And more pix of NYC....


Lincoln Center



Art in the Metro



We noticed a lot of these what seem to be towers for water storage on a lot of apartment buildings.
I wonder if they were originally for fire protection?



And speaking of fires...this one was right by our apartment. The fire and police
department were right across from us so got to see them in action.



Jim and the Hudson River



Dog socialization area.



World Trade Center site



The "Winter Garden" in the World Financial Center across from the site.

More pix of NYC.


Cheese shop...yum...


Around Columbia University....could be Paris, n'est-ce pas?


The Guggenheim


Licorice exhibit at the Guggenheim. You were invited to take a piece...it was
part of the "art work"...however, taking pictures was forbidden but I managed to get one anyway...

Some pix of Washington, D.C. today. We really enjoyed being in Georgetown and it was very convenient for Jim since Georgetown University was right there. Very expensive real estate. John Kerry owns a home there worth 7 million US. Where JFK lived as a senator and when he was first married to Jackie before becoming president. Also where Jackie bought a home after his assassination but soon fled to NYC because of security concerns. I can see why they referred to the village as their "beloved Georgetown". Wonderful restaurants and shops...almost no chain stores.


Georgetown University. The only university on our travels where there were loads of empty computers with internet access.


Some colourful townhouses in Georgetown.


Some shops and restaurant fronts in Georgetown.


The house Jackie K. bought after the assassination.


Lincoln Memorial.


The great man himself...what a fabulous statue!


Don't imagine there's much joy in this building these days.

The hallowed halls of Princeton University


Quite the gift from the class of 1879.

I loved these no parking signs!

I was very impressed with this war memorial at Hampton Beachfor those residents lost at sea in the various wars. It is designed so that windblown sand collects around the bottom...really adds to the whole impression.

Lobster traps in Portland, Maine.



A great fish store. Portland, Maine.


The most photographed lighthouse in Maine.


This is around the area of the lighthouse. The weather here is very changeable and I can see there would be shipwrecks. Just a short time ago we were sitting by the docks in the sun with shirtsleeves eating fish and chips and suddenly the wind got up and the temperature dropped 20 degrees.

When I was in Boston I visited the main headquarters of the Christian Science Church. On our tour of Boston, the guide mentioned the famous "mapparium" (a 3 story stained glass globe you can walk into) and that intrigued me. Also, when we were poor students the Christian Science Reading Room people in Vancouver gave us a free subscription for years to their excellent newspaper and I was interested in seeing the where it was produced. They have quite a neat display for the newspaper. You can look into the offices and they have a computer program which allows you to track what is happening during the daily production in all the various areas. Plus you can create your own new story...it was all quite fun.

Take a look at the mappariumwebsite for pix.

Some other pix of the church building and reflecting pool.

And here's a site for more pix (professional ones!) of the Gehry building

Here's the pix of the famous Media Lab. According to this prof I was asking directions from they are currently working (among other things) on armour for soldiers that is like gel so comfortable but will harden when hit.



MIT Media Lab

And another really cool thing was the "Kendall Band" that was in the subway station for MIT. The students had designed this giant wind chime sort of thing between the tracks that waiting passengers can twist a handle to begin. I tried it of course! It really gets a neat sound going through the underground station...very interesting echo effects.



Kendall Band (Kendall is the name of the subway station)

Back home now after a wonderful trip but as much as we enjoyed the big cities of New York, Washington, and Boston it is great to be back breathing this wonderful west coast air and in a quieter place. Sorry for those big pix that made the print very hard to read since you had to scroll so much. I just couldn't seem to resize my pix on Jim's laptop. Great to be back working with Photoshop. Will be posting lots of pix of our trip over the next while.

First up is a shot of Harvard. I lucked into joining a tour that was in progress while Jim headed to Special Collections to do his usual gig. It was really interesting and learned lots of things.



* That Harvard chooses the best people then finds money in grants, work study, etc. to make up the $40 K US tuition for those who don't have parents that can pay the whole shot. Also, new this year is that anyone whose parents make less than $40K will not have to pay anything.

* 97% live on campus for the entire 4 undergrad years

* most classes have no more than 14 students

* As one would expect, they want students to take a broad range of courses outside their specialty but what was rather cool is that instead of things like Biology 101, they will design directed studies courses for you. For example, the student giving the tour took the Physics of Musical Instruments".


Then on to MIT to take a pix of their Media Lab for my son, pick up a souvenir from MIT for him, and to see the new Stata Centre (not quite finished) by Frank Gehry that is getting lots of press because it is so wild in design. Gehry says the inside of the building is more important than its striking outside. The MIT faculty, he says, wanted to "produce collisions of people by accident".

I thought this building was a total "WOW" inside and out. Everything else there is sooo.... boring that this building comes across as absolutely brilliant by comparison. This opinion probably isn't shared by everyone. The person I asked directions from on campus (probably a prof) referred to it as the "drunken building" but did admit that now they had something (like Harvard does) that people would want to see.

Posting today from Portland, Maine which we're really enjoying. After a long drive yesterday (9 hours) with lots of delays and tie ups we did finally arrive around 5pm yesterday to this very charming seaside hotel in Hampton Beach. Had a great lobster dinner (with mussels thrown in) while watching the sun set over the ocean from the hotel's dining room. Exploring Maine today, will hit the Kennebuck area (Bush has a summer place there apparently but I doubt he'll be there relaxing....), Portmouth, and Kittery, then back for another lobster dinner (they have lots of variations) for me at our hotel. Tomorrow we head to Boston which looks like a pretty easy 1 hr drive, drop the car at the airport, taxi to our hotel, then Wed take the train back to NYC to leave for home Thurs. Yeah...no more difficult driving! Jim's in a bookstore...have to rout him out.

Princeton is a very beautiful small town with lots of interesting architecture in the town and university. Very small place and lots of large impressive churches and no sign of any pubs or where you can get a drink outside. Good place for these 6,000 students here who no doubt are very serious (physics and all that stuff...where Einstein went, where "A Beautiful Mind" was filmed). 12,000 employees at the U. for these students. Gee, they even beat out Royal Roads Military College which had a ratio of one to one.

Pretty sleepy town...not a lot to do but they did have a rather interesting little local museum on the "lost" Princeton. Looks like they haven't preserved their heritage as much as they could have. Unlike Georgetown that in 1950 made the entire place heritage and put restrictions on everything. It shows....it's a wonderful place.

So now off to Maine and area for the weekend. Will be quite a long driving day...about 7 hours I think. Then into Boston for three days then home. The time has flown by.

Well..I give up...will post pix when I get home.

Arrived (finally...!) in Princeton after getting dazed and confused. Things are not laid out on a grid around these old New England towns to say the least. Talking to some people in a store and they said everyone gets lost around here and regaled me with numerous stories about themselves to prove it. Also, seems they have something called "jughandles"....sort of an involved round-a-about that means you have to keep changing direction to eventually get through it. Guess we'll recognize it when we see it. The wierdist thing is you can (and we did) end up going south back to Washington when seemingly on the road north. My mind is still spinning. What we have seen of Princeton and the area is very beautiful and impressive....wow! The research library was open till 8pm tonight so Jim took the opportunity of getting started on his research. Currently a thunder and lightning storm which is too bad for a Cinqo de Mayo outdoor festival they have going on around here. Have an ethernet connection in our hotel room so will try to post some pix.

At Georgetown University in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. at the moment and overlooking some beautiful trees while I'm posting this. We're staying in Georgetown and it's a great area...very village-like with lots of neat shops, restaurants, small galleries, antique shops, and row housing that's very reminicent of the UK ...probablly dating from late 1800's I would say. Jim is doing is usual library thing...found some great Graham Greene letters yesterday that he will be able to use in his introduction to the the new novella by Greene he is publishing that I'm sure the publisher will be very excited about. We met the publisher/owner of Hesperus Press in NYC just before we left as he was there briefly. A really neat guy and they are very excited about publishing the Greene story and also the unpublished first novel if that works out. Jim had a quick look at it yesterday and he feels it's pretty good.

I went to the National Gallery of Washington and it was wonderful for all the works there as well as the buildings themselves...very impressive even after the Metropolitan Art Gallery of NYC which we also just visited. It's free to everyone and they don't even have a donation box (that I could see anyway) so a wonderful facility for everyone. In addition to loads of impressionist and modern paintings (and of course everything else but you've got to focus on your real interests in these places since I'm going non-stop these days) they had a wonderful Mayan special exhibition with great supporting materials including a really neat guide for children and also around 30 very interesting and impressive cubist paintings of Diego Rivera. He only produced such paintings during a two year period when he was in Paris around WWI. I just loved these paintings!

I think we'll do some sort of tour of Washington later this afternoon since we are very short of time here since we leave tomorrow and Jim really hasn't seen much except Georgetown.

Guess I haven't posted for a while. After Greenwich Village we walked along the Hudson River embankment walk...a wonderful decompressing area for New Yorkers and walked up the the 9/ll site and the winter garden (14 palm trees) in the World Financial Centre. Talking to a woman in Greenwich who really wanted us to see that as apparently they rushed this redevelopment through around the 9/11 site and it meant a lot to New Yorkers to have something beautiful again around that devastation. It's very moving to hear people talk about that experience.

The New York Public Library is also just amazing and I loved the park beside it which is the "Bryant Park Reading Room" where they have all sorts of bistro type tables and chairs along with movable shelves of books that people can temporarily borrow while they're there and even a rack of newspapers on rolls. I took a lot of pictures of that and think I'll try to paint that scene.

With all the frenzy of NYC there are many areas of oasis. We walked to the Frick Collection (wow...more wonderful stuff!)from our apartment via Central Park...another wonderful place where people can relax. Then walked to Zabar's food emporium on 80th and Broadway...can't believe the variety of stuff they manage to sell there from a relatively small space...a foody's delight...just bought a bag there for a souvenir to add to my collection of book/ shopping bags since we were leaving fairly soon.

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.

Greetings from NYC! We had a great flight...only about 1/3 full on the plane so could spread out and everything on time. We're very pleased with our apartment here and he owner was very nice and helpful. Lots of markets, restaurants, and services in the area so fun to shop and feel like a part of living in NYC. I'm always amazed about how friendly and helpful New Yorkers are. Raining today so impossible to get a taxi so took the bus but unlike LA where you can use bills, here only quarters, which, of course, we didn't have. Someone on the bus immediately pulled out a bag of quarters to help. And it continues on with all sorts of people helping us find our way, chat, etc. At Columbia University right now killing time as the rare books area isn't open until noon. Think we'll try to take in the Guggenheim after that.

Aa few pix of our visit to Beaconhill Park. Now I know why I haven't been there since making trips to the petting zoo with Richard. It is sooo dull...! The petting zoo is still the best thing about it.



The alapacas were very cool...don't remember them being there.



I'm quite sure this is the first time I've seen a white peacock.



Richard and me taken by holding the camera in front of us. Great thing about digital cameras is you can always take another one if it does't work.

Practicing uploading to blogger from Jim's laptop.

A few pix of these great poppies that seem to come up every year around our house.

This is the only painting I did when we were in California. Forgot I did it actually...just came across it when trying to get rid of clutter. I'm not going to bother taking paints on our next trips since we're moving around too much. I must work on simplifying what I take when I do think I will do some painting.



Fox Cinema - acrylic on paper 8" x 10"

I've been impressed with the art I've seen at Toronto's new Terminal I. I particularly liked this aluminum-plate sculpture of five flying figures by Jonathan Borofsky called "I dreamed I could fly". Perhaps Toronto's airport will make it in the top ten in the world.

Vancouver is #8 and is the only North American airport to make the list. I think it's a wonderful airport and feel very proud every time I enter it. I notice it took a few hits from the evaluators for surly over-zealous customs agents...I can testify to that!

Hong Kong's relatively new airport shares top spot with Singapore's. Ten years ago I was very surprised and disappointed by HK's very dingy airport...glad to see they have something world class now.


"I dreamed I could fly" by Jonathan Borofsky
Location: Terminal I - Toronto Pearson International Airport

This is a canvas mat I just finished. I've been wanting to do sunflowers and a black and white check border for a while now for a mat to go in front of the sink. It didn't quite work out the way I had in mind but I'm quite pleased with it and it goes well with the terracotta kitchen floor.



"Sunflowers and checks"
Canvas floor mat - 23" x 29"

Books I'm NOT reading...all rather disappointing...glad I got them from the library!

"Consider This, Senora" by Harriet Doerr. As much as I liked her first novel (Sontes for Ibarra), her writing style seems to have gotten worse in this rather than better...too many happy coincidences and not very authenic sounding. I did like the painting on the cover, though.



"Island" by Jack Hodgins. I heard him read from this and although I enjoyed his reading I figured I wouldn't particularly like the book. Picked it up on a 7 day Fast Read to give it a try.

"Cat's Pilgrimage" by Marily Bowering. Didn't get past the book jacket on this one. Also had read a bad review.

"Tell No One" by Harlan Coben. Thought I might find a good mystery writer here but his style isn't for me.

I'm really pleased with the way the Victrola came up and it's working great as a wine and liquor cabinet. I changed the design a bit from the canvas I did first.

I don't seem to have been reading that much lately. Too busy with travel and travel plans I guess and I don't seem to do a lot of reading when travelling. Read another No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency called "Tears of the Giraffe"...simple, charming, delightful as always. I guess I will tire of these stories because there isn't really much to them but for the moment I really enjoy them.

When we were in LA I picked up Shirley Hazzard's memoir on encounters with Graham Greene called "Greene on Capri". They both had houses there and met frequently over the years. I bought it for Jim really but surprised myself by reading and liking it. Generally I'm not thrilled with memoirs.

Noticed the Shirley Hazzard had a new book out (first one 20 years after "The Transit of Venus") called "The Great Fire"...all about the aftermath of WW II. I think it quite captures that end of war chaos and people left adrift to re-create their lives again after the war and in the shadow of the prospect of another war. I enjoyed it and was engaged by the characters and story even though I sometimes got the feeling the author was using up material that wasn't really necessary. Something about the atmosphere in the book that I quite liked and I found I didn't mind these faults. Also enjoyed some very insightful comments by the male protagonist on the nature of women. Always rather interesting when a female writer writes through the male point of view and comments on women.

"Stones from Ibarra" by Harriet Doerr...another of my Christmas books that Jim feratted out.
Most interesting writer. She was the ultimate "late bloomer" - finished her Stanford degree at 67 and won a National Book Award for "Stone..." at the age of 73. Story about a California couple who sell everything to reopen a copper mine the husband's grandfather was forced to abandon during the Mexican Revolution. More a collection of insightful vignettes about the Mexicana and American cultures than a novel although it does hang together as a novel as well.

I got back to doing some painting this last week and worked out the design on a canvas that I want to do for the top of the Victrola cabinet. Since it's going to be storage for bar related items I wanted to do something that fit along this line. The "Ricard blimp" is especially for Jim as he has always had this idea that there should be a blimp on the Victoria-Vancouver run.



Cafe Pastis
Acrylic on canvas - 12" x 16"