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

 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; ??????????

My Met membership expired. I could certainly have renewed online but I never renew museum memberships online. I membership-max. This means that when my memberships expire, I let 'em be expired until the next time I go to the museum. Then I renew at the membership desk. Why pay for a month or three months of zero museum visits? Might as well just start the new year of membership at the most optimal moment, ie when I need a museum membership because I am physically at the museum entrance looking to get in. The only time this calculous changes is if you get a discount for auto-renewals and/or I'm guilted into it. A patron of the arts such as myself is susceptible to such mind games. Anyway, I had an appointment on the upper east side the other day and wound up literally walking by the Met on my way back. So I decided to pop in to see this Man Ray exhibit I kept hearing everyone talking about. Which meant I had to renew my membership. Which I did. It was really not at all exciting....

  We got a lovely card in the mailbox from our neighbors we never actually met. In my opinion. The new neighbors moved in 7 years ago and we never, not even once, spoke with them. I'm not saying we were blameless in this whole affair, it's not like we sent them a basket of tea or some kind of welcome offering. But yeah. We never met them. But we did have many many interactions.  I walk around the neighborhood. It's my thing. I get steps in. And every single time one of them would drive by in their car, I waved. At first, they just stared at me like I was a lunatic. So I waved more aggressively. It became kind of a game for me to try to get right in their line of sight with a gigantic aggressive wave. After about five years of this hyper friendly waving, they started to, very tentatively wave back. A tiny finger gesture became a lackluster hand flap. I think that's where progress ended. Fast forward to when they moved out a few weeks ago and we find this note in our mail...

  I think this is the program from a play at SoHo Playhouse that someone in my bookclub enjoyed. "Check out this bleeding heart radish" Right? I'm always up to check out a radish. Bruce is in Santiago Chile.

  Vacuum sealed bags and my Brother PTouch These are a few of my favorite things. I don't know how I lived before I got the label maker. And then after I got a whole bunch of those vacuum sealed bags, wow. What a powerful combo. Feeling really productive in my pursuit of maximum density living.  Carole would be proud of me. I've seen her watch someone put left overs into a tupperware container and then after they put their tupperware container in the fridge, she takes it out again and finds a more compact container with less air space. She's an unsurpassed master at spacial relations. I can't compete at that level but yeah. I'll undeniably give you a little stink eye if you throw a few fluffy things in a rubbermaid tub and call it good.

 I had a really nice lunch with Kerry and Lynnie the other day. So probably that's why I got to be the proud recipient of a pocket text from Kerry this morning.  No worries, I was right on it with my reply: you will never beat me in a game of these kinds of photos! Look friends, I'm masterful at accidentally taking photos. Half my camera role is shots like this. I'm unstoppable.

There was this first floor commercial/retail location down the block from us that sat empty for a hella long time. Like five years or more. At one point, someone wanted to put in a private club of some kind and host private "parties." I've never seen our block come together faster to make sure "parties" didn't happen. Nothing like an alcohol-infused late night "parties" anything venue to instill a sense of community. So fast forward at least a year and signs appeared announcing an art gallery was moving in. Exciting!  I swear two years later, the "coming soon" signs were still on the windows.  But then, at long last, the art gallery opened. Tom and I buzzed by on their opening night and the show and saw: it's certainly a sculpture. Although the inaugural exhibition in the gallery really did not careen down the middle of my lane, it still was definitely cool to have a gallery across the street.  A couple weeks ago, I noticed that the e...

 Not just a baby goat, this goat was 4 hours old. Literally this goat had been in utero until like just after lunch.  Mom and the goat. We were vacationing in Ocean City Maryland when this photo was taken. These people renting an airBnB down the block from us said they had to take the goat with them on vacation due to it being born while they were packing up the car to leave.  I don't fully understand this. We failed to ask sufficient questions. For example, no one asked where the Mom Goat was and why she was deemed incompetent.  Hopefully mom goat was home in the barn getting some much needed R&R, and this was not a scenario where the people down the block had just made off with a goat infant, 911 style. I bet AirBnB rules don't specifically forbid goats, so at least as far as AirBnB is concerned I'm sure these people down the block are in the clear. 

  Check the box for monstrous. What is this thing? Not all that helpful as far as signs go, honestly. Here's the description of this exhibit : Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie  radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy,  Monstrous Beauty  adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment. Admittedly I had to read this like nine times to catch the gist of this whole thing. Is it me...