Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

 Look. I don't know if Spring 2026 deserves a blog post more than any other season of any other year. I just started to get antsy after not having written a post in over a month. I have discovered there's this weird out of kilter sensibility when one has had a blog for 20 years and then one ignores said blog for a time period that is longer than the normal cadence. A vague sense of unease sets in. Now, don't get me wrong:  This does not, dear reader, constitute any sense of obligation to any of you, or even all 7 of you. I don't flatter myself for one major reason. 99% of this blog's visitors STILL arrive because they clicked over here hoping to determine if Cher is really an Indian (as she claims in the maybe or maybe not eponymous song "Half Breed.")  Then they encounter this blog post . The Cher blog post from 2013 that STILL gets hundreds of hits a week. One of two things happens when the unwary scour the world wide web and wind up over on this decade ...

  A photo of an example of a bust on a pedestal in a park.  I edited it so you can see what it would look like without the bust statue on top On the second Monday every month, there's this so-called "Pratstund" where a group of Minnesota Swedes and folks of Swedish descent have a Zoom where everyone speaks Swedish at wildly variant levels of fluency.  Somehow I got invited a year ago and I show up periodically. Meaning twice in total. The second time I made an appearance was last week. So I get on the video chat and the main Swede is talking about a BFD that recently transpired in their little town. It was front page news. It went down like this: The town had been founded by Swedish immigrants in the 1800s or whenever the Swedes were in the business of founding towns. There was one gentleman in particular who idk did a lot of founding-type work and so to honor him in the early 2000's, the town erected a bust of the guy and put it in the town square.  Five years later...

  Headed out into the tundra to go to the Frick Museum As per my last post, it was cold AF in New York City. I decided this might be a rare occasion to break out my grandmother's "knee length" blond mink coat. *For anyone stymied right now, let it be known that while my grandmother had an aggressively large personality, she was really really short. But yeah it's still a gorgeous coat that was made by my great grandfather for his daughter... my great grandfather being a furrier and all. My plan was to wear this coat so as not to freeze my ass off on the way up to the Frick, the perfect gilded age destination for a person in such a coat. So on brand.  I get up there, I meet my friend Anna and together we go inside. And here's how I know the Frick reads this blog, specifically the earlier post here , where i rant specifically about four things at the newly remodeled Frick: 1) Somehow, you keep winding up in the Frick lobby and then you have to dig out your tickets ag...

 First of all, it's ridiculously cold outside. I never wear long underwear and I've been wearing long underwear. In fact, I wore a pair to a big business meeting in midtown last week. At the outset, this seemed like a great idea, but about half way through the meeting, I got really hot.  Originally, my plan had a hukana matada vibe. Like, I thought to myself as I got dressed, stuffing myself into my long johns and my dress pants... if I get hot, i'll just go to the bathroom and take them off and jam them in my handbag. I want to just say that this plan falls into the category of "great on paper, doesn't hold up irl." Like there's logistics involved. You have to take off all your pants in the ladies room balancing in one shoe due to the gross floor, and then come back to the meeting with a giant undergarment in your handbag. It's a challenge of both balance and storage capacity. I say all this to say, we've been spending a lot of time indoors. Appar...

Ermagerd, I made it! I really did not think I was going to succeed this year with the one post a day for 30 days quest. As they say, I've been busier than a one legged man in a kicking contest. NaBloPoMo 2025 felt very unachievable. But then, I wound up finding this lovely group who are all NaBloPoMo'ing too. All of us with our old school blogs coming together with old school comments on posts. Discord? Ha! We sniff at the Discord:   https://theinbetweenismine.com/nablopomo/   These are good people, I enjoyed being a part of it. And I did it! 30 posts in 30 days.  Now look, at this point I do have techniques. I set up the photos ahead of time. I sandbagged some posts in September and October. I'm no NaBloPoMo spring chicken is what I'm saying. I know a thing or two about how to get the job done. And so, we celebrate: I could not be more pleased with this bath bomb. I'm positively irradiated. Nothing says NaBloPoMo success like an Elphaba bath bomb from Lush.  (This ...

  Renya and I made a plan to escape Work Island (which is what the kids call Manhattan these days, I learned that eavesdropping on the subway). We excursioned ourselves to the outer borough of Brooklyn to go to the Brooklyn Museum and see Monet in Venice. The whole way there on the 2, Renya and I cackled about Work Island. It's objectively hilarious. So we get to the Brooklyn Museum, go up to the exhibit. Here's the rather morbid opening salvo: MEMORIES OF VENICE The moment has now come to leave this unique light. I’ve spent some delightful hours here, almost forgetting that I’m now an old man. —Claude Monet Venice resonated with Monet’s artistic concerns and practices, enchanting the artist with its iridescent light, ephemeral atmospheric effects, and the interplay of stone, water, and reflection. Like the Giverny gardens and pond he designed to provide painting motifs, Venice’s architecture rising from the lagoon offered a confluence of art and nature. The city symbolized bot...