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weekend

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4
Jun 11

More New York? More New York

The people have spoken. And, mostly, what they said was “Surely there are more pictures. And there are. Each one I’ve shown you over the last four days came from my phone. These are from my SLR, which I only took into the city on our first day. So this will be familiar but, hopefully, not repetitive.

Having gotten these out of the way, however, we can move on to the next grand adventure.

(Today we had company in my god-sister in-law and her husband. They came down for dinner and to spend the night. We had steaks and talked about cycling and family and recipes and things. And since I didn’t take any pictures of our early-morning laundromat run, dinner, cleaning or the cookbook my mother-in-law gave us today, I’m wrapping up New York. The cookbook, though, is incredible. I’m not a cookbook guy, but I’m excited about Off the Eaten Path. We will be cooking from this — and referring to it here in the future — and you would too if you enjoyed the under-the-radar type places.)

Anyway, New York, one more time.

You never get over that feeling, I think.

I know one of these tough, steely-eyed guys from the Bronx. He gets a little choked up when he talks about the Statue of Liberty, trying to imagine what it would have been like, not too many decades ago, when his ancestors saw it from their boat.

The next time we visit we’re taking the in-depth tour of the statue and the island.

One of my two favorite rooftops in Manhattan, above is the New York Life Building. It is the 81st tallest building in the city. Built over two years at a cost of $21 million, this gothic building was completed in 1928. It has 40 floors and is 615 feet tall. The roof is comprised of 25,000 gold-leaf tiles.

Best building in town, the Chrysler building is the one I always look for. Now 80 years old, this is still the fourth largest building in town. I do enjoy the art deco stylings here. Also, a picture of the building, from the ground, is now on the front page of the site. Last year I put up a view of the Chrysler in black and white, this time it shines in full color.

Wendy checks out Central Park from Top of the Rock. Great views up there. No lines, no waiting.

When people sailed into the area and saw New York’s first “cloud scraper” as it was then called, they might have marveled at the sight. Or thought, “How ostentatious.”

And by cloud scraper I mean the three-story building in the foreground.

When we get home and I get all of the photo galleries caught up there will be plenty more from Boston and New York that didn’t make it onto the blog. I’ll, of course, let you know.

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29
May 11

Conference Day

Not much here today as we spent most of the day in sessions or business meetings or various other exciting aspects of summer academia. The Yankee had two presentations, the one of which I saw was, naturally, awesome. I had to present in one session. The topic has some interest to it and we received some nice conversation over the work. That study is going places.

So, pretty much the full day was spent in one hotel meeting room or another. Here’s the view from our room:

That is World Trade Center East, with an inlet from the Boston Harbor behind it. You can see a lot of sailboats from there. Sixteen floors, eight elevators and completed in 2000. The architects are a firm that have built hospitals and campus buildings across a great swath of the country. One of their buildings, in fact, is a library at UAB, where The Yankee and I did our master’s degrees. Small world, huh?

We got out of the conference just in time to see the sun go down over the city’s skyline.

We walked from the hotel to the T, and then rode out to the aquarium where we met Wendy — we’d left her all alone and she didn’t get lost all day in her travels — for dinner at Legal’s. We must go here every visit, The Yankee insists. Pretty good stuff. We sat on the patio, listening to the horns of ferries and other ships as they came in for the evening.

Wendy had her first ever taste of New England clam chowder and proclaimed it delicious. Later, two people drove by and asked her for directions. This only happens to Wendy. As soon as she opens her mouth, though, the southern accent pours forth and the lost people realize their error. They’ll be getting no directional help. For the rest of the night we offered fake directions.

“Just go down yonder into the holler. Keep on that road a piece. Turn left by the old Miller barn and drive on that gravel road a spell. You’ll get to it directly.”

This sculpture is near our hotel, and is an unsettling image to walk past, even without context. It is the heads bowed and the horse’s neck stretched in defiance, or mourning, depending on how you feel at the moment. Even more so is the second horse, which is holding a different posture. Just to see the thing takes a little getting used to.

Andrzej Pitynski’s sculpture was on display at the popular Boston Common for years, but people didn’t like looking at it there, apparently. Freedom is fine to celebrate in Boston if it is the American Revolution, but don’t bother us with those Polish partisan fighters who battled the Nazis and the communists during World War II. Is that the problem? I’m clearly not up-to-date on the apparently heated opinions of this sculpture, but these folks are.

Here’s a piece on Pitynski, detailing his work, his inspiration, his family ties to the characters he sculpted and the world during the time of this project. Poland, where this was intended to go, was not that welcoming of such an homage in 1980, so this work somehow found its way to Boston. It got moved around a bit and finally put in storage for a few years. It has been by the World Trade Center since 2006.

Tomorrow: we catch a train for Connecticut.

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28
May 11

Wendy invades Boston

Our friend Wendy has flown up to join us in New England. She’s from small town south Alabama. The largest place she’s ever lived has less than 250,000 people. She drives hours out of her way to avoid Atlanta. She’s never been to a northern city.

That, in fact, was the first time she’d ever seen a subway.

She got in today and we showed her around town. This is my third time in Boston, so I’m practically a member of the Chamber of Commerce. We took her over to Faneuil Hall. She saw the street dancers, who promised to leap over these four volunteers:

They were great. We had burgers for lunch at a place where the premise was that the staff insults you. This must be the place to which career waiters aspire. I don’t get the appeal, but the sandwich was good and our server wasn’t that bad. They made fun of Wendy, though.

We walked around, through some of the ancient churches of Boston I’ve written about here before. We took the DUKW tour. Tried to do this a few years back, but the airline hosed us and the Duck people were unaccommodating. I’m bitter, but The Yankee wanted to take the tour and offered to pay. I can hold a grudge over principle and lack of customer service, but she made me relent.

That’s our ride. Says the site:

Teresa is named after the Liberty Tree, which was the famous elm tree that stood near the Boston Common. The Liberty Tree was one of the places the “Sons of Liberty”, would gather to protest British rule. On Occasion they would hang lanterns on its branches to symbolize unity. The Liberty Tree was so despised by the British loyalists that they cut it down in 1775. That only enraged the colonists even more. To show their support for the revolution, people started hanging flags with a picture of the tree.

It is a reproduction DUKW, though the company does apparently still have a few original World War II amphibious trucks still in their fleet. One of those is below.

Our guide was good. Loves his town, great with the kids and big on trivia. I would have preferred more history — Boston has tons and tons, of course — but it was a beautiful day and a fine time was had by all.

This is in the Charles River Basin:

In the distance you can see the Harvard Bridge. Our guide told us the story of how the MIT kids didn’t like the bridge leading to their campus being named after their cross-town rivals. At one point in the mid-20th century one fraternity made their pledges measure the bridge using their smallest member as the unit of measurement. The bridge, then, is precisely 364.4 Smoots and one ear long.

Our guide told us that a few years back Smoot came back to MIT for a reunion and took a Duck Tour. They asked him why he was laid down head-to-toe spanning the length of the bridge instead of measuring him and using a rope or something like that.

“MIT students, wicked smaht right? Engineers. He said ‘It just didn’t occur to us,'” our guide said.

He also told the story of when the mayor of Boston bailed out the Rolling Stones.

This is supposedly one of the remaining authentic DUKW’s. Soldiers piled into this thing and stormed beaches. She has a significantly more comfortable life these days.

We had dinner in Little Italy at a place called Giacomo’s. The reviews on Urban Spoon aren’t great. Seems people find the service lacking. The lady that waited on our table was entirely forgettable, but the food came quickly and tasted fine. I chalked it up to the difference in Italian and American dining culture.

So we finished dinner, found a gelato, caught the T back to the hotel and started working on tomorrow’s presentations. Tomorrow, also, Wendy will begin her assault on Beantown.

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22
May 11

That’s gonna leave a mark

It is so hard to say goodbye to a four-star hotel. Especially when you know you’ll never stay at a Ritz again.

Though, I will say this: our ironing board was missing a foot, making it rickety. And the electric outlets in our room were installed upside down. Maybe it is really the Rits-Karltown, and we were mistaken.

But the towels, good heavens the towels were luxurious. You dried yourself clouds who had the misfortune of getting too close to the laundry room. The wait staff waded down into the infinity pool to bring drinks. People there fell all over themselves to help you. Breakfast this morning was the best buffet you could ever experience. The place smelled of potpourri and there was fine oak in dark accents everywhere you looked. Everything was granite-topped or better. Fine place.

After breakfast we checked out and went back to the lake house. Dave wanted to take us all out on the boat, so there we were, enjoying the sun and the breeze and a quiet stretch of Georgian lake and pine scenery.

Dave broke out the jet skis and people took turns riding them. One of them came free and The Yankee wanted to ride. She invited me along and I’m thinking She’s never driven one before. I’ve never been on one before. What could go wrong? I ask you again WHAT COULD GO WRONG!?!?!?!?

You drive a jet ski a little differently than other things that are not nautical. We putt-putt away and she says “How do you turn?”

“Wide. It doesn’t spin on a dime.” She turns the thing back in the general direction of the pontoon and guns it. We accelerate. We’re moving at a good clip. I glance down at the digital speedometer and see 52. (It should be noted we were on the slower of the two jet skis. And, if you are unaware, when you get in the 40-plus range on water, that is serious.)

I say “Slow down!” just as we cross a wake and are both elevated out of the seated position.

In the moment I had left before my savior called me home I decided it was either me or both of us. I pushed her shoulders down, forcing her back toward the jet ski and pushing me away. I fly off the thing somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 miles an hour. (Let’s call it 65, just to be safe.)

I managed to get my body turned to the right and tuck my right arm back in something close to a normal position and have mostly exhaled when I hit the water. And, if you’ve never done this: hitting the water at 145 miles per hour is not unlike hurling yourself into a sturdy wall.

I go under. And all of these are the first seven rapid-fire thoughts, occurring much faster than I can type them or you can read them:

1.) OOOOF!
2.) I’m glad for this life jacket.
3.) This is what death feels like.
4.) I’m going to die now.
5.) This is what broken ribs feel like.
6.) Wind, knocked out of me.
7.) Force breathing, force breathing.

That all happened in the amount of time I hit the water, submerged and the lake halted my flailing and flopping. I’d landed on my right side, feet towards the still-traveling jet ski, head back pointing at nothing in particular, and I took it all on my rib cage.

I haven’t absorbed a good shot like that in a long while. She said that by the time she had the jet ski turned around to find me she could already hear me grunting and straining to breathe. (The best way to do it, I believe, is just force your body to do it. The first two or three tries are no fun at all, but at least after that it is over and you can breathe again.) So I was in the water, thankful for the lifejacket (which I ordinarily hate) because I didn’t have to worry about swimming. I could just sound like some martial arts expert chopping a noisy tennis player in half while the tennis player volleys.

She turns to come back and I waved her off because that was all I could think to do. I really wanted to breathe and didn’t want to have to floating into her novice jet ski self. Finally I got it together enough that I brought her in, but I couldn’t climb on the stupid thing because I was wet, weak and slick from sun block. So she had to almost pick me up, like you see in westerns from time to time, but with much less grace. And that was pretty much my day. Before everyone got done with the boating I had gotten good and stiff.

I had some Advil at the lake house and then we hit the road. Just got home, in time to take some Ibuprofen and am moving verrrry gingerly. I haven’t bruised up, I can breathe, I don’t think anything is broken, but I got beat up good!

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21
May 11

A wedding in four pictures

If you’re going to get married on a lakeshore in Georgia, this is a beautiful place to do it. Our friend’s parents built their beautiful place here as a retirement home a few years back and now it has more than a little family history to it. Lovely people, all, and they threw a wonderful party for their son, who’s as good a man as they come, on his big day.

I say that about a lot of people here, but Dave is truly a terrific guy. He went to high school with The Yankee, joined the Marine Corps and then went to Penn State. He moved to Atlanta about the same time his parents did. Also in Atlanta, at that time, was my best girl. They truly bumped into each other in the produce section at the grocery store there, meeting again 1,000 miles from home in a city of five million people. His best man, there, went to high school with them as well. Turns out he just moved back to their hometown. He’s in computer networking and now lives in a home built in the 1750s. (Update: I didn’t get the full story, but it seems that one of the first free black men that fought in the Revolutionary War lived in that home.)

There were two ring-bearers, brothers, who beat each other up all day. When they came down to the pastor and the groom they were swinging the ring pillows around out of youthful boredom. Everyone was fairly surprised they didn’t have a pillow fight. There was a flower girl with curly, yellow hair who was too cute for words. They sent all the kids down and figured, “Whatever happens, happens.” Everyone thought one of the three of them would steal the show, but it turned out to be this rascal.

The father of the bride gives away his daughter. It was a lovely little service, and they danced away the rest of the night in the sweet Southern air.