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iPhone

adventures / cycling / iPhone / Monday / photo — Comments Off
6
Jun 11

Sea Day

We’re just taking our time out here in the Atlantic. We’re cruising at a pace that makes Bermuda on the third day of the cruise. I don’t mind. I love the sea days. If you don’t know how to relax a few sea days will teach you. We’re on the Celebrity line — which is the line of choice, my cruise veteran folks insist — and they do a great job with pretty much everything, including giving you entertainment and distractions on the ship. But to just sit back in the shade, read, watch the waves go by, that’s glorious.

So we left yesterday, turned off the phones after we crossed under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York and started exploring the ship. We had the lifeboat drill, required by international law, but streamlined to 94 seconds by the efficient people of this vessel, the Summit. Essentially, go to your muster station, bring your life jacket. Put it on, velcro, snap, whistle and light.

I feel safer already.

As if anyone is going to be finding their way to the theater if the dreaded seven horn blasts are heard.

So we did that, saw a bit of the ship, got cleaned up for dinner and had a fine time.

This is my second cruise, our honeymoon last year and this week, both on Celebrity where you get top-notch service. And the food. My heavens, the food. Last night I had a lamb shank that could have fed an American family of six. Amazing. Tonight there was the barbecue glazed black salmon, which was nothing like you’ve pictured just now, but better in every conceivable way. In between there are restaurants, grills, cafes and all sorts of other places to embarrass you with their options.

Today, though we started in the gym. I rode 35 miles, had a piece of grilled and pressed chicken for lunch and then went to my massage. See? Celebrity. My masseuse was from Romania, where they train people with sharp elbows and brick-like knuckles in the finer arts of sublime muscle torture.

Then we hit the therapy pool, which is to say a warm salt water pool with random spouts swirling water at various angles splooshing you. After that I read the day away.

There is nothing in the world wrong with a sea day.

The Yankee and her parents, at dinner tonight.

adventures / family / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
5
Jun 11

On a boat

We’re departing from Bayonne, New Jersey for a cruise to Bermuda with The Yankee’s parents (see them in the background, there?). See you ~~suckers~~ fine people soon.

adventures / family / friends / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
4
Jun 11

Other photos

We’ve found our summer home:

Now someone just needs to tell the people that presently live there …

At any rate, this will be our view:

The Yankee, family friends John and Kate, my lovely in-laws Nancy and Bob and the irrepressible Wendy:

This is at the delicious Tutti’s Ristorante in Westport. The place is practically under an interstate and the building has the feel of an old mom-and-pop video rental store, but the food is sooooo delicious. We went there Thursday.

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3
Jun 11

New York, Day 2, Part 2

Friday is here, right here, where you are reading now. And this Friday will add more to what you read about on Wednesday, which is here. Really the whole week, as far as the blog is concerned has become about New York City. We’re spending the week with the in-laws and having a lovely time in Connecticut, but I went camera happy in the city.

Indeed, everything you’ve seen so far has been from my phone. I haven’t even uploaded pictures from my SLR. Which only reminds me how far behind I am in the photo gallery section of the site. I’ll catch up one day. Now, more of Wednesday!

A word on Theodore Roosevelt: I’ve read 2,170 pages on the man (Theodore Rex, The Rise and Wilderness Warrior) not counting the excellent 1912, which is about the campaign between Woodrow Wilson, William Taft, Roosevelt and Eugene Debs. You could say I know a little something about Roosevelt’s ideals of the “vigorous life.”

But I’d never realized the Klingons were his primary voting bloc:

That’s at the Metropolitan Museum, where I did not see a wax statue that looked like Robin Williams. But I did see a recreation of the Easter Island Head. And, yes, when The Yankee took my picture with it I gave it the bunny ears.

They have dinosaurs and other cool fossils at the museum of natural history. You have to pay to enter some of the special exhibits. As we had already paid once, we didn’t desire to do so again. But even in the sections for the cheap people, like me, they have some fine displays.

That’s some evil looking turtle ancestor, isn’t it? Both museums, the Met and the Museum of Natural History have some great displays. You could spend a day in each, maybe. We tried to do in two in afternoon.

No one likes going to museums with me. I want to read every sign.

Other stuff: How was your lunch yesterday? I only ask because this was our view:

We sent Wendy home today. Said she had a good time, but was ready to be home where things moved more slowly. We had waffles with John, who is a family friend that retired early to, he said, make waffles (and Photoshop jokes). His waffles were worth the wait. After seeing John we dropped Wendy off at the airport spent our afternoon around the house. My mother-in-law showed me her grandmother’s camera:

She let me take it apart. It has everything you need except the 2.5 x 4.25 film. The optics are still pretty good, but the aperture might need work. The camera was released in 1906 and was in production through 1937. She thinks, based on family history, that it is one of the earlier years. That camera may be 100 years old and it still makes the fabled Kodak sound.

Finally: this is a panorama I shot of Grand Central Station. I’ve been playing with this app for a while now and I think I’ve almost got it figured out. Give it a whirl.

adventures / Auburn / friends / iPhone / memories / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off
2
Jun 11

New York, Day 1, Part 2

Hello, Thursday, I’d like you to recall Tuesday. We’re going to add a few more pictures from Tuesday in this space today, and then some more, tomorrow, to round out Wednesday.

This idea didn’t make any more sense when I initially thought of it, either.

We are very high up on the Empire State Building, here:

We met an Auburn man there, too. We had four War Eagle Moments in Manhattan over the last two days, in fact. All four of those stories have been added to that photo blog.

It doesn’t look that high in the picture, but of course this was as high a place as you could stand in the man-made world. And, of course, that’s higher than you should ever hold your phone through the railing for a picture of a shadow.

I have taken this picture before, but the one below is better. I love this stuff:

Like this. That’s great faux-deco.

And the NBC microphone, at Rockefeller Center, took that picture five years ago, too.

St. Patrick’s Cathedral, from high atop Rockefeller Center:

We were able to walk behind the pulpit in St. Pat’s for the first time ever. They had a copy of Pieta there, and the others visiting revered it with a reverence that could only be considered reverence.

I have seen Pieta, at Rome. (The original was by Michelangelo, and it was the only piece he ever signed.) St. Pat’s Pieta is a fine sculpture, but on a scale of one-to-10 Pietas, this is four Pietas at best. According to Wikipedia, the authority of everything Michelangelo, the St. Pat’s version isn’t even an “authorized replica.” This version was built in 1906 by William Ordway Partridge, an American who studied in Florence, Rome and Paris (where he was born).

We learned about this building while on the Circle Line tour on Tuesday:

It was the first skyscraper on the island. Actually, our guide said, they originally called it a cloudscraper, all three stories of it, but they renamed it so people wouldn’t think poorly of the weather. Marketing has deep roots. Behind it, I believe, is the New York Bank Department.

OK, this one needs a bit of background. Our friend Kelly takes pictures of her feet to prove she’s been places. (Ask her why.) Every so often, then, we take pictures of places our feet have been. Here The Yankee shows Kelly the Statue of Liberty. I suppose my picture of her taking a picture is the “making of” photograph. Wendy also took a picture of The Yankee taking a picture of her foot. I took a picture of Wendy taking a picture, which means I also shot the “making of the documentary.”

This was all on the Staten Island Ferry, which we rode over from Manhattan and back for an extra, late evening view of the statue. We rode to Staten Island on the Molinari, who was a congressman and borough president. We rode back on the John F. Kennedy. We passed the S.I. Newhouse, which was named after the historic publisher. I worked for one of his companies for more than four years and walked past some of his offices in Times Square on Tuesday. No getting away from the man. He died in 1979, his son runs the family empire today, at the age of 83. He’s worth billions.

How quiet do you think it is out there?

More from our two days in New York tomorrow.