Today’s post was penned by my lovely wife. Hers in the next entry in a small feature of everyone in the family discussing their feelings on having lived in England and returning to the States. The previous post in the series can be found here. ——————- Travel was number one…
It’s been over a year since this song lodged itself into my – and, hopefully, yours – brain. Today, Vince clued me in on the sequel. Still brilliant!
A person decides to go for a week-long trip to Paris with her teenage daughter. Neither of them have travelled much before, especially to Europe, and they’ve never been to France. Neither of them is much interested in history, art or architecture. They picked Paris as a holiday destination because,…
I’m watching the Yankees on TV last night. Becky, who does not have school in the morning, does whatever it is that she does on her laptop in her bedroom. The Yanks win the game and clinch the World Series. As delighted as I am, my outward reaction is purposefully…
Every day after work I walk by the National Debt “clock” on 44th Street near 6th Avenue. Here is a not very good picture from last night (damn the return to standard time! – I can’t get out of the office before it’s dark anymore and my pocketcam is not…
I am a rare European-born and raised naturalized American who gets baseball. For most of my fellow emigrants, the game is too static, too full of seemingly inconsequential action when only a couple of people seem to get involved (for instance, when the batter takes a ball), and not very…
Four months since my last movie overview – and only a couple of movies watched in that period of time. Before I get into an explanation of why my movie-viewing habits have become so insignificant, let me tell you what those two viewings were, and anyone who couldn’t care less…
I was checking the score of the last night’s MNF game on ESPN, when I came across Chris Berman’s “Fastest 3 minutes in Sports”. Introducing the annual NFL game played in London, he made the frequent mistake of misidentifying one of the iconic city landmarks. People! Let’s get this straight!…
For a reasonably technologically-savvy person, I sometimes find myself utterly amazed by what nowadays technology can offer. Like, for instance. I’ve been wearing glasses since my early teens. One pair of glasses that I got myself roughly 20 years ago were so called “chameleons” – the specs that would become…
It took me a while to follow up on Geo’s excellent suggestion, but I finally started to sit down with members of my family to get their thoughts on living in England and being back in America. First up, the teen. Burlaki [back] on the Hudson: So, what did you…
Following on one of the notes from yesterday, we are expecting friends over tonight. Natasha is in her element in the kitchen, and here is a dessert she made: Pear and Almond Cream Tart (serves 6). Ingredients: 3 firm pears lemon juice 3/4 pound shortcrust or sweet shortcrust…
Checked my Analytics stats for the first time in G-d-knows-how-many-weeks and realized how wholesome and boring the searches that lead people to my website are. Fully two-thirds of all the searches can be fairly coherently attributed to specific subjects of my posts (over a quarter of all searches are to…
I realize that a lot more comes into an Olympic host selection than just the appeal of the leaders of each respective country whose cities are in the running. Yet I feel strangely disturbed that Obama’s appeal to the IOC turned out to be a non-factor in Friday’s vote for…
Natasha was shopping for new beds and mattresses before we could move into the new house. She walked into a local franchise of Sleepy’s. The shop was empty save for a lone salesperson. He eagerly approached his prospective customer and offered his help. What followed was an in-depth investigation of…
Spending all of my free time – however little of that! – in making “my” part of the house (offices, computers, assorted electronics) presentable, I am still a few days away from resuming some semblance of settled-down existence. And blogging. In the meantime, due to overwhelming demand, here are a…
In the past, a 6-day interval between posts on this blog would invariably mean that I was on a trip to some fun and rewarding destination. At present, not so much. I still don’t have a writing angle that I want to be exploring in depth, and I’m increasingly lukewarm…
In the absence of truly original content, I sought to fall back on a gimmick today, that being the trebly-symmetric date of 09/09/09. Except, to keep the symmetry intact, I would have to talk about something related to the Olympic Games, as I did both on 07/07/07 and on 08/08/08.…
Our weekends have gotten back to what we consider “normal” for us very quickly upon repatriation. A dinner outing with parents. An idle get-together with friends by the pool. A mixed kids-and-adults party in celebration of some occasion. We have not had a single Saturday or Sunday in the last…
Many of my online friends did this test and, for lack of any other entertainment herein, I finally decided I needed to start using fillers again… … except I was not actually ready to do justice to a 120-item questionnaire, so the result turns out to be rather random. Human?…
A quick observation that I cannot properly quantify: We’ve been struck over the last few days how much more commercial time there is on American TV as compared to the channels we watched in England. It feels as if every 6-7 minutes there is a 3-4 minute commercial break. Our…