It happens with regularity most nights: Lenny will come into the bedroom before I fall asleep and settle in on my legs. Inevitably, I'll have to shift, which wakes him up and he takes that opportunity to resettle himself on my neck and shoulder, leaning up against my head. With Casey away on this particular night, I took the opportunity for a self portrait.
I drove down to my parents' house for the annual cookie bake with my mom's college friends. They've been doing it for more than 30 years, I believe, since they were seniors. It rotates among the houses -- two in New Jersey, one in D.C., one in Connecticut, though the other NJ couple now lives in Boston. When all the kids -- there are five of us from the group -- were living at home in our younger days, we loved this weekend together. Lots of cookies and extra presents.
This is one of the few photos I've taken of myself this year. We first tried the face-recognition timer, but I didn't think to re-read the manual on that feature, so we didn't get it to work right. Alas.
Time for a new license. Four years later, I've got a little less hair, a new shirt and went to a DMV that has you stand a little further from the camera.
I was about to reach for my sunglasses at a stoplight when I noticed my reflection in them. So first, I took this photo. Then I donned the shades to reduce the glare.
I was tired and lazy this Saturday and didn't try very hard. This is the one and only time I pressed the shutter, and I just let it be.
Though I'd packed it for the trip, I stupidly forgot to bring my mini tripod for our day at Acadia National Park. When we reached the top of Gorham Mountain, there weren't any other hikers to take our picture. So I found a knee-high rock, set the facial-recognition timer and stood next to Casey. Voila!
No vanity here. Went with the bedhead because it better shows the fluffiness. The shave was DIY; the haircut, professional.
Our New Year's Day tradition: Get drunk the night before, wake up and recover on the couch with TV and take out the rest of the day. Not much more to it than that.
We kept Cassie up late, too, so that she was pretty much on our schedule today as well.
"On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk -- times neither day nor night -- the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself."
-- William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
(I could basically chronicle our trip to Chicago last weekend in each of my three blogs -- my baseball blog, because we went to a Mets-Cubs game at Wrigley; my general blog, because that's where I tend to record everyday stuff; and this one, because my original plan with this was to post photos with some frequency and tell the stories behind them and whatnot. As I was browsing through them in my Flickr account, I decided to explain this one, then came up with the idea to post the photo and account here. Seems like a good idea to do with other pics from the trip, so we'll see how well I stick to that plan.)
[Photo by the wife.]
So we wake up slowly on Saturday morning after sleeping in and miss the free "breakfast" (Lender's bagels, yogurt and boxed cereal) offered by the Hampton Inn Downtown. "No problem," we say. "We'll just go straight to Lou Malnati's for deep dish on an empty stomach." (Which was a perfect plan, by the way.)
It's a warm day -- not terribly humid, like Sunday would be -- and when we sit down, we're given small glasses of water, as one usually is upon being seated at a restaurant. The waitress takes our order, and while Casey has an iced tea, I say I'm fine with the water for now. Yet when she returns with Casey's tea -- in a huge glass like this one -- she also brings me this water.
Casey and I just stare at each other, bewildered. My plan (and I stuck to it, too) was to order a beer upon the arrival of our pizza. Throughout the course of our lunch, I drank the beer and thwarted the bus boys' attempts to refill my tiny water glass, pointing each time (I think three different bus boys came by) to the bucket of water I had that hadn't been touched.
By the end of the pizza, I'd emptied my pint as well as the small water glass. Just before leaving, I wanted one last sip. It was a prolonged sip, and here it is.
