Last week I was having trouble sleeping through the night. I was waking up for three or four hours each night. The last several days, I’ve been catching up, often sleeping well past 9:00 am, and generally having a sluggish start to my day. But, that’s just the microcosm. On a larger level, the start to our three months in […]
Starting Slow in London
New Year’s…Resolved
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Never have. I get it, but I don’t really find this a particularly meaningful time of year to commit to changes. Maybe that’s because I’ve always lived on an academic calendar–even the years I wasn’t a student or a teacher, Jessica was, so I never really got off that rhythm completely. But, this year, […]
NYC6: The Beautiful City
Welcome back for the last (I think) post on my brief sojourn in New York. I wanted to end with my favorite part of being there…which was mostly simply the fact of being there. We walked along the rivers, through the parks, up one side of Manhattan and down the other and all over in between, not to mention some […]
An Interruption: the worst day of the year.
A year ago, we were at what we thought was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica and I spent a relatively quiet night at home, playing games and watching movies before taking a lovely hike along the coast near Santa Cruz to usher in 2021. That night, that day…they were pleasant, but a bit sad. You see, for the […]
NYC5: New York Goes Over the Top (Arts and Holidays)
New York is big. Shocking information, I know. This means there’s a lot of pretty much everything. One of the things that there’s clearly a lot of is museums, particularly art museums. We passed up visiting several dozen that we either wanted to go to or simply walked by on the street. On one of our architecture walking tours, I […]
NYC4: Underground, Out Loud, and on the Table
And…we’re back with more of my favorite bits of New York life. One of those is without a doubt the subway. I’ve always loved the New York subway–and public transit in general–since I’ve been a kid. For much of high school and college I wore a necklace with a NY subway token on it, and my college thesis was about […]
NYC3: From the Past into the Future
Everyday as we walked around New York we saw signs of construction. At one point we even debated the ratio of blocks that had scaffolding (to protect pedestrians from construction) to those that didn’t. At least on the major north-south avenues, I think we decided it was something like 1-to-1. Slightly less on residential streets, but the crosstown streets in […]
NYC2: It’s Been a Long Time Coming
So, if you didn’t notice, I failed to write anything for the past month or so. Jess and I continued to absolutely love our time in New York, but all of my “work” time (i.e. when Jessica was working and I was at home getting stuff done and not just enjoying life) ended up being dedicated to studying math. I […]
NYC1: First Impressions, Friends, and Family
Jessica and I have been in New York for almost three weeks now and are absolutely loving it. It feels completely different from our last three months of travel, but also has some bits of similarity. Let me see if I can explain… To start off, I have a very different relationship with New York than anywhere else we’ve been […]
It’s All Fun and Games (and some work)…in Germany’s Rhineland
The last couple of weeks of our zipping around Europe were definitely our least touristy, but also incredibly pleasant for completely different reasons. By a series of lucky accidents, we had two sets of close friends, two important work contacts for Jess, and one huge game convention for Gabe all within a couple hours train ride of each other in […]