Ithaca

Sean, V, and I went up to Ithaca last weekend for the wedding of a college friend. It was the first time we'd been back in a while, and it was really nice to revisit some of our favorite haunts. It was also strange to go back - Ithaca still feels the same, as though we'd never left. Yet so much has changed - Sean and I weren't dating back when we lived in Ithaca, and now we're not only married, but we have a baby. Somehow the same, but totally different.

It was fun to take V around to our favorite places - the Arts Quad, Louie's Lunch, the gorges, Rand Hall, Purity ice-cream, Ithaca Bakery...Who knows? Maybe she'll go to Cornell someday (although at the rate tuition is increasing, we won't be able to afford to send her there!)



Buttermilk Falls - V slept through most of the hike, and fussed through the rest of it. I guess she isn't into hiking.





Beautiful patterns made by creepy water bugs.




This is Rand Hall - where we had our studios. It still looks exactly the same, down to the mounds of chipboard and parti models strewn all over the place. The new architecture building by OMA is almost done, and it looks pretty nice. I love Rand to pieces, but I might be just a little bit jealous.







The Green Dragon cafe, where we spent many midnights getting a cup of free coffee before heading back to studio to keep working. Still looks exactly the same.




The beautiful bride and groom!

Tick Marks

We recently came back from our annual trip to Seattle to visit with Anna's extended family and it was our first trip there with V. She got a big introduction to about 40 family members, and that was probably only half of the family members on both sides.

It was a touching thing to add her to the tradition of marking heights on the closet door in the cabin. I only made it on that wall in 2007, long after I had finished growing. But now V can add her notches as she grows over the years. A big part of our lives are now behind us, but there is a huge and amazing part coming up. Looking at the door with all the heights of all the cousins, I can only imagine all the things that happened between one mark and the next. V is the first of the new generation on Anna's mom's side, and she's now left her mark on the 100+ years of family history at this place.

V is almost 6 months old, which blows my mind. She's growing more and more into a little person every day. By the time her mark makes it to the middle of the door, she'll have experienced so many things and become a real little person with her own set of quirks and traits. I can't wait to see who she turns out to be, but I also hope it doesn't go by too quickly.

Memorial Day Weekend

We went to Connecticut over Memorial Day weekend. It was a sentimental visit, because Sean's parents recently sold their house, so this was the last gathering of the family at the home where Sean and his brother grew up. I have fond memories of the house, too, because when I first moved to New York and was looking for a job, Sean and his family invited me to come stay with them for a week. Sean and I had developed an interest in one another earlier that summer while we were still in Ithaca, but because we'd been good friends for so long we were both too scared to share our feelings in case it messed up our friendship. It was during that week that I visited Sean in CT that we decided to take a chance on being more than friends. And look at us now - married almost four years, and we've got a baby! Sometimes I still think it's kind of crazy that I married my best friend - who would have thought when we first met each other freshman year?

It was V's first visit to CT, and she was totally enamored with all of the plant life, especially the grass - she kept trying to get her face as close to the ground as possible and seemed to enjoy standing in the grass (but sitting, not so much - too ticklish, maybe?). I guess that living in the city, she doesn't get to hang out on grass all that much, which is kind of sad. V also seemed to respond very well to the fresh air and all of the quiet - she passed out for a solid ten hours all of the nights we were there - it was awesome. Maybe she is a country mouse at heart.

Washington DC

Last weekend, we took a trip down to DC with our friends Jenny and Andrew, who used to live in the area. It was cool to see everything again since neither of Anna or I had been to DC in the last 15 years. Normally this is a long time for a city, but in a place where the buildings could probably endure for centuries, not a whole lot has changed. Unfortunately, we didn't have our camera on us for the nighttime tour of the monuments, but we got a few other pictures to show.



The National Cathedral had incredible stained glass. Anna was obsessed with photographing the beautiful reflections that the glass made on the cathedral walls. One window even had a moon rock in it. The cathedral garden is where Andrew surprise-proposed marriage to Jenny a few years ago. We made them re-enact it.



Of course, we went to the Air and Space Museum. Soyouz spacecraft had a really nice peacock blue paint job. Way to go, USSR. My NASA quiz told me my ideal jobs are (in order) 1. heat tile inspector, 2. photographer, 3. spacesuit developer.





The trip to Arlington Cemetery was a beautiful yet sobering reminder of the price of waging war. We saw a changing of the guard ceremony, and then two families who had lost their sons, probably in Iraq, laying wreaths in a ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Beacon, New York

We took a trip with our friends Michelle and Anderson up to Beacon, NY last weekend to try to see some fall foliage and make a long overdue trip to the Dia:Beacon. The leaves weren't really turning yet, but we did see the oddball orange tree here and there on the walk from the museum to Main Street. The town of beacon had a mix of old stores and new knicknack stores. The highlight was the Hudson Beach Glass shop and studio. We watched a woman making a glass tumbler. It looked like a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. We even met the Mayor of Beacon, who was walking around town. We chatted a bit about how Main Street connects two villages, but visitors only walk the half that is closest to the Dia. So if you go there, be sure to walk more than 3 blocks. Unfortunately, we missed the other half of Main Street.



The Dia:Beacon building is massive. Its original use was the box manufacturing factory for Nabisco. mmmm...cookies. My favorite exhibit was the Sol Lewitt series of wall drawings. Their scale matches the building, but their detail is so minute. You can see how the texture of the wallboard changes the line if you look really really close.



The only other pieces that matched the scale of the building were the Richard Serra's. I hadn't seen one that I could walk inside, so that was cool. We snuck a few pictures of the exhibits when the docents weren't watching us like we were going to steal something.



A few more photos in our Flickr set.

Rockaway Beach / Boston

Sean unexpectedly got Thursday and Friday off from work, so we spent Thursday at Rockaway beach, beating the heat (why didn't I do this all summer?), and on Saturday we caught the Bolt bus to Boston. Neither of us had been to Boston in years and we thought it would be a fun way to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. Also, I'm sort of on a scouting mission to find cities besides New York that we can live in. Boston seems like it would be a pleasant enough place to live - it's smaller than NYC, but big enough that I wouldn't get bored. The waterfront is beautiful, and the T (while limited and frustrating) is extensive enough that you could probably get away without driving. But with one of our goals being to move closer to my family on the west coast, it seems kind of pointless to move from NYC to Boston.

We only stayed through Monday, so we didn't to do as much as we would have liked - we ate a ton, went to the ICA, the aquarium, Harvard/Harvard Square, MIT, and Chinatown. And of course, no visit to Boston would be complete with out a walk on the Freedom Trail, and a scavenger hunt for all the folks dressed up in historical costumes.