Scribbles and Photos

Reflections of Me Renaming my blog turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than I had expected.  Not quite the dramatic story arc of the first season of Dexter (which I am mid-way through on this extended stay-cation) but an adventure none the less. As an aside :  All photos in this post are of the Mirror Mirror Window -- one of Bergdorf Goodman's 2012 holiday windows (see The #BGWindows Follies for more photos from the #BGWindows). Why rename it you might ask?  It's complicated. Answer 1 I was bored.  Bored as in my living room has been arranged this way for too long and it's time for a change kind o' bored Answer 2 The title was misleading.   Anyone stumbling on my blog might think it's a blog about traveling by its former title ( The World Awaits Me ) and it isn't.  While, sometimes it is but mainly it isn't.  For the record, travel posts are the most popular on the blog.  A sign that it is time to hit the road again. ...

Central Park on a Very Snowy Day This morning, nature gave Connecticut a light dusting of snow.  Nothing even remotely close to the snows of Christmas' past but it will have to do.  Now, if I only had my boots!  Merry Christmas everyone! Snow Tracks

Through the Trees Today, there was a massacre of children.  It is completely and totally heartbreaking.  It is also completely and totally senseless. 28 people are dead.  20 of them are children.  It is the second worst mass shooting in the United States.  The worst was at Virginia Tech in 2007.  32 people died that day.  The carnage today exceeds that of the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School (13).  Worse yet, there have been 181 school shootings in the United States since Columbine. Those were senseless events and this is a senseless event, Once again, we are asking ourselves why.  We are holding vigils.  We are transfixed by the images of parents hugging their children.  They are the lucky ones.  Their children survived the carnage.    Once again, we are hearing stories of the teachers who hid kids in closets.  The responders who asked children to hold hands and close their eyes so that they woul...

#BGWindows Upside Down Girl Band (Partying All Night) OK, I admit it.  I am obsessed with the Bergdorf Goodman windows.   Bergdorf, with Saks and Lord & Taylor's (L&T) is the last of the grand dame department stores that used to line 5th Avenue.  Yes, Bonwit Teller still exists (just down the street from Bergdorf' as a matter of fact) but it is a pale shadow of what it once was -- a mish mash of items priced to sell to the hoardes of tourists that populate mid-town.  Bergdorf's (as my mother would say). on the other hand, remains the kind of store that is an destination in and of itself -- so big that it takes up not one but two street corners at 58th & 5th.  Now that's a store! But I digress.  The 2012 Bergdorf holiday windows have been revealed!  And, oh what a wonder they are to behold.  Did I say I was obsessed?   #BGWindows Featherful Under Construction A small confession, I am not ...

Fallen Trees I always loved that moment in Star Trek: Next Generation when Jean Luc Picard (sexiest star ship captain ever) would say:  "make it so."  Because, inevitably, it would be so. A while back, I penned a post, Pillbox Fill: An Idea for the 2013 FIRST Robotics Competition , that focused on creating a robotics competition that would raise intergenerational awareness.  For those of you who don't follow Robotics, the First Robotics competition is for high school aged kids.  Every year, teams from all over the world wait anxiously to learn what the next year's challenge will be.  They get their boxes filled with parts and then they build robots and then they compete in a raucous, controlled chaos fashion. The central tenant of the post was that FIRST , which had been founded by Dean Kamen, should build a robotics competition wrapped in a social frame.  Specifically. I wanted a competition centered around older adults and activities of daily li...

Fallen Ginkgoes I have this knack for being out of town when major weather hits and Super Storm Sandy was no exception.  As she barreled down on New York  City,  I was already safely out in southern California for a meeting.  And, there I stayed through Sunday, November 4th.  I returned to two New Yorks -- the upper West side where my apartment was unscathed and the South Street Seaport area where the building housing our offices is down and out for the count. Uptown, Central Park saw some damage from the storm but they were well on their way to cleaning it up in preparation for running the 2012 NYC Marathon.  Although the official marathon was canceled, people showed up dressed to run it and with personal support crews in tow.  And run it they did even as the City began to break down the finish line. Downtown, we'd been grappling with office displacement since the storm of the century ended and we were already up and running with web mai...