Shipping Up To Boston...

I'm sailor peg
And I've lost my leg
A climbing up the topsails
I've lost my leg
I'm shipping up to Boston
Shipping off to Boston
Shipping out to Boston
To find my wooden leg

Hopefully I won't ever have a wooden leg but I am heading to Boston in half an hour for a company event. I'm back tomorrow evening. It's still really weird to me to be away from home and away from Alison, even if it is only for a single night. I'm sappy that way I guess. I mean, there are worse places to go and the reason I'm heading there is to oversee a company dinner at a very nice restaurant with a good group of people. Free food, free booze, and a nice hotel to crash at. Years ago this would have really appealed to me. I'm mellowing in my old age, as to be honest, I'd rather be at home watching TV with my girl.

In other complete unrelated news, we're heading to St. Louis in late Oct. to pitch in on a movie that I invested in. I'm apparantly going to have a brief cameo role and am also supposedly going to be a murder victim in the film! haha.

My mom's coming out to visit second weekend in October - that'll be fun. It's only for a couple of nights but I've already booked some fun activities to keep us all busy while she's here. It'll be good to see her again.

Other than that, just keeping on keeping on. This weekend some of us local yocals are planning to hit up a tiki bar in Brooklyn called the Zombie Hut. I'll bring my camera.

A lot has changed in the last 7 years...

I was on another NYC boat cruise last night, unaware really of the date, and once we got to the south end of the island we saw this...

If that skyline doesn't look familiar, blame my lame camera phone, but those lights are shining out of where the World Trade Center towers used to be. They literally pierced the clouds, it was amazing. It just kinda hammered home how much has changed for so many people since September 11, 2001.

A few random pictures from my hike in Boulder, Co. last week. I was there for work but we had enough time that some of us were able to manage a 7 mile hike to a height of 8800ft above sea level. It was weird, the altitude winds you pretty quickly, but once we got to the top it was well worth it. Plenty of drinking water and some energy/protein snacks helped keep us all moving. In all there were about twelve us in the group. The other sixty or so people went on the beginner or intermediate hikes, and probably felt much better after wards. Then again, we got this view and they didn't...


One of the coolest things about getting to the top of the peak was the random stuff that we were able to see. This lone squirrel was just going to town at the top of the tree that you can see in the first picture. I was able to zoom in on him a bit. What a cute little squirrel. Hooray!

As you come down the hill, you get a nice view of the mighty city of Boulder. I believe that was were Mork and Mindy was filmed, but don't hold that against it. It's a nice place, even if it is ripe with dirty hippies. Seriously. I saw guys dancing to the Grateful Dead while playing frisbee in the park and just about wanted to puke. Or at least steal their frisbee. That said, if you don't mind exlporing the city a bit you can find a couple of good record stores and score Jerry Reed LPs for your girlfriend at a fair price. If that's your thing.

Another thing to be aware of is that Boulder is definitely bear country! They make no qualms about letting you know this when you come into the park and warn you not to approach the bears. We didn't see any (I was hoping to see a mountain lion or a bear or something but we had to settle for squirrels, deer, and a frighteningly buff sixty year old dude who was doing push ups by himself at the top of the mountain) but the stickers on the garbage can prove that, yes, I was in bear country. Go me.

Here's a peek at the peak. It was a good hike and man did I feel it the next day but it was definitely worth it. Why bother going all the way to a hippy town like Boulder if you're not at least going to get outside for a bit and see what makes it interesting in the first place? Sure there's a shopping strip and a lot of neat bars to hit but you can get that and more in NYC (and believe it or not, you'll spend a lot less doing it). You don't get big ass mountains in NYC though. We had them in Portland, and that was pretty rad, but work didn't fly me to Portland (yet - it's on the books for August of 2009 so Portlanders mark your calender now as Alison and I want to plan a vacation around it).

On the way up and the way down you see some neat rocks and outcrops, formed by the movement of glaciers thousands of years ago. At least that's what the guide said. The guide was cool. He was in his sixties and his calves were like the size of my chest. He was in super rad shape and kept telling us about how when he was in college everyone would smoke weed on the front lawn of the campus.

So yeah, here's me. On a mountain. Looking rugged and in dire need of a haircut and sporting a couple of nice pimples. Since I got home, the pimples went away but I still have to get that haircut, lest I wind up smoking weed on the front lawn of a campus and developing freakishly large leg muscles.

Casa Bonita!

So since Friday I've been in Colorado for work. I flew into Denver and checked in at the hotel (after a SEVEN HOUR DELAY coming out of LGA because a bird hit and dented the plane I was supposed to get on causing a bunch of last minute repairs). My good friend Matt, who lives in the area, came to pick me up and we went to Casa Bonita (made famous by South Park!) for bad Mexican food and rad photo ops.

Here's the proof.... three floors of caves, mariachi bands, arcade games, and all around tackiness.

Weekend Update!

So last week I went to Chicago for a few days for work. Most of the time I've spent so far in Chicago has been around the airport, this time I was actually based downtown for three days. I didn't have a ton of time to explore but I did hit up a couple of record stores (I bought some awesome soundtracks at Dusty Groove) and wander around a little bit. The architecture there is interesting and we ate at some fantastic restaurants. Tomorrow I leave for Boston for a day, then Friday I head to Colorado for a week after which I won't have much travel for a while. Here's a couple of goofy pictures of me in action at a company dinner, both before and during.





In other picture related news, I've been into photographing random old theaters and stuff around the city. NYC has such a great history in that area and it changes so quickly that it's entirely possible that an old theater that's there one week could be torn down the next. The closet one to Alison and I's apartment is The Eagle. This is an old art deco style theater that was a porno movie house for a long time. A couple of years ago it was bought and changed into a Bollywood theater catering to the large Indian population that live ten or so blocks from our pad. As you can see, it's not in the best of shape and has a nice seedy vibe to it. Plenty of 'grindhouse' appeal going on in a city that was once famous for that and which is now fairly sanitized in that regard.





On a semi-related note, I dug the way that this shot turned out. This is the entrance to a smut shop in Manhattan, down in the village. The lights play off of the entrance way nicely and gives it a strange sort of happy, colorful look to it. A neat combination of chrome, colored lighting, and urban scum. Or maybe I read too much into it.



Alison and I went and saw Pineapple Express this afternoon and we both had quite a bit of fun with it. It's a little long (a common problem with Apatow's theatrical productions) but it's funny enough that you can overlook that easily enough and Seth Rogan just makes me laugh. His chemistry with James Franco carries the film but a few stand out moments (including an awesome 'death by Daewoo' scene!) help it rise above the average Hollywood comedy. It's a film I think I'd like to see again at some point.

Hooray For Lady Liberty!

So last night I went on a boat cruise around Manhattan. I didn't bring my camera, just had my cell phone, but this one didn't turn out too bad considering...

Weird Pictures From Sylvan Cemetery In Staten Island

So yesterday Alison and I went to Princeton Record Exchange in NJ (a pretty bad ass store) and one the way home stopped in Staten Island. There's this weird abandoned cemetery there called Sylvan Cemetery. From what I can find online, it started as a private/family burying ground and then became a public cemetery for a while. It seems to be made up primarily of the graves of two families, The Deckers and The Cannons. And one point it supposedly transferred over to a local church who, without funding, couldn't afford the upkeep and it's since fallen into abandonement and disrepair and not much has been done to it since the 1920s. Currently there is a new sign up (it wasn't there the first time we drove by it a couple of months ago) and someone has cut back some of the brush and grass around most of the graves in addition to putting down some cedar chips to create a possible parking lot? It's hard to tell. Someone's been trying to clean it up a bit at least.

Regardless, it's a very strange area and there's a simultaneously sad and eerie vibe to the whole place.

If you don't mind scrolling down about half way through the page, you can read an interesting (albeit fairly incomplete and seven years out of date) history of the cemetery and how it came to be abandoned here. There's also some interesting information about the cemetery and the surrounding area on the Forgotten NY page. Here's another article on how volunteers have started work on cleaning up the cemetery. That last article was written less than a month ago which would explain why, the last time we drove past the area, there wasn't any work done to it and why the work that has been done to it since looks so fresh. They've still got a ways to go before restoring the land to any sort of proper burial ground. I'm kind of glad I got some pictures before it is all cleaned up though. It's much stranger in its current state than it would be all spiffed up.

A few pictures...









Some of the pictures are a little washed out. It's dark in there even during the day time and I had to use a flash when I didn't really want to. A lot of the graves are really old an in terrible shape. Some of them are also very small (if you look you can see how some of them aren't much bigger than the leaves around them) and you can trip over them if you're not careful. Years of partying has resulted in some odd litter, mostly beer cans and stuff, as well as a fair amount of vandalism.









The last four... wierd how stuff like this just gets forgotten about and falls into disrepair, especially when you consider that, although SI is the most remote of the five burroughs, this is still technically part of NYC proper.