very simple

Gifts for my brother. My little brother is currently working in Senegal, and my parents and he are meeting up in Amsterdam next week to hang out before he moves on to a possible new adventure. In the meantime, it’s really hard to get moleskine notebooks where he is, so I picked up a little care package of them for him. These, plus the dozen or so muji pens I also got him should be enough to tide him over for the next…month or so!

There are times when you think…maybe my parents don’t know me at all. And then there are times when they give you a birthday card with a picture of a cosmopolitan on the front and you think…maybe they know me too well. In any event. It’s my birthday. had a lovely dinner with my parents at a new place in the ‘hood. and now I’m home and thinking that maybe actually drinking that cosmopolitan wasn’t the brightest idea on a school night. Nah. It was great.

Wandered around the upper west side greenmarket today with my parents. I didn’t buy anything, but I did take a picture of this really odd-looking mushroom so that’s…something.

American flag, received at my grandfather’s funeral almost exactly 10 years ago.

As I may have mentioned before, my brother is getting a (second) master’s degree, this time in international development (his first is in education), at the London School of Economics. Because he’s such a slacker, he obviously couldn’t make it home for Passover. But that didn’t stop us from trying to include him in the festivities, even if he couldn’t actually partake in the wondrous density of my annual matzo ball failure.

In the Berkshires this weekend for Passover, and thought that this shot of my dad was an example of pretty much the quintessential Berkshires life. Coffee, paper, dog, big leather chair. And flannel. Always flannel.

Plus, a bonus shot of Ollie. As cute as ever.

In November, I went over to London to visit my brother (who is attending the London School of Economics), and my trip was documented by my posting a handful of photos while I was over there. And then the rest of my photos have been sitting on my computer for the last 4 months waiting for me to sit down for an hour and given them a good pass-through. I took hundreds, but here are the 40 or so that I thought were worth posting. Full images and descriptions when you click on the thumbnail.

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.