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!!