Maine Miniatures

S. Bridgton, Maine, USA

From Winter Miniatures

Last night's wind reshaped a lot of the snow around here. It also brought down a tree along my parents' property line, narrowly missing the neighbor's house.

I went out to photograph that, but had much more fun playing with my camera's macro function.

From Winter Miniatures

Let It Snow!

Bridgton & Denmark, Maine, USA

From Let It Snow!

I love coming to Maine in the winter! Especially when it snows, which hasn't been nearly enough in recent years. But today there was enough snow for downhill skiing, snowmobiling and other tourist draws in Maine. So Dad and I took our cameras out to see what we could capture.

We started in Pondicherry Park in Bridgton, Maine, where a new covered bridge went in along a new footpath through the bog in the middle of town.

We checked out the north end of Moose Pond in the shadow of Shawnee Peak ski area.

Then we drove down along the lake, through the middle of downtown Denmark, Maine, a classic New England town.

From Let It Snow!

Christmas at All Souls

Manhattan, New York, USA

This morning, as I left my apartment in Brooklyn to go to the Upper East Side, the streets in both neighborhoods were nearly deserted. With the ground still wet from the wintery mix the night before, I was transported back to the days after Hurricane Sandy; I guess the storm affected me more than I thought.

From All Souls Christmas Dinner

I went in to join some of the young adults and many of my other friends from All Souls Church who don't have family in town to celebrate Christmas with. There was an enormous spread of delicious food, good company, Santa Claus, caroling and plenty of good cheer!

Holiday Brass

Unitarian Church of All Souls
Manhattan, New York, USA

From All Souls Brass Band

For Family Christmas on the Sunday before Christmas Eve, All Souls adds a brass quartet to our musical ensemble. Before each service, we gather on the church steps to sing Christmas carols, then proceed into the church for service.

Ben's Boat

somewhere near Freeport, Maine, USA

From $800 Boat

After a bit of a set-back in which his car died, my brother now has a new truck to go with his fix-'er-upper boat. The truck probably cost him several times what the boat did, but the truck is immediately roadworthy, and the boat.... Well, what do you get for an $800, 29-foot sailboat?

On one hand, you get a mess. The hatches are dry-rotted splinters, the port berth (above) is completely unusable, there are holes in the hull.... He hopes to live on this boat in the spring, but it needs a new electrical system, a toilet, a stove and ... well, everything! On the other hand, he also has an opportunity to redesign the living space, like inserting a chart table into that port berth. Follow his progress on his blog, $800 Liveaboard, because despite the mountain of work ahead of him, this is one happy man!

Cousins

Massachusetts, USA

I got to see the newest addition to our family at the NIC-U a couple weeks ago, but Grammie hadn't seen her newest great-grandson yet. So my sister and I--she's visiting from Colorado--offered to drive Grammie and Grandpa down to Massachusetts to meet him. First we stopped by at my cousin's house to see the elder great-grandson, S.

It's very important to S that no one wear shoes in his house, especially on his living room carpet, and sometimes he takes matters into his own hands. His Great-Grandpa, who never takes off his shoes, was simply charmed!

It was really fun to hang out with my sister, who hadn't seen my cousin in a few years, and just sit around the kitchen table, catching up.

We did go and see the new baby after awhile. His Great-Grammie got to hold him, but by the time I saw him he was rolled over against the wall having his dinner.

After the hospital, there was a real treat waiting for us back at my cousin's house. Her in-laws had sent homemade Christmas Stollen from Dresden, a traditional fruitcake-like bread that's just delicious! Happy Holidays!

From Massachusetts

Teardown

New Dorp, Staten Island, New York, USA

From All Souls in New Dorp

Adrianna's Catering Hall in the New Dorp neighborhood of Staten Island was flooded along with the rest of the neighborhood, and with enough force to deposit this boat on a car out front. The neighborhood is still, three weeks later, without electricity, heat or hot water. But Adrianna's didn't shut down. All around the community, people are living on the upper floors of their homes, with extra comforters on their beds and cold showers in the morning.  Then they come here for hot food and the invaluable company of their friends and neighbors.

In front of Adrianna's is this tent, where rows of tables are piled high with donations from across New York City and around the country. There are canned goods, shoes, toilet paper, bleach, pick-axes and workgloves, and lots and lots of bottled water.

They dispatch teams around the neighborhood to do a variety of things, primarily demolition work like "mucking and gutting," as they called it in New Orleans. Mucking means dragging all the waterlogged and destroyed belongings out of a house. Gutting is stripping the floors, walls and often the ceilings of those houses down to their studs so that the interior can be rebuilt.

While families are still filling out paperwork, getting inspections and wading through the inevitable bureaucracy of a huge cleanup project like this, teams of volunteers can do in a few hours the hard physical labor that would take days or weeks to do oneself. And with payouts rumored to be as little as $3000 per home, volunteers may be the only way many of these families can afford to rebuild.

From All Souls in New Dorp

Welcome To the World

In the aftermath of the "Storm of the Century," a little miracle happened.

From Preemie Perfect

My cousin had her baby 12 weeks early, the healthiest 28 week baby the nurses in the NIC-U had ever seen.

Welcome!

WIN!!

Harlem, New York, USA

Obama WINS!!

Aftermath

Some images I found of New York City, post-Superstorm Sandy:

Pre-Dawn Blackout at the ConEdison Plant:

Morning Slowly Dawns:

from my kitchen window:

From Superstorm Sandy

86th St N Line:

Battery Tunnel:

East Village:

Pile-Up:

Battery Park, apparently:

Sitting Out the Storm

Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York, USA

It's funny. Olga and I are usually content to sit at home in Bushwick for literally days at a time. Today, though, we woke up around noon, and by two in the afternoon we were going absolutely stir-crazy!

From Superstorm Sandy

From our windows, there doesn't seem to be anything going on in particular. Some wind, almost no rain, and eerily empty streets. Actually, not even that empty. The bodega across Wilson Street is open, and the Chinese restaurant, and the new coffee shop across Suydam Street, too. The coffee shop has only been open for a couple weeks, so they probably can't afford to close ... and they're still getting customers! As for the bodega and the Chinese restaurant, the families that own and run them also live on the second floor with an internal staircase to get home, so why wouldn't they stay open for as long as they have even a trickle of customers?

Meanwhile, I'm more than a little jealous of friends like Tiffany who are living close enough to the rivers to go for a short walk and see the storm sweeping in. I love storms, especially after all those years in the desert, but I love being safe and dry even more!

So we're sitting at home, watching it unfold on Facebook and TV (our electricity and Internet are just fine!), playing wild and vicious card games of Spit and Speed, and trying not to remember that we couldn't go anywhere even if we wanted to....

Friends and Foliage

Bear Mountain State Park, New York, USA

From Bear Mountain before the Hurricane

Across the Hudson and not too far upriver, the Appalachian Trail passes over Bear Mountain, and many other trails criss-cross the state park. I've been hearing about Bear Mountain since I first came to New York City, and all this time I've been keeping my eye out for opportunities to get out there and go hiking.

When the Twenties and Thirties Group at First Unitarian Brooklyn announced a hiking day there, I knew it was the right time. UUs are always fun people to spend time with, and I'd decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to get more involved with the young people at the Brooklyn church.

So I put on my sturdy shoes, filled my Camelbak, layered up and grabbed my camera. Not only was it nice to get out of the city, and great to spend time with a group of really wonderful young people, but it was also the peak of fall foliage season on Bear Mountain.

The colors were so brilliant and vibrant, and in a way that I haven't often had an opportunity to see in recent years. Frequently I found myself lagging behind as I stopped to take photos of vistas, popping yellows and deep reds.

With the first clouds driving ahead of the impending Frankenstorm Sandy, the sky was heavily overcast and the light was uninspiring, but the leaves and the company most definitely were inspiring. It was a great day.

From Bear Mountain before the Hurricane

Sometimes the Job You Need

Isn't the Job You Were Looking For

Manhattan, New York, USA

When I was in high school, we had an interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Harford County whom I found to be really inspiring. I'd been interested in comparative religion for most of my life--since long before we became Unitarian Universalists--but initially mostly in order to be able to defend my agnosticism from my evangelical classmates. Sometime during Rev. Kathy's interregnum, I realized I was interested in comparative religion for its own sake, and that eventually (in my 50s or 60s for a "twilight" career) I would like to go to seminary and become a UU minister.

But first, I had some other careers in mind. It was being said over and over that my generation would have 3-5 careers or more--not jobs, but careers--over our lifetimes, and these were gonna be mine: simultaneous translator of Arabic, then special education teacher, then bestselling novelist, then UU minister. Along the way, the plan has changed. I passed over the simultaneous translation, tried out the special ed thing in a few venues to varying degrees of success, and have worked on-again-off-again on the novelist gig. In my unemployment this summer, I've been looking for nonprofit entry level program management positions, preferably with connections to Arabic and/or the Middle East and Islamic world writ large. When the Unitarian Church of All Souls I've been attending for more than a year advertised the position of Membership Coordinator, I applied on a whim--or perhaps something of a sense of desperation!

Garth Brooks says that "some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers." Whether you believe in God or not--I'm perpetually on the fence--I think it's a truth universally acknowledged that from time to time we all look in the wrong place with the best of intentions. I think that nonprofit program management in the Middle East could still be in my future, but there are so many reasons why the job I started last week is the perfect job for me right now.

For one thing, I get to stay in one place. I get to stay in the United States for awhile; globe-trotting is fun, but exhausting, and hard on your social life! Better yet, I get to stay here in New York, where I've established a nice network of new friends, and many of my old friends are less than 4 hours by bus away and happy to come and visit. I'm close enough to my parents, siblings and cousins to spend holidays with family, which hasn't often been the case in the last 15 years. I get a chance to try having a relationship that doesn't start with an expiration date.

Better yet, I get to spend the next several years in nonprofit management, so that when I'm ready to go back to the Middle East in a few years, I'll have more than fluency in Arabic and understanding of local culture. I'll also have the technical skills required to get one of those development jobs I really want.

Best of all, I get to work with an office full of people who share my convictions, who are working to make the world a better, more loving place, and who appreciate my talents. It's been a long time since I felt like the whole office thought of me as a good employee.