It has been snowing all day. As usual, the local media totally hyped it, beforehand. Yesterday, NYC public schools preemptively canceled class for today. In fairness, it has been coming down pretty hard, all day, and is still coming down. Even though Reagan and I both had to work, we were both able to leave a lot earlier than normal. I wish that we could have had the whole day off, to be out and about, like our friends Kim and Ryan.  I did get a few snaps of my own, today, mostly on the way out of work.

^—Looking at Battery Park City, from 1 WFC.

^—-1 World Trade Center from the Vesey Street Bridge.

And my favorite, the ever timely snow-heart that someone made on our sidewalk.

Since Piper has been back at Columbia, I have been back to the old car moving routine. I have not enjoyed it. I normally get up at 6, so that I can get it done before there is any real traffic. The sweet spot is between 6 and 7. After 7, there is a garbage truck and a school bus blocking every single street in our neighborhood.

This morning, Reagan woke me up, while she was stirring around. I had one of those sudden moments of panic, like I knew I shouldn’t still be asleep. I had forgotten to take my phone off of silent, and the type of alarm that I had set for moving the car, doesn’t make any noise, when my phone is on silent. It was already 7. I got down stairs just in time for the blizzard to start, and in time to get stuck behind every school bus and garbage truck in our neighborhood, at least once. Hahahaha. I’m ok with that though, because the snow was very pretty and entertaining to watch, while taking breaks from watching the dudes toss garbage into the truck.

At long last, I did find a parking spot in time to make it down to work w/o being late, where I took the above photos of the storm. I know they are kind of boring. I liked these ones much more.

To add a little bit of contrast to the gray photos above, I thought I would post the image below. It has made its way around the internet by now, but I thought it was cool enough to share again anyway.

The image comes from artist Steven Worley’s blog. In his post, he outlines the history of Crayola’s color spectrum, and how the palette has expanded over the years, saying:

Crayola’s crayon chronology tracks their standard box, from its humble eight color beginnings in 1903 to the present day’s 120-count lineup.  According to Crayola, of the precious crayons of my childhood – the seventy-two colors from the official 1975 set – sixty-one survive.

So cool.

In spite of high hopes coming into the weekend, it turned out to be kind of a bust. Reagan and I weren’t feeling super well on Saturday morning, so we scrapped the plan to pick up Piper’s stuff in Jersey, and instead, headed straight to the hospital. By Saturday evening it was pretty apparent that we were both coming down with some sort of ailment.

I spent the entire day, Sunday laid up in bed. Reagan toughed it out and made the trip to church. For her reward, she is feeling even worse today. Neither of us went into work today. I have been logged in from home, trying to get some stuff done. But it has been slow going, since my head is still so cloudy.

Staying home wasn’t a hard decision to make, when we woke up to sideways rain pelting against the window. As nasty as the weather was today, it certainly did make for a cozy sick day. Late in the afternoon, the clouds broke for a minute and I ventured out to move the car (which is when I shot the image above). Hopefully those clouds will take our illness along with them, on their way out of town.

The worst part of this ordeal, of course, is not being able to see Piper. From the nurse’s report, this morning, it seems as though she may have made some progress during the night. They were able to come down on her ventilator settings a bit. Last time she was totally paralyzed they were able to make the same progress. The real test will be, if she can maintain those settings when they back off the sedatives. Fingers crossed. We miss you Piper!

I saw all of this ice that was collecting in the north cove marina, from my boss’s window Monday, when I was in his office. I decided to photograph it, Tuesday morning on my way in. The funny part? Apparently I wasn’t the only person I know, taking photos of floating ice in the Hudson.

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I had to be in the office for a while on Saturday. When I arrived downtown, it was late afternoon, and it was like a ghost town. It was totally freezing outside. The only people that I really saw were occasional groups of tourists. The sun was totally lighting up the west side of the downtown post office. So I stopped to take this shot. Not the first time I have had fun with this piece. I walk past it almost every day, at least once. So, why not?

What is even better, is that after I got this shot, I was packing everything bag into my bag, when a group of tourists who were kind of off to the side watching me pulled in right behind me and started breaking out their cameras. Like run-on sentences much? This is why that’s funny (the incident, not the fact that it was expressed in a run-on sentence, it’s pretty obvious why that’s funny).

Below is a detail from the shot above.

I had some surplus vacation time to use up before the end of the year. As a part of it, I’m taking a vacation at the end of every week this month (for those weeks that don’t already end in holidays), starting last Friday. It was really fun to be able to go up and see Piper on a week day.  Our friend Andrea came with us on Friday. Piper enjoyed cuddling and playing with Andrea.

^—–Andrea and Piper, reading the bellybutton book.

^——Piper zoning out while Reagan gets Piper ready for her lunch.

I have been riding the A-Train between the same two stops for a handful of years, now. My routine is pretty much down. I even have backup plans for when something goes awry. For example; in the morning, I know which crack to stand next to, so that I will be in the right spot to get in the door I want, when the train pulls up. Same thing, for the evening. Only, instead of a crack, it is a support beam that I stand next to. If someone is in my spot, I have two back-up spots to stand in and wait. It probably sounds crazy. Actually, it probably is kind of  crazy.

Anyway, I have been taking the train in the evening a lot more, since I moved groups at work. I used to pretty much always take a car home, because I would always work pretty late. Even when I didn’t work really late, I was taking the train late enough that it wasn’t rush hour anymore. I had no idea what I was missing. Afternoon rush-hour is complete crap. I hate it, bad. I don’t mean to sound like Max Hall, but I really can’t think of one thing that I like about rush-hour. Not only are there way too many people indignantly shoving their way in and out of the doors, but the freak-meter is off the scale. I mean, they are out in droves. Of course you get your occasional freak, no matter what time of day you are on the train. But during rush-hour, you can’t really avoid them.

This may seem like a petty example, but here is what happened on my way home Thursday evening: I was standing in the very end of the very last car. This dude gets on and posts up right next to me. He is probably late teens/early 20’s. He turns around to look out the back window of the train, and starts gradually shoving me over, so that he can be more squarely positioned in front of the window. Whatever. Not a big deal. I mean, there is a lot of exciting crap to look at back there, in the dark tunnel behind the train. Whatever he was seeing out there must have been pretty inspiring though, because next thin I know, he starts singing to himself. The singing is loud enough that I can hear it over my headphones which are turned up to 11. At first I thought he just got carried away, singing along to the music in his headphones. Oh wait, he isn’t wearing any.

Then this other lady gets on, and asks the woman sitting next to where I’m standing, to give up her seat. The woman obliges, and lets the other lady have her spot. This lady is dragging one of those annoying little backpacks with the rollers on it, the kind that everyone trips over while trying to walk behind them on the sidewalk. She slides her government-worker issued MTA pass back into its little plastic case and sits down in her commandeered seat, while wedging her little wheely bag right between her shins and the side of my leg. Nice. So, now I have aspiring American Idol-boy all up on my left side, and this crazy woman cramping me all up from the other side. The train is so jammed that I can’t really even move to another spot, at this point, without putting someone else out.

Next thing I know, this woman begins to rummage all through her little pack, which seems to be stuffed to capacity with a never ending supply of plastic sacks. Apparently she isn’t finding the right sack, because she rummages for like 3 stops. The whole time I’m blocking the stupid little fully-extended pull handle on her bag from hitting me in the junk, as it wildly swings around during all of the rummaging. Finally, she finds what she is looking for. It is a container of yogurt. She now begins to rummage through her handbag. Eventually she comes up with a plastic knife. Good enough, I guess. She opens the yogurt and drinks out all of that clear stuff that settles at the top. Mmmmm delicious. In the process, she gets a bit white smudge on the end of her nose from the partially peeled back foil at the top of the container. Next, she begins to spoon (knife) the yogurt into her mouth. Her first couple of attempts don’t go too well. The yogurt slides right off of her knife onto her sleeve. No problem she just licks it up. Then she takes a different approach, putting the cup to her mouth and just using the knife to shovel the yogurt in. So amazing.

There was a sudden and particularly loud burst of song that distracted me for a few seconds. When I looked back to my right, she had finished the yogurt and was back to rummaging. I was back to shielding the goods from the flailing handle. Momentarily she came up with yet another yogurt. Nice. At this point she had a substantial amount of white goop on the end of her nose. What harm could a little more do? She downs the second yogurt, plastic knife shovel-style and goes back to rummaging. I go back to shielding. Yellow plastic bags, black plastic bags, white plastic bags. She must have collected one from every bodega in the entire West Village. She finally retrieves a black plastic bag and unties it, to reveal a tupperware containing cut celery. Not too weird.

She opens up the tupperware and starts going to town on the celery. After placing one end of a celery stick in her mouth, she cups the palm of her hand at the other end and pushed it in, about a quarter of an inch with each chomp. It was similar to the way the beavers eat sticks in the old cartoons. She repeats this action with 3 to 5 sticks of celery, until her checks are completely jammed with partially masticated celery. She has one long celery string hanging from her lower lip, down past her chin. All the while, still rocking the goop nose. Over the next 5 minutes she chews that wad of celery.

This ride was taking forever. We stopped twice in the tunnel between 59th and 125th. When we finally arrived at 125, enough people de-trained that I was finally able to extract myself from between the aspiring vocalist and the hungry government worker, to find a less stimulating perch. I need to start working late, again.

[The photo is of the Rector Street stop, on the RW, in late October]

Brian McKnight

Omarion

Monday night, I had the occasion of shooting DJ Webstar’s b-day party for SoJones at the M2 Ultralounge in midtown west. Omarion and Brian McKnight are a few of the celebs that showed. You can check out the rest of my photos at Sojones, as soon as the article is published. I was just invited back, to shoot Mariah Carey’s Halloween party, at the same club. The only problem is that we are already going to Weezer’s party that night. Speaking of Weezer, Reagan met some of them yesterday. So cool.

First of all, I had to share this photo, because I’m still laughing over it. If you have ever run a NYRR sponsored race then you have undoubtedly seen all of the course photographers along the way, and received the subsequent email solicitations to purchase the photos. Last Saturday, I figured “why not have a little fun with them?” So I fired off a couple of pretty nice poses as I was passing the photographers. I was pretty much rolling when I received the proofs in the email. This is definitely my favorite one, though. If you have ever seen “American Psycho,” then you know where I got this pose.

Second, the Hartford Marathon is just around the corner. In fact, it is only 2 days away. I am really excited and nervous about it. My best marathon time was on this course, so I’m kind of putting a lot pressure on myself to do well. I have been resting all week. I have even left out going to the gym, except for on Monday. I want to try to have as fresh of legs, as possible. On Tuesday, I had a bit of a scare, when I started sneezing and sniffling a bit. I seriously would have been devastated, had I gotten sick right before the race. I have been swallowing hands full of vitamins for the last couple of days, and knock on wood, I haven’t had any other symptoms. Thanks everyone who sent me suggestions for my playlist. With everyone’s help, I have checked out close to 300 new tracks over the past couple of days. I was able to get some really good ideas to keep me moving on Saturday.

Lastly, I haven’t posted anything in a couple of days. I’m sure that some people may have been worried/hoping that I ran out of things to say. Hahahahah. In actuality, I have been pretty busy on a few other projects, and haven’t had a lot of time to write anything good. About a year ago, I had the privilege of joining a group in my extended family that had undertaken the challenge of organizing genealogy for my mother’s side of the family. For my contribution, I helped them put together a couple of websites to publish their work on, as well as to facilitate networking, etc.. For the past few days, I have been kind of re-working the sites. Here are a couple of screen shots:

Here is the link, if you want to visit: www.christensenfamilyhistory.com

Here is the link, if you want to visit this one: www.whitneyfamilyhistory.com

In addition to those two sites, I have been working with my cousin, who has a candy-bouquet/gift-basket business that she is building a site for. So anyway, between all of that and my “real” job, the hours have pretty much been filled. But, I’m really looking forward to this weekend. I’m hoping to get in a couple of more good poses for the camera guys. “Blue Steel,” maybe?  We’ll see.

One of my favorite times of the day, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, is the last 10 minutes of my workout session. This may sound totally retarded, but whatever. I endearingly refer to those 10 minutes as, “nap-time.” After 30-90 minutes of running, then a 60 minute workout, I get to just lay there on a massage table, with ice packs on my knees. It is so amazing.

I’m not one of those guys who works out with the blackberry in-hand. So gym-time is already kind of sacrosanct, in the sense that I’m “off the grid,” as it were. So, I totally love those last 10 minutes, where I can just let my mind drift, and veg-out, before showering and getting back to the inevitable inbox buildup that has accumulated.

Today particularly, I was realizing how much I appreciate my 10 minutes of solitude. During nap-time, today, I got to thinking how much I appreciate the small things generally, when things get particularly hectic in my life. For example, I love the re-designed tab on Orbit gum. It is now so much easier to close the flap.

I love it when Reagan sneaks some cookies into my backpack, in the morning, while I’m in the shower. I love it when I come down the last set of subway stairs right as the train is pulling up. I really think that is the kind of stuff that keeps me going. Anyway, sorry to get all pensive. I just thought I would share.