Family life, funnily enough
You’ve just shunned the increasingly viable Airtrain-Subway combo from JFK Airport for a cab, despite the incredibly long cab line at the new AA terminal, and then this happens on the Long Island Expressway:
Five hours to get across the country and then two more to get from the tarmac at JFK to Manhattan. Oh well.
Died. And in a damn car crash of all things, considering what stymied his career in the early 60s. To anybody, who like my parents have been watching football and especially Fulham for decades, it’s a dark day.
Thankfully David Lacey’s still around to provide some perspective.
Most of these are in and around Sandhurst, where we stayed for a few days. In August album, usual passwords apply.
We’ve got a lot of puictures from our recent trip to the UK, so many in fact that I’m putting them up in batches as I don’t have the time to do them all at once.
You will also notice (should you choose to click on the photo album links on the right) that I’ve upgraded the software that runs the photo part of the site. Well, the good people behind the Gallery sopfteare did the upgrading, I just downloaded and installed it. But fear not, all the albums are still there and the same username & password that worked previously, still works.
The first lot include a lot of our trip to Legoland, near Windsor. Not sure who this bloke below is supposed to be, but he was typical of the characters we encountered that day:
So if you need a password etc, email us. Go to the August 2005 album for the latest kids pictures.
Last Sunday (Sept 11) I did the NYC Century Bike Tour 2005. Well, to be accurate, I did the 35 mile version anyway (15, 55, 75 and 100 mile versions were also options).
The ride took us down through Manhattan from the top of Central Park, over the Brooklyn Bridge, down to and around Prospect Park, up through Williamsburg, Greenpoint in Brooklyn then into Long Island City, Astoria, Randall’s Island and then back into Manhattan. Some crazies did the 100 mile version, which when contemplated after about 30 miles in that, to me was mindboggling. Next year, 55 for me, I think.
The whole thing looked like this when taped to a tree in Astoria Park, Queens. I did the Manhattan bit and then the green bit and back to Central Park.
I rode home from there, so it was about 40 miles in all, but that was me done for the rest of the day, I have to say. Still you get to see some parts of the city that you probably wouldn’t visit if you weren’t passing through on a bike, unless you were lost. There’s some more pictures of those sorts of places here.
Finding places for a kid to ride his bike in this town are obviously not that easy, unless you happen to live close to Central Park, which we do not. So the past few Sundays I’ve taken him down to the delightful-sounding Stuyvesant Cove, which is actually a demarcated swathe of concrete beside the East River and the FDR Drive just below 23rd St.
But that is honestly selling it a bit short. It is a valiant attempt to give people a place to sit, read, jog, cycle (that Manhattan Greenway path I traversed last year bisects it) or whatever takes their fancy.
There’s a large mural painted on the ground in front of a a little envirobmental center called Solar One and M has great fun steering his bike of choice around there, though recently he’s chosen his trike rather than his new bike.
We see the usual menagerie of New York there – one week we were greeted by and ambulance carting a guy away who had been sleeping in the undergrowth and didn’t appear to be moving any time soon.
And each Sunday around 5pm the first seaplanes arrive to deposit those more fortunate types, presumably avoiding the roads back into town from the Hamptons. We spot them, watch them take off again and then head for home.
Robert Moog’s sad death at just 71 brings back a memory of the first year of secondary school when the music teacher played a record – Walter Carlos’s ‘Switched-On Bach’ – which was one of the first records to make extensive use of Moogs when it was made in 1968 and which I had heard previously during assembly at primary school.
Our primary school always played a piece of classical (a.k.a. ‘serious’) music as the kids filed in and had a board up displaying the composer’s name and the name of the piece of music (which I recall Dad made from blue Perspex!). We were exposed to numerous pieces of music this way, but mostly strictly from the classiscal and neo-classicial eras (I know that now but obviosuly didn’t then). But one day they played Switched-on Bach and I recall being at least a tad intrigued. (Incidentally ‘Walter’ is now ‘Wendy Carlos‘ after a sex-change op, but that’s another story. ;))
So when in the muisc class at secondary school early in the first year the teacher asked us which instrument was being played on that record, I was alone in answering ‘synthesizer’. I recall the other kids laughing at the suggestion, but I knew what I was right – smug git that I was.
Amy & Dan were in town last week to see the Daily Show and other stuff and stopped by to see us. After his customary two minute warm-up, M put on a little show. Here he is singing along to Kaiser Chiefs which we recorded a few weeks ago and that he’s been watching at least a few times every week since, rehearsing for his big moment, to such an extent that he knows the gestures of the lead singer, as you can see here and especially here.
Well he took to it like, well a boy to a bicycle. No sooner was he on it than he was speeding down the street with us jogging to keep up with him (that’s his mother’s helmet he has on, needs a little adjusting but not much!).
I guess those miles clocked up on the tricycle paid off (that will now be readjusted for her for later in the year).
