very simple

Today, my brother was very excited to take me to borough market, which is essentially the green market on the south side of the Thames. Of course, remembrance Sunday put a damper in those plans, as pretty much everything was closed. Including the train to take me to borough station, forcing me (the horror) to walk from Bank station, where I accidentally emerged at street level in the middle of some sort of procession/parade across London bridge. Which was, in actuality, quite lovely.

So then, in search of something to see and/or eat, we ended up walking all the way down Thames walk to black friar bridge, back across, and taking a tour of LSE, before having a classic pub lunch.

Again, more pictures will follow once I arrive home, but today’s photo of the day is the view of the millennium bridge and st. Paul’s. And I didn’t even edit this. It’s really this beautiful out here.

Last night I arrived in London, on what amounts to my first real vacation since 2009. I’ve said it elsewhere, but it really took having a job again to appreciate having time off. As much as I tried to ‘enjoy’ my period of unemployment, there was a constant undercurrent of worry, and I certainly wasn’t going to travel anywhere extravagant, if for no other reason than the thought that the minute I stepped away from New York would be the exact minute a headhunter with the perfect job would come looking for me.

So anyway, I’m in London, ostensibly to visit my brother, and to see a few other folks, including meeting some people I actually work with but have never met in person, and catching up with a few former colleagues on this side of the pond.

Today, since my brother had a conference to go to, I took myself to the British museum. A full set of photos will get uploaded once I can edit them properly on my computer, but I thought I’d start off by testing my camera to iPad adapter by showing photographic proof that I’m actually here.

So, I finally decided to download my photos from Labor Day weekend, given that it’s almost November and I haven’t even put up a post since September. I’ll blame that part on the whole ‘having a job’ thing, even though, truth be told, I do have my weekends free. I’m just lazy.

But that started me down a wonderful journey of discovering that there was some sort of script error in my blog installation, which forced me to spend the last three hours venturing further down the rabbit hole of wordpress reinstallations, backups, “emergency” password fixes after wordpress decided to no longer recognize me…fun stuff.

it all appears to be (hopefully) working again, at least insofar as I can actually log in and write a post, but I had to delete a lot of plugin customizations particularly around stats. Not that anyone reads this thing anyway, so I guess that’s no great loss!

Anyway…on to the original point of this post. Labor Day weekend, as usual, was spent in the Berkshires. This year it was very rainy, so we ventured up to The Clark in Williamstown to check out some of the art. The coolest thing was an exhibit by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who refashions the multitude of liquor bottles foisted upon the local population into beautiful wall hangings. So this is mostly that. As always, click on the thumbnail to get the full image.

I’m pretty sure I’ve given up the ghost on the 365 project (again), but I’m still taking pictures when the mood strikes. I’m going to blame it on the fact that I’ve got a new job (finally) and that’s taking up a lot of my brain-space now, which I view as a good thing. Getting paid doesn’t hurt either. But, in any event, I headed up to the family compound in the Berkshires for memorial day weekend, and took some pics of the burgeoning spring/summer flora and fauna. As always, click on the thumbnail to see the full photos.

We are not a particularly religious family, but we still do the big holidays. of course, we do them in our own unique, potentially sacrilegious way.

Our seder plate – the plate itself is beautiful, a gift to my stepmother from someone she knew who was an Iraqi jew. We, of course, never have all of the proper ingredients, so we do things like replace the hard-boiled egg with a purple marshmallow peep.

I can’t even estimate how old this bottle of Manischewitz is. It’s got a modern label, so it can’t be that old, but I do know that we dig it out of the basement every passover, use about 3 oz of it for the actual seder (and Elijah’s cup), and then drink good, non-kosher wine with our actual dinner. Then the bottle goes back in the basement for another year.

And finally – our passover table. This one is pretty traditional, including the deluxe edition Coffees of Maxwell House Passover Haggadah.