... Just because I love this picture

I don't have too much to say tonight. I came across this photo though, and had to post it. It's Oliver, in case you couldn't tell. He's a cute little baby of course, but my favorite part of the picture is the older gentleman sitting next to him. The man smiling down at him with that "look at my sweet little offspring" look on his face. It's Oliver's grandfather and dangit all if he doesn't remind me so much of Oliver. The eyes, the nose... (such a nose!) I look at this picture and imagine that I can see the man I will be married to in 30 years. At the same time I see him as he was more than 30 years ago. Past and future getting all mixed up. The chain of family and descendants moving forwards and backwards.

Good stuff.

Chinatown -- Black & White -- Night

Some photos I took recently in Chinatown. I have a new part-time job - a really great one at a university in Manhattan. It's located in Greenwich Village, and after work I've been walking from my office down to Oliver's where I try to coax him to come out and have a bit of fun in the city. (The couch and the internet will be there tomorrow! Let's go do something different!)

What a great walk. 45 minutes or so, and basically a straight shot down the Bowery and into the heart of Chinatown. I think one of my favorite things about Chinatown is the contrast between chaos and total silence. It's such a busy area, but everything seems to close down early and before you know it you're walking through a ghost town.

Beach Vacation

That's what it felt like anyway - a beach vacation. In reality it was just a bike ride, a few hours in the sun, and a bike ride back home.

Coney Island. A place I had been itching to go see since we moved here, but had never gotten around to. The appeal, you ask?

It's a great place to bring the bikes. 9 miles from apartment to ocean. Not bad.


Also a great place to sit and enjoy the July sun.


You can dip your toes in the water...


... and also get a feel for the local color (read: cigarette butts in the sand).


Cigarette butts aside, the beach! The Atlantic Ocean! Dark bronze, oiled, speedo'd old men not pictured. But definitely there - trust me.


And a boardwalk to boot. It feels vaguely "late 19th Century Atlantic seaside" to me. As though there should be men in straw hats selling tonics.


Latin dancing on the boardwalk. Merengue? Salsa? I can never tell.


Kitsch. And rides. And great people watching.


And seaside food. Clams!


Carnival games.


The parachute jump. Looking geometric against the clouds.

Black and White (and Middle Gray)

I thought I would throw a few photos up here - photos I've taken for my black-and-white photography class. I've got a lot to learn, of course. That much is obvious after a quick glance at my pictures. All the same, I feel proud of my little shots. No mere point and shoots these; I've fumbled around with film speed, shutter speed and aperture for each.

All the photos below were taken within a five minute walk of my apartment. Many are of the arch at Grand Army Plaza, the others on 7th Avenue.

The JC Look

It was a beautiful day here yesterday. I made a 30-minute walk over to a friend's house and enjoyed the view the whole time. Jersey City has such an interesting look to it. Where I live, it's 19th Century brownstones and bodegas-turned-organic restaurants. Quiet streets and a real sense of neighborhood.

Most of Jersey City has a different aesthetic going on, though. I took a few pictures yesterday, things I'd been meaning to get on "film" for awhile now. Peaceful cemeteries overlooking the skyway. Abandoned vans in vacant lots. Concrete above you and below you.

Jersey City has been struggling for several decades. The last 10 years have brought a number of "immigrants" from Manhattan, and that accounts for the lovely historic district with its refurbished brownstones. The rest though, is generally still a bit tougher. Sometimes a lot tougher. Shootings in parks, homeless people hiding out in your basement storage unit (as my friend recently experienced), etc. So yeah, there are problems. But there's pride too. As there should be. Rock on, JC. I hope you make it.

A Special Treat... Just for You

I really shouldn't be on Blogger right now. I should be working on one of the end- of- the- semester projects I'm avoiding. Something came along though, and I can't resist.

It is, quite possibly, the best picture I have ever been in. And ever will be in. It takes my breath away. It makes me want to be the best possible version of myself.

Picture the scene: Algonquin Provincial Park on the last weekend of summer. A golden sunset, a shimmering lake, a beautiful night. The end of a wonderful day. A young couple, camping with friends, sits together by the campfire. They are full of- overflowing with- love for each other and the life they have built together. Wine glasses in hand, they drink in their surroundings.

"We should have someone take a picture of us," says the wife, smiling softly at her husband.

"I will!" says a nearby friend. "You two look so cute right now, and the setting is perfect." The friend gets her camera, fiddles with the settings, and gets ready to shoot. "Smile, guys! This is going to be such a nice picture."













Click.

While Walking Home from Work...

... I couldn't resist a quick picture. Maybe I belong in a smaller city. Maybe I belong in a cottage by the sea. Maybe I still haven't figured out where I belong. In any event, I like the things I see in the place I am now.

Casa Us

I finally have things in place enough to take a few pictures. Care for a quick tour?

The view from the outside. There's a bit of tree in the way, but you get the idea.

Our living room. I was thrilled (thrilled) when I learned that both our couches would fit in the space.

The dining room, with a view to the living room. I spent many hours working on that table, and I'm more or less happy with the results. I'm also happy with the bookshelves - another recent purchase. I needed something small and "underwhelming", and wanted to show off as much of the exposed brick wall as possible.


Another view of the dining room

The kitchen. It's not my absolute ideal, but it's serviceable.

Bedroom. This isn't a view of the whole room, since it doesn't include the bureau or the desk (with all the crap we've piled on top of it), but it'll do.

Our back patio. We have a patio! The table and chairs were left behind by our landlord - free table and chairs! And we have ivy. Ivy! All in all, a very exclamation point-worthy space.
It's a good place. It's probably half the size of our old apartment, but I've completely adjusted to the smaller space and even come to enjoy it. Come visit anytime, by the way. There's a lovely couch for you to sleep on.

Here and There in the City

We had a lovely staycation over Memorial Day. We did some touristy stuff, some non-touristy stuff, snacked here and there when something sat especially attractively in a display window, and spent a LOT of time outside - in the shade whenever possible, since we're delicate little flowers. I had all sorts of items on the to-do list, but of course we didn't do them all. We did some things that we hadn't planned on too, because that's how it works best when you're wandering around, right? A few thoughts:

Times Square: a little disappointing. I hadn't been there for many years, and I wasn't too impressed with what I saw. It was big and bright and full of energy, but it was also full of things like a Hershey Store, a Disney Store, and a really swank Ruby Tuesday's that would TOTALLY trick me into thinking "what a lovely, unique restaurant" if I were a foreign tourist. Not to knock Times Square - really, it was great - it just felt like a chunk of space that had been created in a boardroom somewhere far away and dropped into place by the Skechers corporate helicopter.

On the other end of the spectrum, we stumbled across Riverside Park. Oliver convinced me to go in, and wow! What a lovely, unexpected place! It's overwhelmingly green, and runs along the Hudson River. It has an incredible community garden at 91st Street (picture below), and a bike path (a bike path!) running for what looked like forever along the river. Outdoor activity with a green backdrop! It's possible. Weather permitting, we'll be back this coming weekend.

Other plans we discovered we would have to make: Spend an entire day exploring Central Park (it's HUGE), spend a lot more time in the East Village, go to the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, go see South Pacific... my head is exploding. In a good way.

Other bits:

Gray's Papaya at 72nd and Amsterdam

Lincoln Center

Scenic Bits

This is Van Vorst Park, the neighborhood oasis a block from our apartment. Since I'm still in the sending-out-resumes-and-filling-out-applications portion of my summer, I've been lucky enough to spend some time there in the last couple weeks. There's nothing quite like sitting in the sun and listening for Jersey accents.

I love the fact that I caught frolicking kids in my photo. It's a great little park.

Manhattan isn't too shabby either. I've been doing a lot of wandering, and I love the fact that in a split second you can go from a frenzied, traffic-clogged thoroughfare to a silent, elegant street full of brownstones and trees. During yesterday's wanderings, I took a few pictures:

Grace Church at 10th Street and Broadway

Looking north from Washington Square Park

Green framing water tower

High Shool Photos

Do you ever get absorbed by a project? It's fun, isn't it. I've started scanning the pictures from my photo albums and saving them on our computer. Almost through Volume One, I realize that what started out as an attempt to compress four photo albums into a hard drive has morphed into a love/memory fest.

"Volume One" chronicles my high school adventures. Maybe I should rephrase that - adventures I had while in high school. I didn't have a camera for the normal, day-to-day part of high school, so my photo album only captures the big trips and happenings. Vacations, summer camps, etc. It's funny to open up the photo album, all these years later, and see mainly pictures of people I met briefly and then never saw again.


This photo is from the Caribbean cruise my parents took me on, Easter Break of 1996. The Macarena was big that year, and as you can see I had mastered the steps and was eager to pass on my knowledge. That's Erin to my right and Kim to my left. They were sisters... or were they cousins? They were from Ohio I believe, and their grandparents had brought the extended family on a trip together. The three of us hung out all week, along with the other teens looking to lose their parents and flirt the nights away in the ship's teen lounge. I was always a little amazed that they wanted to hang out with me, because they seemed so much cooler. They had better clothes, they were better with boys, and they had that easy manner all cool people seem to have. They liked me though, and we even corresponded for awhile after the cruise. Kim even gave me a little decorative box from her trip to Spain. I still have it.


I love this photo. It's Scott, one of our group leaders for my first church-group canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. Summer 1995. We were camped on an island high over the water the day this picture was taken, and he was the only one (?) brave enough to jump off the cliff. He caught a fish that night too, and I think we all ate some of it. His son was also a part of our group, and if I remember right the son was starting to veer off with the "bad crowd". I think he might even have gotten his girlfriend pregnant the next year. Maybe that was just a rumor. I liked Scott.


Ah, my Georgetown summer school experience. The best three weeks of my teen years. Tons of kids who liked school, a world-class city to explore, and no parents within a thousand miles to tell you what to do. We went wild. By "wild," I mean that we went to all the monuments on the National Mall, and stayed up late writing foreign policy papers and spraying each other with silly string. This picture is, let's see... John from Tennessee... Jen from Utah whose boyfriend was about to go off on a Mormon mission... Mitch from Texas who had a cheerleader girlfriend back home... I forget the names of the next two guys... Jason from Chicago, who ended up becoming a real, long-term friend. He was my senior prom date, student at a college a mere hour and a half from my own, and an usher at my wedding. This photo was taken at Washington DC's Hard Rock Cafe, which seems pretty dang classy to a bunch of high school kids. Seemed classy to me at the time, anyhow.


And Ned, from Turkey. The alpha males at the summer school treated him pretty badly, and I'm embarasssed to admit that at first I didn't see anything wrong with that. Ned turned out to be a really neat guy. I wonder what he's doing now. Maybe he's married, maybe he has some interesting job where he does good things for people/makes a lot of money (whichever one he's after).

I wonder whose photo albums I'm in, out there somewhere. Are there people that come across my picture and wish me well? Do they remember things about me that I've forgotten?