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

  photocredit: otherwing photography We were upstate during a major flooding incident and all these crayfish were barreling across roads. "Why did the crayfish cross the road?" No freaking idea, by all accounts it seemed like a really dumbass idea.  We were upstate for the annual familypalooza week in an AirB&B and of course we picked the week it rained apocalyptically. Between the storms, we walked up and down the country roads near our place. We observed flooded out roadways, swamped bridges and pretty much just lakes on either side of the streets. We made comments on the depth, salt content, and likely water recession timelines like we had at least a clue what we were talking about. Which we did not, of course. We ran into this one woman, a volunteer firefighter who had been called to this ramshackle house up the street to pump out water in the basement that had risen higher than the first floor. She came out of the house and apparently saw a crayfish on the road, so s...

So. We didn't proactively do any Pride related activities today.  I say proactively because it is frankly hard for us not to accidentally participate. We live right in the thick of the whole shebang.  The parade gets staged right out front our building and then it ends a few blocks away. So yeah. It's a dawn till dusk type scenario where every time we leave, we gotta take ID because there are barricades and police and we can't get back to our apartment without showing proof of residence.  Luckily the "proof" is pretty loosely defined or we'd still be out there. I left without ID but they let me call the doorman to vouch for me. It was awkward as fuck. Now I'm going to have to give a big ass holiday tip. Tom showed a UPS alert he had on his phone with the address. This was a far superior plan to mine for reasons of finance and also it was a lot faster. After the first border patrol incident, we got smart and started telling the officers as we exited the bar...

Incident #1: Wednesday evening, I was sitting in a beautiful venue with blond wood paneling and excellent acoustics watching this big gala presentation. They were presenting some very heartfelt awards. It really was lovely don't get me wrong but just suddenly I was like... I gotta go.  I'm cranky and tired and surrounded by just too many part-time real estate agents and cliques of longtime friends all hugging and squealing and yeah. I was suddenly hit by a solid wave of longing to be in my own home in a pair of more comfortable pants. But: Colossal Problem. I had seen the gift bags they were planning to hand out after the event that included a fancy little box of non pareil chocolates. Non Pareil chocolates. You see the obvious allure. So I sat in my seat for an extra ten minutes trying to puzzle out how to both leave immediately and also get the chocolates you were only supposed to get at the very end when all the normal polite people left en mass. They didn't even have th...

We wound up going to the Print Show at PowerHouse Arts even though the last time I was at PowerHouse Arts, and I could be wrong about this however I didn't bother to look it up as usual, but I'm pretty sure last time I was there, the entire PowerHouse Arts premises were about as big as a not-so-big book shop.   So yeah, I was totally worried about going the whole way out to god knows where in Brooklyn to a show we paid in advance to get into, and then have it be like five sad vendors jammed in a not-so-big bookshop, and maybe one of them is selling home remodeling and another other one is chasing you around with perfume samples.  Heads up: Powerhouse Arts has moved. And it's an upgrade.  Now they have a huge warehouse-ish building and therefore this print show was impressively large and well curated. Worth the trip and the price of admission in other words. After a lot of thinking and circling back, we purchased two prints. One of them was fairly gigantic and in a fr...

A play called "Every Brilliant Thing" is currently on Broadway. Matt and Helen went to see it. Playbill from Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway. So look, I'm only mentioning this so I can be one of the cool crowd who talks very knowledgeably about some show currently on Broadway  because they also saw the original and/or earlier revivals. My friend Danielle from book club and her cousin Greg do this. They hammer through a detailed critique like it's a dereliction of duty not to give excellent notes. For example, out front the theater after we all saw Gypsy last year, both of them launched into comparing and contrasting Audrey whatserface with all the prior leading ladies they'd seen portray Mama Rose using words like "vibrato" and "mezzo soprano."  I think Danielle said she'd seen nine (9) different Gypsy productions. NINE! Her dad was on the Tony committee so she got an early start.  So anyway, this is my one (1) time to shine and I'm t...

 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...

  Sandy rarely wears a shirt. https://www.breathewithsandy.com/ It has been a revelation, this Breathing with Sandy. Don't get me wrong, I have been doing the box breathing every now and then for a while. But I never realized there's a whole fandango of different breathing techniques until someone recommended this kinda unusual book called The Presence Process .  I feel bad calling it "unusual" because it is a beloved book that has transformed a lot of people's lives. But it's one of those books where, when you're reading it, you feel like you feel when you find yourself somewhere you didn't expect to be. Like at a rave surrounded by folks in velvet vests dancing with twinkly lights and there's a pond and someone is in it riding an inflatable swan. I appreciated the book and the Process but it's definitely one of those right time, right place, right person kind of affairs. So anyway, spoiler alert, part of the Process is to do this "consci...

 So we had 14 for Thanksgiving dinner. We started doing the holidays at our place after that one year, early on, when we found ourselves in the car at 1am on Christmas Eve.This transpired because Tom's parents are divorced and apparently whoever Tom spends more time with on Christmas Eve is the one he loves the most. So yeah. And this was after a bunch of Thanksgiving drama. So as we were driving through the wintery darkness so many moons ago, I said to Tom, It's your fault they got divorced, why am I suffering? (I didn't actually say that line, it's part of a Nate Bargatze comedy special , but I expressed a similar point. It just took me probably about an hour.) Anyway, ever since then, we hunker down at home and tell anyone who wants to see us they need to come by us. That's it. And you know, I think it's lovely. I hope everyone else does too. 20 years later, I'm thankful for them making the trek. Happy Thanksgiving!

Tom made a beautiful dinner  Look at this dinner! Color me lucky :-)

  My grandpa, age 2 My mother texted over this photo the other day, apropos nothing. I guess she was cleaning out boxes. I had never seen this shot before. Meanwhile, I have this one in a frame: Grandpa was very athletic. Played football in college. Some things you don't realize until you're old enough to realize such things, but he grew up fatherless. His dad died very young, so he was raised by his single mother. At some point this historical point of interest turned into an a ha moment for me. Here was a guy that as a child experienced the death of his father, the family breadwinner.  As an adult, I can think back and see the trauma kind of buried in his persona. Don't get me wrong, he was beloved; but he also had a hard edge honed sharp probably as a survival mechanism. He grew up too soon, lived through the Great Depression, fought in WW2. He made a life for himself really against a lot of odds.

  The end of the penny brings up old memories. OK so this was decades ago but still lives rent free in my brain. I was so jaw on the floor flabbergasted gobsmacked with disbelief... my Pennsylvania Dutch heritage just did not know what to do with itself. I was moving out of the dorm freshman year at college. And yeah, I went to a fancy college with many very rich people. People so rich they honestly had no idea how the normal folk went about their daily lives. I got invited to go hela-skiing, was given someone's "old" wardrobe when she got a new one for spring, and had lots of dinners at 9pm which might have been the most mindbending of it all. Farmers and steelworkers are in bed by that ungodly hour for chrissakes. Anyway, we were moving out of the dorms freshman year and Marjory takes a huge glass jar of pennies and other loose change from her room and just chucks the whole thing in a garbage can in the hallway.  Thunk. I'm speechless. Can't even talk. She threw...

Speaking of the gigantic bowl in the gift shop at Olana, it had a koi decorative motif. I asked Tom if he wanted me to buy it for him for Christmas and he was into it. This is not the actual bowl, i wrapped it up already, but it's close. And similarly gigantic. See what I mean? It's big. There's koi. I hauled the bowl up to the cash register. It was heavy this bowl, and also not cheap. The cashier lady, who was objectively odd, scanned the price. I tapped my phone. Then she said, "Would you like to round up to the nearest dollar and donate the change to the museum?" I stared at her dumbfounded. First of all, the purchase price of the bowl made a 42 cent donation feel slightly ludicrous. Second of all, I was paying with ApplePay, THERE WAS NO CHANGE. Third of all, I'd ALREADY COMPLETED THE TRANSACTION.     I said no. Then she stared at the bowl, gaging its size and said, "you don't want any tissue paper or a box or anything do you?" I said no agai...

  The view of Olana, Frederic Church's home. The view from the walking path. Frederic Church not only painted landscapes, he endeavored to create them. He called this "terraforming" Vaguely moorish or persian or some such. Cool dragon candlestick brought back from overseas. Yup. A view befitting a painter Nice hat. We decided to pop in to see the former home of the famous Hudson Valley School painter Frederic Church. He was a disciple of Thomas Cole who lived up the street. We took the tour and hiked around the grounds and bought a gigantic bowl in the gift shop. As you do.

A mail truck. So yeah, many work-from-home afternoons, I try to do a loop or two around the block. I have several goals besides taking in some fresh air.  One of my goals is to observe the neighbors and see who drives like a maniac. I have conducted studies to determine the most effective methods to encourage safe driving. I'm not even necessarily talking about my own health and well-being, there's little kids and dogs all over the place. So look, I regard my efforts as straight up community service. It's my gift to the neighborhood, you're welcome. Here's my conclusion. The best way to get people to slow the fuck down is to wave at them all friendly like. That might be how the whole thing started with the new neighbors . Most normal people will wave back and honestly it's turned into a kind of nice neighborly ritual over the years. So anyway, I was out the other day hauling ass around the 'hood because I needed to get back for a meeting. I must have waved a...

  Weighing all the things on the bread scale Tom was texting with Matt about baking bread. We were headed up for a weekend visit, with a plan for Tom to demonstrate the bread making process. Tom said to make sure there's a scale. It is essential to weigh flour and other ingredients if you want a loaf that actually is edible. Matt says they do not have a scale, and Tom says he'll bring ours. Tom starts reading the texts aloud to me. I hear: Matt says when I bring up the scale he's going to use it to weigh flour. I'm like, right. To bake the bread.  Tom says, no. Because he wants to double check what they tell him at the dispensary. Me: ??????????? Tom: Oh, flour is a slang word for weed. Me: oh. right. The flower you don't put in bread.  Tom; ??????????