As much as I love photos and pictures and such, there aren’t that many that make me wonder what the story is behind them. This is one.
(via)
1000 words?
Page One: The Hobbit
I saw someone do this on Tumblr a couple weeks ago, and I fell in love with the idea, so I’m starting a whole new series of blog posts, which I will intend to do weekly but which, as with all such things, I will actually do whenever I think to do one. The idea is a simple one: the first page of books that mean a great deal to me.
For my purposes, I will generally define “page one” as the first page of the actual story, whether that be a prologue or the first chapter. Anyway, here is Page One of The Annotated Hobbit, featuring the complete text by JRRT with annotations by Douglas A. Anderson. This book is full of fascinating details about the writing and publication history of The Hobbit, and of course, the ever-wonderful story of The Hobbit, which I continue to believe is absolutely essential to any proper reading of The Lord of the Rings.
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Brief notes from the vacation
So, here I am, writing on the last day of my vacation. Although, that raises an interesting question — is this actually the official last day of my vacation, since I’d be off on Sunday anyway? Did “vacation” actually end around 4:00 pm on Friday afternoon, which is roughly when my work week usually ends? Hmmmmm. (I once worked with a guy who actually tried arguing with management that since vacation weeks included days he normally didn’t work — that particular company required vacation time to be used one entire week at a time — that he was somehow getting screwed out of paid time. I found his argument unconvincing, as did management.)
Anyhow, some random notes are below the fold.
There really is something to be said for staying in a place where you walk out on the deck and see this view:
There’s also something to be said for watching your kid step into the ocean for the first time in her life:
I tried waving to Portugal, but I don’t think they saw me. Too far away and stuff.
A trip to any seaside vacation destination isn’t complete without things like minigolf at places that look like this:
Nor is it complete without eating food like this….
…at places that look like this:
Seriously, I refuse to take seriously any seafood restaurant that doesn’t decorate with things like big metal lobsters:
(Well, I give the Legal Seafoods people in Boston a pass because they’re classy and their food is of such high quality that I mostly forgive the lack of nautical bric-a-brac. Everybody else though? I don’t care how good your food is. Make me feel like I’m walking onto a set from Jaws or Moby Dick or Pirates of the Caribbean.)
Lighthouses are awesome. Lighthouses in the mist are particularly awesome.
Schlepping around pedestrian malls filled with stores selling stuff at tourist-trap prices is still kind of fun.
Didn’t buy much — saltwater taffy, a dress for The Wife, a stuffed doll for The Daughter, and that’s about it. It’s fun to drop into little shops in a town that has long-since figured out how to get nice, walkable retail onto its waterfront.
Other things that are fun include kites on the beach…
…watching kite-surfers…
…and standing in the sand as the waters rush in around them.
Let’s see, what else? I tried scrapple. This is a food item, served mostly as a side at breakfast, that is basically pork sausage mixed into cornmeal mush, formed into a loaf, sliced, and pan-fried. I liked it. The Wife did not. The Daughter did, until I told her what it was. It’s always fun to travel to different areas and sample their local dishes, the ones that for one reason or another are almost never seen on menus outside a fifty-mile radius.
I don’t know if it’s just a Jersey Shore thing, or all of New Jersey in general, but Ye Gods, the road signs in Jersey suck. They are terrible at marking things — especially so in a tourist area, where you have to assume a large percentage of the people on the roads don’t even live there. Come on, Jersey, make it easier to figure out where you’re going.
Although I did like this one:
Dirty jokes write themselves!
The drives down and back were largely uneventful, although the drive back was on one of the hottest days that I can remember. We didn’t stop anywhere, outside of a few bathroom and/or food stops.
And now, real life resumes. Yay rah.
(The photos in this post are taken from this Flickr photoset. You can see more of ’em there!)
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Sigh….
“Well, I’m back,” he said.
Kind of odd that the first photo from our trip that I upload is actually the last one taken, but I’m not always prone to doing things in correct order! Anyway, we’re back in WNY, and that’s the sunset from last night when we were on Route 219 near Springville, with only about 25 miles left to drive.
More details to come, but the trip’s over. Normal life resumes…soon. (Trip may be over, but vacation isn’t!)
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Wondering where I'm going?
This place. And I can NOT wait to be there. It’s been fourteen-plus years since I walked in salt water.
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Bucky T. Katt?
Overalls weather!
Usually, from June to mid-September at the earliest, I might get to wear overalls a handful of times, because it’s just too warm for them. Not that overalls are especially hot, per se, but the bib and the back part do tend to rest where…well, where I tend to produce the most sweat. I’m better at dealing with heat now than I used to be, but I’m still not up to wearing overalls in summer.
I’m not sure how the rest of this summer is going to play out, but so far in June, we seem to have a pattern going where it will get seasonably warm (or even a bit warmer) for a few days, say five or six days, and then we’ll get two or three days of unseasonably cool days that lots of folks whine about but which I find highly pleasant and refreshing. This weekend is one of the cool weekends — highs in the low 60s, which is not usual for June in these parts! So I get to wear overalls this weekend, huzzah!
Will this pattern hold? I doubt it, but I’d love it if it did. I’d love to be able to wear overalls to the Erie County Fair, but it’s always too hot by Fair time. We’re knocking on the door of July, which is always my least favorite month (mainly because of the heat), so we’ll see.
By the way, that plant in front of me is one of two ivy plants that we have. That one is actually grown from a cutting I made off the original plant, which you can’t see because it’s behind me (except for one tendril sticking out from, well, behind my arse). Usually our ivies shed most of their leaves over the winter, even though we bring them inside, but that didn’t happen this year, so both of them are doing abnormally well for being this point in the summer. Also note the hummingbird feeder — we have three, The Wife loves hummingbirds — and the hummingbird light next to the feeder. It’s solar powered, so it charges through the day and lights up at night.
I like our balcony, and I wish it got enough sun that we could have a real producing tomato plant. That line of trees there, on the right side of the photo, keeps going well past where the camera is, giving us nice shade but also enough shade that tomato plants will grow but not produce fruit. Oh well.
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Wavy
The Central Terminal
Here is Buffalo’s Central Terminal, a gorgeous old monolith of a building that stands, unused and (somewhat) neglected, on Buffalo’s East Side. The trains don’t run there anymore, and the building fell into much disrepair over the decades it stood there; but in recent years, it’s been the focus of a volunteer restoration effort that has done a lot of great work there.
When there was a brief push for high speed rail as part of the stimulus package a few years ago, folks wondered if maybe the Central Terminal could serve as Buffalo’s HSR terminal, but apparently this is not possible. Oh well.
Long live the Central Terminal!
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Two Headlines
I still have my copy of the Buffalo News from September 12, 2001. Now I have another to keep with it.
No, I’m not delusional enough to believe that Osama bin Laden’s death “ends” anything. It may mark a turning point in some ways against a particular enemy, but history is long, isn’t it? Yesterday’s events sprang from that awful day almost ten years ago, but bin Laden was out there before that; he was created, in a sense, by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War.
And the first Gulf War came about, in part, because of American support of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s…and that came about because of British Imperialism…and that came about because…well, it all goes on. In a way, yesterday’s events can be traced back to Suleiman’s victory at the Horns of Hattin, and before that.
But at least Osama bin Laden exists now only in history. No, he won’t be forgotten. But he’s another name for the history books now.