Now at New York University checking email and posting to this site while Jim does some special collection stuff. I'm starting to get a bit of a collection of temporary library cards. Jim has loads from all over. We'll have to do something with them some day. NYU is in Greenwich Village just off Washington Square so a rather neat area to explore. Big news yesterday was about a student in creative writing here actually managed to live in the library for the last eights months undetected. He got found out because he was posting his experience to his weblog! With tuition at just under 30K US and residence another 12K he didn't have the money to live in res. Seems the university officials were pretty good about it and gave him a free room in residence until the end of the year.

Weather is sunny and coolish today so makes for great walking weather. We heard LA was 102 F yesterday...glad we aren't there now.

We've done the bus, metro, taxi, and walking and it really is great that NYC is such a wonderful pedestrian city which means lots of transit. Manhattan is really easy to get around and taxis are unbelievable cheap although I read in the New York Sun (great little newspaper for only 25 cents) that next week fares go up 26%. I think the cabbies really deserve it...seems they clear around $75 a day with no benefits paid. One fellow interviewed said the only doctors he sees are the ones he has in his cab as passengers.

Yesterday Jim had to spend the whole day at the New York Public Library (found lots of great stuff) so went to Lincoln Centre and also to the annex of the American Museum of Folk Art which is in the region. Will go to the new main building later in the week. The annex had some very interesting quilts as well as the a special commenorative 9/ll quilt, decoys, weather vanes, and various other quite neat things. I'm looking forward to the main exhibit. Then actually walked 50 blocks back to where our apartment is in the upper west side. Walked along Central Park Avenue for most of the way. It is a most magnificent park. Also, fun to see all the doormen calling cabs for their wealthy tenants. And of course the ubiquitous brownstones have a quality all themselves.

Got to the Guggenheim after Columbia the other day and certainly the architecture is rather impressive. Lots of strange modern stuff (mainly in the minimalist genre) in the spiral. One piece I thought was quite fun was a very large bunch of cellophane wrapped licorice bars and the viewer was invited to "take one". I took a couple and have an illicit pix of someone taking one (didn't realize you couldn't take photos). I liked this because a number of the other exhibits had to have special guards making sure you saw what the exhibit was and didn't step on it or something. Also had some good impressionist and modern stuff in the Thannhauser collection.