started another (Beartown), and discovered that, gasp, the Philadelphia International Airport only stocks Pepsi products?!? NOOO!!! Mama needs her Diet Sprite!

I reluctantly nursed my... Starry? WTF is a STARRY?!?... and made it last until we got back to our home airport, at which point I'd forgotten that I'd even taken a photo of our parking spot. Thank goodness for the teenager, who just flat-out remembered where we parked in her head, and who loudly sang our personal mash-up of "Party Rock Anthem," "California Girls," and the entire Percy Jackson musical with me to keep me awake for the drive home. 

I want her to go to absolutely the BEST college, y'all, and also I never want her to leave my side for a second. 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which I Drive to Ohio, Talk to a Stranger, Eat a Disappointing Bagel Sandwich, and Tour Octagon Earthworks in the Sleet

The teenager's Trashion/Refashion Show was also the occasion of my college student's very first weekend visit home. It was a pretty great weekend in which she picked back up right where she left off, walking the dog and gossiping about our favorite books and then reading more books while sitting side-by-side on the couch. 

Of course, like a good college student, she had class at 9:30 am the next Monday. So even though at 9:30 pm on Sunday we were on our way to get post-show ice cream with all the other cool teenagers--

--at 4:30 on Monday morning we were pulling out of the driveway and on our way to Ohio!

Not gonna lie--I am maybe about five years too old to pull off a four-hour drive at 4:30 in the morning. The airport, now? That's only like an hour away. I can do the airport at any old time. But a genuine 4:30 am road trip, with the dark, empty highways and nothing good on the radio and turning the headlights off bright whenever a car passes even though I can't see for shit without them on bright... yeah, I'll be fine if I don't have to do that too many more times in the rest of my life.

Fortunately, I had an alert and capable college student with me, so after I'd driven maybe an hour, just long enough to convince myself that I'd done my share for a bit, we switched and I had a good, long snooze while my kid drove the sun up.

It turned out that this day was also the college's Admitted Students Day--I remember when my kid and I were attending Admitted Students Day!--so campus was quite a bit busier at 8:00 in the morning than I'd anticipated, and when I swung over to park after dropping the kid at her dorm to freshen up, there was a line to get into the visitor parking garage.

A guy was attending cars as they pulled up to the garage, leaning into each driver's window to chat and then beckoning them on. I guess my sweatpants and hoodie and bags-under-eyes look didn't fit the vibe of all the other cars with family groups and teens in tow, because instead of just directing me to the parking, the attendant looked at me and then said, "Are you faculty or staff or..."

I said, "Hi! I'm actually just here visiting my freshman!"

The guy literally replied, "Visiting a freshman. Huh! I've never heard that one before!"

We both blinked at each other.

Finally, I was all, "So... the sign says there's visitor parking here? Where I can park while I'm visiting my freshman?"

The guy was just like, "Pull forward," and then turned to the next car.

THIS, you guys. When I tell you that I have a ton of social anxiety about talking to strangers and I hate doing it, it is because of THIS! I SWEAR to you that my social interactions with strangers are baffling and strange MOST OF THE TIME. It's definitely me, too, because every time I'm with Matt and I keep my mouth shut, his social interactions go fine. But if I am there and I happen to open my mouth, suddenly the Wal-mart cashier is telling us all about how all her friends think she's weird or the guy at the gas station counter is ranting about Ft. Lauderdale... that latter incident will happen to me approximately ten hours after this parking garage interaction, when all I want in the world is to buy my Diet Dr. Pepper, barbecue Pringles, and Flipz. 

Even though my kid had a full day of classes, I met her in the Student Union first for a breakfast that she'd been telling me all semester was gross--turned out, it WAS gross!--and then off she went, popping back in to check on me off and on all morning while I got some work done. After another sandwich, this one only slightly less disappointing, we finally said goodbye, so that I could spend the afternoon on my own Ohio adventure before trekking back home. 

Because as excellent luck would have it, Octagon Earthworks, which is currently leased by a golf course of all things and is only open to the public four days a year, was having one of its rare open houses THAT AFTERNOON!

Y'all KNOW how I feel about the ancient mound builders of North America. I am OBVIOUSLY not passing up a chance to see the Octagon Earthworks!

First, though, I revisited the Great Circle Earthworks for a guided tour and a look through the museum that was closed the last time I visited.

This is the view into the Great Circle, looking towards Eagle Mound.

This moat did once hold water, likely as an architectural feature to incorporate the reflections of the sky. Early archaeologists even observed standing water. When the site was used as Ohio fairgrounds, though, animals were kept in the depressions, and the area deteriorated enough that it no longer holds water. 

It was cold and raining the last time I visited the Great Circle. It was cold and raining again on this day!

Looking towards the three-lobed Eagle Mound, likely once the site of ceremonial buildings that were purposefully burned and buried over.

The guided tour was well worth holding my camera under my coat out of the freezing rain and furiously berating myself for thinking that my hoodie could effectively substitute for a wooly cap, though. We hardy few learned that the land that the Newark Earthworks was constructed on had been previously maintained as a prairie, even though this area of Ohio was traditionally woodlands. The prairie had been purposefully maintained via regular burnings, probably at least partially for hunting, and would certainly have made a temptingly perfect spot for the earthworks construction that began around 160 BCE. 

This site is currently the largest complex of earthworks known anywhere in the world. It was also likely a tourist or pilgrimage destination for much of North America, as objects were found at the site that can be traced to places as far-flung as Yellowstone and Arizona. Post-colonial farming, construction, and urban development destroyed most of the earthworks, but there are some enticing early archaeological records that hint at earthen walls running for several miles and crossing the river, pointing directly at the ancient Chillicothe Earthworks. 

The various parts of the Newark Earthworks were also created using the same base unit, shared by both the square and circle earthworks. Even Octagon Earthworks is that same square with the sides opened up. There are a lot of interesting equivalencies and patterns, and it's clear that there was some sort of overarching organization. 

Earthen walls also form lanes to connect different earthworks. In the photo below, you can see the opening in the Great Circle, with the visitor center in the background. Past that opening, on either side of the visitor center, are earthen walls that form a wide lane that once led to another circular earthwork that contained burial mounds. I believe that these were excavated, but as with Spiro Mounds, study can't really be done on the remains because it's hard to trace a direct lineage to a current Indian nation that can evaluate the ethics and give permission. 

Below is a map of the reconstructed site. We're in that circle up top, and you can see Octagon Earthworks below it and to the right. 

This map comes from an 1840s archaeological study of the site that was published by Smithsonian. That study is in the public domain now, so you can buy cheap reprints!

Here's a fun tidbit from the museum--Stonehenge was completed about 1,500 years before the Newark Earthworks!

I had fully intended to spend the entire afternoon wandering around the Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks, but being wet to the skin and mildly hypothermic, I instead chose to sit in the car after my Great Circle visit, blast the heat, and read on my phone until it was time for my guided tour of the Octagon Earthworks:

And then it started sleeting! YAY!

The Octagon Earthworks, though, is the site that I WAS THERE TO SEE, and I was not leaving. Thanks to the stupid golf course the site is only open to the public four days a year, and it was already a lightning strike miracle that I happened to be there on one of those days.

To be honest, though, I sort of figured the tour would be cancelled and I'd just wait around and then go home, but at 3:00 on the dot everyone's car doors opened and we all bundled our way over to meet our tour guide and go on our adventure.

The golf course idea would be kind of cool if it wasn't completely sacrilegious, because apparently they DO use the earthen mounds as obstacles, like large-scale Putt-Putt. Below, for instance, is a smaller earthen circle, possibly intended for visitors to stop and purify themselves before entering the Octagon Earthworks. The golf course uses it for target practice.

At every corner of the Octagon is an opening, but then in front of every opening, inside the Octagon, is a shorter earthen wall that hides that entrance from sight:

Through photos, you can share with me the scattered showers and bouts of sleet that came and went during our hour-long tour.

So when you stand inside the Octagon and look towards the edges, you're completely visually enclosed by earthen walls. 

It's also HUGE inside:

As with the Great Circle, these trees aren't original to the site and instead grew up afterwards. Part of the Octagon Earthworks was also used as a potato field once upon a time, so needed some reconstruction.

In the 1960s, speculation really ramped up about Stonehenge being an astronomical observatory, and it became trendy to make the same speculations about all kinds of early monuments. The rebuttal to this is that you can draw all the imaginary lines between rocks that you want to, and obviously some of those lines are going to happen to line up with interesting things. 

So two professors from Earlham (my kid was accepted to this college but we didn't really consider it because WOW, the tuition!) decided to debunk the whole "astronomical observatory" theory by bringing a group to Octagon Earthworks. The plan was to draw all the imaginary lines they could think to draw, then match up whatever could be matched up to solar phenomena, then run the math to show that the whole thing was a coincidence. 

Except that they couldn't match ANYTHING to a solar phenomenon, which is both statistically unlikely AND kinda points to the Stonehenge layout being a little more than coincidence, ahem. But when they switched to examining LUNAR phenomena, they started getting hits!

Once every 18.6 years, the Moon rises as far north on our horizon as it will ever rise. Over the next 9.3 years, the Moonrise shifts ever southward, until it rises at the southernmost point on our horizon that it will ever rise. Then it starts moving back northward for the next 9.3 years until it's back to that northernmost point. Octagon Earthworks marks both those points.

Probably once a day, I stop and think about that fact. If you were an ancient mathematician and astronomer, how the fuck would you KNOW THAT?!? You'd have to have direct observational records for the past hundred years to pick out that pattern. You'd have to map it in the sky, or physically mark it on the earth, to record it. Did they mark it, then build it and hope they were right, or did they wait until the timing was perfect, mark the rise that they observed, then build the walls afterwards?

We're lucky ducks, because the next major lunar standstill, this northernmost Moonrise, is in 2024/2025! 

Here's one of the walls that marks that rise:

Another interesting spot is this seeming gate at the opposite end of the Octagon, marked with curved walls:

It was originally thought that it might have once been an arch, but when it was excavated--nope! Just a cool-looking gate that was then built over!

It was still in the upper 30s and spitting down sleet and freezing rain at the end of our tour, but it was fine because a few hours earlier I'd re-rigged the loose windshield wiper back into place in a way that I was reasonably sure wouldn't come flying off again, at least if I didn't turn the wipers too high. 

So back in the car I got, shivering and wet to the skin, and blasted the heat and mapped myself back home. I waved as I passed my kid's exit, then managed to put myself in every single rush hour in every large city that I drove through for the entire trip home.

I'll see you on top of the Octagon Earthwork for lunistice!