kate_nepveu | Entries tagged with trips

Just back from a Wednesday-Saturday trip with the kids to NYC.

On Wednesday, SteelyKid and I went to the big Macy's with the goal of touring every floor. However, we spent a while actually shopping for fancy-ish clothes, so when we hit the eighth floor and discovered that it was not, as we'd thought, the last, we decided that we'd come close enough and we could live without seeing luggage and furniture.

Thursday, we went to a Yankees game for the second August in a row; I never posted about the last one, which was just a day trip, but having grown up outside of Boston, it physically pains me to be in Yankee Stadium even though I was never particularly a baseball fan. Nevertheless, Chad's side of the family are all Yankees fans who've passed it on to the Pip (who is playing baseball moderately seriously these days), and I will put up with it for their sake. Anyway, though the Yankees lost (and we got rained on), it was an exciting game and the kids were into it. I note that it's weird how much the new pitch clock affects watching in person; I'd get distracted by a kid behind me or something and suddenly three pitches had gone by without my noticing. (It was an afternoon game and T-shirt day, so there were many, many children there.)

Yesterday we went to the Met during the day; please see Tumblr for a long report with embedded pictures on Van Gogh, contemporary art, and random things.

That night we saw The Play that Goes Wrong off-Broadway, which is an incredibly silly new-ish play in which "the Cornley University Drama Society" attempts to perform "The Murder at Haversham Manor."

More information, no spoilers

The program contains such gems as a letter from "Chris Bean" (the Society's president, the director of the play, and the actor playing the detective role) that starts,

We are thrilled that the Cornley University Drama Society is now performing at New World Stages. We can only apologise to those involved in the would-be Off-Broadway production of Equus, which due to a clerical error, is now being performed in the Cornley University Gymnasium. We hope there are no hard feelings and we've left the vaulting horse out for you.

and a cast listing for "Max Bennett," playing Cecil Haversham, that reads:

Max is in his first year at Cornley University where he is studying human geography and crime. He is an avid fan of films, and his favourite is The Legend of Bagger Vance, which he's seen 27 times. This is Max's first production with the Drama Society, and he is very glad to have donated a large portion of his recent inheritance to help the show.

Over the course of the show, as the audience reacts positively to "Max's" performance, he mugs more and more shamelessly, clearly just delighted to be on stage. It's kind of adorable, honestly.

("Chris" gives a little speech at the start of the show saying that in the past, budget difficulties have led them to put on shows like "James and the Peach," which had to be changed to "James … Where Is Your Peach?" when the peach went bad.)

Before the show officially begins, "Annie the stage manager" and "Trevor the lighting & sound operator" are asking audience members if they've seen a dog who is supposed to be in the play and asking (presumably planted) audience members to help them repair the set. (One of my favorite bits is that "Trevor" replaces three missing floor boards … and eventually a completely different one does the stepped-on rake thing and smacks someone in the face.) The kids were entirely on board right from this.

Things go wrong for the "actors" and "crew" basically immediately, as the title promises, in very slapstick-y ways that build and repeat, and then change instead of repeating just at the right time, but always escalate. It is absolutely not intellectual or sophisticated, but it sticks to its premise [*] and is a well-oiled machine. We happily put aside cynicism and laughed ourselves silly.

[*] I genuinely felt bad for the "actors" while also appreciating the acting! There's one moment where "Chris Bean" is desperately and repeatedly calling for a prop. Someone in the audience eventually yelled where it is, and he breaks character as the detective and says (paraphrased), "You're not supposed to talk to me, I'm on stage! Stop laughing, everything is going terribly!" I did try to stop laughing, he was so upset! Of course, he then went on to say, "Be like this man in the front row, he hasn't laughed once in 45 minutes," so, you know.

Anyway, other than one mildly homophobic joke, I've no complaints, and again, the kids loved it, which was the goal, after all.

Today we did a quick pass through the American Museum of Natural History, and then we came home! And now I need to go to bed, but if I didn't write this tonight I knew I wouldn't at all.

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In what remains a somewhat unbelievable turn of events, Chad was recruited to sing for his supper (give lectures) on a cruise line, guest included—that would be me, thanks to his parents, who were so amazingly generous as to come stay with the kids. So I am sitting in BWI after an 11-day cruise to the "Leeward Islands" of the Caribbean, attempting to do a very fast summary, because I'm diving right back into everything when we get home and if I don't do it now, I never will.

Cut for length

We were on the Seabourn Sojourn, which has a capacity of 458 passengers (we were told there were 400 on board); all the cruises we've done before have been on much bigger ships. It was definitely very nice to have basically no lines for anything. And the food and service was extremely good, as would be expected for an "ultra-luxury" line! (The Disney cruise, however, matched it in service.) They'd laid off 90% of their hotel staff in 2020 and only started running cruises again in June of this year, so there were some very small ways in which I saw the rust, but only because of what I was expecting, you know? The size meant that we did feel the motion of the ship more, especially a few days when there were significant swells in the Atlantic, but fortunately I did not get motion-sick, which was a surprise because I did on our last cruise (to Bermuda out of NYC, which I don't think I ever wrote up here). We had the option to sit with other people in the main restaurant and did that twice, once to better results than the other, and also Chad, as one of the "guest conversationalists," hosted dinner four nights, so we got to meet a bunch of nice people that way.

We had two days at sea on the way down and two days on the way back. Between those and long afternoons (dinner did not start until 7), I read so much—I hope to do a fast post about that too. That alone was worth it to me, I'll be honest.

Anyway, our ports of call. I have a few pictures from these and will try to upload them to Tumblr and link back when I'm home, since that can be done more piecemeal.

San Juan: headed for the older fort, Castillo San Felipe del Morro. Along the way visited the Catedral Basílica Metropolitana de San Juan Bautista, which had a bunch of lovely art and the most amazingly bored-looking Saint Sebastian; a pigeon feeding park; and a park with a street cat refuge (Parque de Los Gatos!) and cool trees. The fort was neat, great views and I enjoyed the layers of history. We had lunch nearby at El Patio De Sam: amazing fried balls of homemade cheese on the appetizer menu. Then to a book museum we'd seen on the way up, La Casa del Libro Museum, where a slightly nervous and very enthusiastic staff member explained that their rare books and manuscripts were in a vault because they just finished an exhibition; but they were showing works of an artist, Imna Arroyo Cora, which were interesting. Then we were taking the long way back to the ship and saw Castillo San Cristobal right there, so we went up: it was not as interesting, and I don't think that was only because we did other one first. It was very hot and a lot of walking, but satisfying, especially after two days at sea.

Our next stop was supposed to be Saint Barthélemy, but the seas were such that we couldn't safely tender in, so we went to Phillipsburg in Saint-Martin instead. I'm afraid that is filled with lowest-common-denominator tourist shops, so we walked around for a little bit to establish that yes, it was all shops, and then had a somewhat incongruous lunch at a place with a windmill on top (Dutch Blonde Beach Bar & Restaurant, this being the Dutch side of the island) because Chad wanted local beer, and where I discovered that little puffy pancakes called poffertjes were good. (We'd heard that people could get really hung up in traffic coming back from the French side of the island, and I'm really prone to carsickness so prefer not to be driven in tourist destinations, so we did not try to go elsewhere.)

Then to Terre-de-Haut Island, Guadelope, which was very enjoyable: we walked up to Fort Napoléon des Saintes, which made us feel very virtuous because it was, of course, hot, and the road was pretty steep in places, but we got to enjoy the scenery along the way and work off some of the meals we'd been having. The fort has an amazing succulent garden, extremely beautiful and well-designed and maintained, and a museum that's all in French; as I had no data, I couldn't Google Lens translate any of it, but I was able to appreciate enough from context. Then we walked down and found a restaurant on a different beach than we'd tendered into called La Paillote, where we had perfectly good fish-based food.

In Antigua we did a "reef snorkel and beach trip" excursion; the snorkeling was just fine, the beach was nice, and we were only delayed a little when the catamaran needed to go pick up a mechanic and repair one of its engines.

Much better snorkeling out of St. Kitts; Chad had a GoPro to take pictures and I'm getting something for that purpose next time we snorkel, because it's so frustrating to try and describe things after the fact! Saw some giant parrotfish, a trumpetfish, a white boxfish with black spots, and several schools of fish. Then we spent the afternoon on "Carambola Beach," which is a private facility that the cruise had rented out, so did not set foot in a town at all.

...nor the last day, really, which was at Jos Van Dyke in British Virgin Islands: we tendered into one beach with bars and restaurants, and the cruise ran a shuttle to another beach with bars and restaurants. We did not realize that we would not be setting foot in someplace with shopping on the final two days, and therefore had not done the really exhaustive souvenir shopping that we should have. Oops. (The kids have presents, but we hadn't seen anything as a thank-you for Chad's folks.) Anyway, I slept until 11 that day because we'd had very heavy swells overnight and, it turns out, I can't sleep on even a small and slow roller-coaster; I went over and met Chad in time to watch the second half of the World Cup final at a restaurant called Foxy's. Back on the ship I was near some people who were watching the penalty kicks by video-calling their daughter in England so they could see her TV! (They were very happy when France lost.)

And that's all, barring the books! Chad will undoubtedly also write it up and I'll link that here too, along with pictures when I can.

Poll #28055

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The last week in August, Chad's folks took the kids (and us) on a cruise out of NYC to Bermuda and back. This was so lovely and convenient: no planes! Drive down to the shipyard, park, walk onto the ship!

We were on the Norwegian Cruise Lines' Escape, which has a passenger capacity of over four thousand, nbd. Anyway, it's enormous, it has a ropes course at the stern that the kids loved (best experienced during the in-port days), and the restaurants we went to were all good; I think our main note about the ship itself was that it would have been a little nicer if there had been a designated quiet pool somewhere.

I personally kind of liked having two and a half days in one place, instead of stopping at a bunch of places; it was nice to get the chance to explore in a little more detail. We didn't take as much advantage of that as we might have, because we had booked three out-on-the-water excursions for each morning, but various combinations of our group made their way ashore: wandered the National Museum of Bermuda and saw their dolphins, looked around the West End, got some souvenirs. (I got a neat glass ring and pendant at Studio 8 Glass, where SteelyKid also got a pink-sand-and-charms locket.) Of course SteelyKid and I made it back onto the ship with a whole ten minutes to spare before the all-aboard time, which was mildly nervewracking, but we managed.

The water excursions were a bit of a mixed bag. We did Rising Son Cruises's catamaran tour the first day; they had a nice mix of equipment (snorkel, paddle board, kayak), and the spot they brought us to had some decent snorkeling and cool caves, but it was quite close to the dockyard and I found that very mildly deflating. Then we did a kayaking trip and that was a mistake, because it was hot and required physical exertion and the kids were super not into it. It probably would have been good otherwise, though. Finally, we did a glass-bottom boat and snorkel (I don't know the name of the company, unfortunately), which was perfect; we got a good informative look at stuff through the glass, and the snorkel spot had more variety and clearer water than the first trip.

(Note to self: you are a lousy swimmer, take the fins, they make snorkeling so much less work. Also if your mask is leaking around the nose it is probably too tight, not too loose.)

It was sort of amusing taking three tours in a row; we heard two very similar versions of the turtle egg transplant story and one wildly different (incorrect) one, and three generally similar variants of the sad tale of the HMS Vixen, though with more detail than I can confirm on a quick morning Google (in particular, did it arrive in Bermuda with convicts aboard that no-one told them to expect? and did the convicts doing the dockyard construction set it on fire?).

Finally, I am pleased to report that the medical staff onboard was very good, because the Pip developed an allergic reaction to something the evening we left Bermuda and was all over hives; we made one trip down to the medical center for a diagnosis and Benadryl, and then another the next day when the hives were worse, resulting in an IV drip of Benadryl and Prednisolone. His poor Pipliness has had an up-and-down time of the symptoms since, but yesterday morning the pediatrician recommended we change to another antihistamine and, knock on wood, that seems to have done it. (No, we have no solid idea what caused it; no, we're not planning to do any testing unless it comes back, because our best guesses are the ship's detergent or something at the beach that day; as always, no unsolicited advice, thank you.)

Edit: I forgot I had a couple of videos of the dolphins: the longer one is the dolphin on the left learning to come inside the sphere, as part of a study to map dolphins' visual blind spots (teach dolphins to come in, teach them to vocalize when they see a light mounted inside the sphere, figure out which areas of the sphere they can't see), and the shorter one is a dolphin swimming upside-down with a ball.

Chad also posted a giant album of photos just after I made this post.

Edit 2: another giant album of photos, this time featuring the sillyheads.

Poll #22596

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We visited my mom and her husband in Florida! It was a bit warmer than usual, mid-80s; their pool was about 70F, so the kids and Chad had a blast and I watched from the side, as usual. We took an airboat tour of the Everglades and saw little dolphins super-close; found shark teeth and shells and dogs on the beach; and generally had a nice unstressful vacation. (The air travel was not the greatest, but we didn't have to stay overnight in an airport hotel like we did coming back from our New Year's trip, so hey.)

A couple links:

jhameia said that this Atlantic article on college-admissions "rigging" angst was "an amazing, compassionate, and productive response to white people anxieties about missing out on what they think they're entitled to," and I agree.
At Hyperallergic, The Clandestine Cultural Knowledge of Ancient Graffiti.

Because G+ is shutting down, my community there is testing other social media platforms, and we've moved on to federated/distributed ones. I have a Hubzilla account on an experimental fannish instance, and also a Mastodon account that I haven't started using yet but will soon, probably. If you've got a compatible account, feel free to add me/let me know!

(I really like the idea of Hubzilla and I want someone to make a turnkey install so that I can host my own, a la WordPress, which seems vastly unlikely at the moment, alas.)

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We did our annual mid-December trip to visit my mom & her husband in Florida, and their Christmas gift to us was a trip to Tampa's zoo, including a behind the scenes tour. The Pip got a little antsy during the more logistical sections, because he is six, but I found it all very interesting. And in more kid-friendly happenings, we:

1) scritched a rhino (such hard skin!);

2) witnessed the rather amazing quantities of bodily waste that an elephant can produce (literally, the sound effect was "splat"; I will spare you the picture);

3) fed a giraffe, well, the kids did anyway: one big leaf of lettuce just sucked in whole;

4) watched elephants play with Christmas trees decorated with produce as an enrichment activity, including one who just picked up an entire tree and carried it around upside-down.

So that was pretty great.

Here's SteelyKid mugging for the camera and the Pip contemplating life while brushing a goat.

(Yes, I completely failed at everything DW again for . . . many weeks, idek. Hi! Sorry!)

1) We are renovating our house. We had no spare bedroom and our kitchen was falling to pieces, so we are a) gut-renovating the kitchen, b) expanding the mudroom off of the kitchen to include a bathroom with a shower and enough space between the sink and toilet that people over the age of five can comfortably sit on it, and c) expanding the little room above the mudroom into an actual bedroom, rather than a small low-ceilinged room good for nothing but random storage. The new bedroom will become SteelyKid's room (she and the Pip will have closets that back on to each other now; regretfully, I declined her request for a secret door between the closets), and SteelyKid's old room will become a guest room. (For instance, Chad's parents live two hours away, regularly come up for the day to visit . . . and then go back home again the same day.)

The end result will be great. The process has been . . . interesting. Getting the loan, for instance, involved regular and literal rage headaches on my part as speaker-to-the-mortgage-people. And while our contractors are awesome, the ridiculously wet weather we've been having delayed the start of construction until mid-May (they'd hoped to start in April), and then more rain while we were on vacation led them to advance some indoor work, so we came home to find our kitchen half-gutted and couldn't figure out where anything was. (It wasn't that much stuff, because we had been moving things out in preparation, but still. I wanted to cry.)

2) Oh yeah, vacation. We went to Mexico for a week with Chad's grandmother, who took her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids (except one grandkid + family, who couldn't make it) on a collective trip to a fancy all-inclusive resort. The kids had a great time with their Midwest cousins, who they'd never met, and spent a good 50% of their waking hours in a pool of some kind, and we enjoyed catching up with everyone. Check out the sillyheads with dolphins!

( 3) also I concussed myself and messed up my neck, but everything will be fine )

Edit: Chad has more detail about vacation in all its aspects.

4) Readercon! I will be there seven days from now. I have a schedule:

( cut for length )

I will also be taking Safety Committee shifts--this will be my last con on the committee, I've handed in my resignation solely on the ground that I've been doing it for a long time now and it's time for me to move on.

So, given the panel times above, and the possibility that I may have to bolt off if the phone rings, a poll:

Poll #18559

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 8

Are you going to be at Readercon?

Yes I am. . .
6 (75.0%)

. . . and we should try to get together!
4 (50.0%)

I might be, touch base with me later!
2 (25.0%)

(If you don't tick the second box, I will assume that you are entirely swamped and it would not be plausible, and I will hope to see you in passing.)

5) What with vacation, and the concussion, and making the non-demolished parts of the house fit for human habitation, and work, and Readercon prep, and staring balefully at my notes for the Books of the Raksura post I promised Tor.com pre-concussion . . . I have not read Twitter or DW in more than two weeks. I am sorry! I miss you all! It is just . . . a lot.

And now, we are taking the kids to an amusement park tomorrow, so I really need to go to bed.

and I can't tell if it's fatigue or adjusting to being on land. Or both.

Thanks to the extreme generosity of Chad's parents, we went with them on a Disney cruise this last week in the western Caribbean. I have been almost entirely offline as a result, and have opened half-a-dozen posts from the last page of my reading list to read and respond to, but am unlikely to go further back than that, sorry (see above).

Cruise was great; challenging solely because of the children's ridiculously narrow tastes in food, which the staff bent over backwards to accommodate, and a little because SteelyKid has a very low melting point. Also I did get a smidge motion sick but not that often. Rooms very comfortable, lots of stuff to do (even if you're not that into Disney characters), quite good food, generally a well-oiled machine. SteelyKid snorkeled for an hour and a half straight and swam with a dolphin, the Pip touched a sea turtle and went on a waterslide ten times in a row, and I smeared sunscreen on the kids at every opportunity and some that weren't and they didn't burn, go me.

Sadly I was on the same ship as Susan Egan, who voices Rose Quartz in Steven Universe, and did not lay eyes on her or, more to the point, hear her sing. (New episodes next week!)

. . . there was more, but I have no idea what right now. (Oh, wait, it was about the MCU, and therefore needs the next rock.)

(Edit: Chad has a more thorough review.)

Yesterday afternoon, Chad's parents picked the kids up (both kids; their first overnight with the Pip without us there).

Last night, I stayed late at work, had a lovely dinner out, fought Quicken into admitting that my account was too reconciled, cleaned off my desk of a week's worth of mail, took all the ornaments off the tree and put them away, and then slept so soundly that my back is stiff this morning (apparently my body is no longer used to sleeping the night through and, I don't know, doesn't automatically move or something any more?).

The only bad things about this are (a) look how adorable they are! and (b) I am worried about inflicting the Pip's variable sleeping ability on people not used to it . . .

But as changes of pace go, on the whole pretty nice. Now, pack and dress and off for a whirlwind vacation.

Just for the sake of completeness:

I have no luck with the iHome alarm/iPod docks that are becoming standard in hotels, and thus slept through my alarm Wednesday morning and got, again, a late start. But I spent a couple of hours at the American Museum of Natural History, taking a nice leisurely look at the evolution of vertebrates through dinosaurs and into mammals (dodging school groups all the while) and then at shiny gems. (I usually play a game, at art museums, of what I'd take home, assuming I had somewhere to properly display it and so forth. At the Met this time it probably would've been this triptych of Japanese landscape hanging scrolls: one, two, three. From AMNH I think it would've been some of the opals they just acquired.)

Then the train in the rain back to Albany, only slightly delayed, and home. SteelyKid was having a snack when I came in so I was able to get my suitcase up the stairs without her noticing, but then we had a lovely reunion and I got to marvel at how much more verbal she'd gotten in just a week.

It was a great vacation, just long enough to really feel like I did things and to be ready to come back home. I woke up Thursday happy and refreshed and full of resolve to keep better habits, which mood still lingers. What more could one ask for in a vacation?

Last night I saw the Roundabout Theater Company's revival of Tennessee Williams' play The Glass Menagerie. I highly recommend it.

I don't really understand why I like The Glass Menagerie, since ordinary people doing ordinary things and being unhappy while they do them is really not my usual kind of thing. But it was my favorite of the Williams plays I read in high school for a paper, and pieces of it have stuck with me. When I saw that it would be playing while I was in NYC and got a good review, I went to some trouble to get a ticket.

I think I'm going to put most of this behind a cut so that I can talk spoilers freely. Non-spoiler points: it's funny, it's sad, it's very well acted and staged. One of its characters has a physical disability; I didn't see the play's treatment of that as problematic, but I'm not a great judge. If you like the play and you're able, you should definitely see this production (except that it ends the 13th, so you'll have to hurry).

( spoilers )

Sunday, brunch at Bee Desserts (formerly/sometimes still Cafe La Palette), which had a shady back garden, very nice savory crepes, interesting honey cakes, and crepes Suzette that were not as good as they should have been.

Then to the World Science Festival, where Chad's book signing went well and where the street fair was really impressively extensive and energetic. In a few years SteelyKid will love it.

Then after a few hard-earned lessons on my part [*], we made to it New York Classical Theater's production of Richard III in Central Park. This is the free & roving Shakespeare I've mentioned before, and as always it was a lot of fun. I'd never read Richard III or seen it performed, but I was familiar with it from The Daughter of Time and The Dragon Waiting.

It really is quite a piece of propaganda—most blatant, I think, in the Duchess of York's laughably over-the-top dialogue—yet survives as art because it manages some plausibility all the same. When it sounds almost not ridiculous that Anne should kinda-sorta-half consent to marry Richard (the murderer of her husband), or that Queen Elizabeth should agree to try and convince her daughter to (later) marry Richard (the murderer of her brothers [**]), or that we should feel a bit of sympathy for Richard when it all comes unraveling, well, that's good writing.

[*] (1) When getting subway directions via Google Maps, be sure to put in the proper date, as some trains do not run on weekends. (2) Check ancient hazy memories about restaurant density against reality ahead of time. (3) Do not buy an unsalted pretzel from a vendor who is packing up for the night. Also, later: (4) Pretzels from street vendors aren't as good as you remembered even when they actually have salt and a consistency softer than rock.

[**] This production omitted young Richard for the sake of time, rather to my confusion.

Then we had better street cart food and overpriced Times Square diner food and went to bed.

Today I went to the Bronx Zoo, where it is baby season. Two words: lion cubs. There will be pictures, oh yes.

The weather was perfect, the many school groups (I wonder if there were more because it was a Monday and therefore other museums weren't an option?) mostly avoidable, and I had a lovely time meandering around and backtracking and imagining SteelyKid's reaction in a few years ("Oh! Kitty!") and playing Where's Waldo to my heart's content.

Then dinner with

oyceter at the Shake Shack, where the food was perfectly fine but nothing to inspire cult-like devotion in me, and now some more writing or maybe cross-stitching or reading. Because hey, vacation!

Frozen yogurt at Pinkberry, really excellent vegetarian food at Gobo, and overpriced tea and snacks somewhere I can't remember, in the company of many excellent people. I imagine the people around us may have been a bit traumatized by some of the topics of conversation, but oh well.

Night at Staybridge Suites in Times Square, which is very nice indeed; go, Priceline.

A wander on the Highline, which is pretty neat, and then a slow stroll back up to W 37th to the new hotel, enjoying just being somewhere so lively.

And now I think I'm going to shower (it's hot, even using my umbrella as a sunshade) while I wait for Chad to arrive.

Chad has real books! (On shelf Dec. 22; see dogphysics.com for more information.)
Rubin Museum of Art: excellent new (2004) museum focusing on the art of the Himalayas. Explanatory text that comes close to the Asian Art Museum's (in San Francisco) for clarity and informativeness. If you like that kind of art, go.
Bronx Zoo on an unseasonably warm November Saturday: thumbs-up. Even at 60F, some of the colder-weather animals were more active, and most of the warmer-weather animals we looked for were out. Very close looks at tigers (hello, gorgeous top predators!), a red panda (hello, animate stuffed animal!), etc. But even on a usual November weekend, I bet it would be worth going: the winter signs make a point of saying which exhibits are in heated buildings, and as long as it wasn't too cold to walk between them, with quick pauses to admire the cold-weather animals on the way, well, I think it would be pretty cool.

And now, the stack of mail, and unpacking, and brief-writing, and so on and so forth.

Finally, a bunch of birds.

( 14 pictures )

An extreme miscellany this time: tigers, lemurs, Amazonia exhibit, wolves, and a beaver.

( 15 pictures )

Orangutans and the reptile and amphibian house.

( 19 pictures )

Some big mammals, and a bunch from the small mammal house.

( 23 pictures )

I, uh, kinda went crazy with pictures at the National Zoo earlier in the month. I've whittled them down to 92, and you can see them all in this gallery, or behind this cut and those in subsequent posts.

Here we have giant pandas, Asian small-clawed otters, some big cats, and some other random other things. As usual, click through for big versions.

Note: indoor pictures were taken without flash, so are sometimes dark. Sorry.

( 20 pictures )

I've pulled out 32 pictures from our visit to the Freer and Sackler Galleries in DC, almost all Asian art, and posted them in this gallery or behind the cut, whichever method of browsing you prefer.

For almost all of these, I took pictures of the labels and so have more information; if you're curious, just ask.

( 32 pictures )

Zoo pictures next.

We spent Tuesday through Friday in D.C.; I was there for a workshop (which was great), and Chad came with to make it a bit of a vacation. He wrote up the cultural part of the trip over at his blog—visiting the Sackler & Freer Museums, wandering the mall, and going to the Zoo. He also has a picture of the imperturbable mandarin ducks, and will be posting a few more. (When I have time, I'll go through my museum pictures and the rest of the zoo pictures and put them up, but I took a lot, so it won't be for a while. That's really the revolutionary thing about digital cameras, I think, the number of pictures you can take conveniently.)

Anyway, great trip, even though my brain refused to get out of post-vacation mode yesterday when I could really have used it.

In other news, we've picked a contractor to turn our garage into a library/office, thereby allowing us to use the current spare bedroom as a nursery and Chad's current office as a new spare bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls! And I've been feeling fetal movement for the last couple weeks, which is reassuring though occasionally weird—I never expected anything that feels like a water cooler sounds when it's refilling: "blurp, blurp." We have daycare visits and a fetal echocardiogram scheduled for this week.

Some more discussion sparked by those culturally-appropriating fake memoirs: rachelmanija on Memoir, Fiction, and Truth, and rushthatspeaks on Memoir and Honesty.

And some more links behind the cut, mostly food and cute:

( links dump )

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Kate

Outside of a Dog

January 2025

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Style: Neutral Good for Practicality by timeasmymeasure

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incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

Entries tagged with trips

New York City, August 2023

Cruise blogging

NYC-Bermuda cruise

Florida trip; links; federated social media

scenes from a zoo trip

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

the room won't stop bobbing up and down

changes of pace

NYC, last day

The Glass Menagerie (Roundabout Theater, 2010)

Still NYC

NYC so far

three things from a 48-hour vacation

Zoo Pictures, 5 of 5: Birds

Zoo Pictures, 4 of 5: Miscellany

Zoo Pictures, 3 of 5: Orangutans, Reptiles, and Amphibians

Zoo Pictures, 2 of 5: Big and Small Mammals

Zoo Pictures, 1 of 5: Pandas, Otters, Big Cats, etc.

Pictures from the Freer and Sackler Galleries

Week-ish in Review

Profile

January 2025

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