Another month long blogging drought. Neglecting this site has me feeling guilty, and I avoid thinking about the site to avoid the guilt. But the cycle ends here and now!

What a month, too. Above we have the image that greets me when I walk out the front door of my new apartment building, turn right, and look straight up. Due to certain fortuitous events and circumstances, I have moved to the ninth floor of a building callled The Hawthorne, which is located on East 53rd Street at 3rd Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. This is, well, a fairly amazing and extremely convenient place to call home. I’ll be here until the summer. And I am trying to enjoy it as much as I can while it lasts.

The big cylindrical building in the photo is my neighbor, the 34-story Manhattan skyscraper usually called the lipstick building because of its shape. It is most notable these days because its seventeenth floor was, until recently, the home of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, a.k.a. a 50 billion dollar ponzi scheme, a.k.a. “what may be the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single person” (according to Wikipedia). I don’t know if my Canadian readers are familiar with the story, but basically as a result of the outing of Mr. Madoff as a con man last year, a whole lot of people and organizations who thought they were very rich have had to do things like sell their jewelery and consult bankruptcy lawyers. And in a place with as many rich people and as many poor people as New York, an interesting mix of genuine empathy, side-of-the-road-car-wreck-feelings, and shameless schadenfreude tend to push such stories to the front page. Something about the American Dream having a down button in addition to the up.

Anyway, while that has been playing out in my new hood and elsewhere, there have also been a variety of very exciting developments. Notably, Obama took over a great big mess and immediately broke out his country-sized mop and Windex bottle. The day of the actual changeover was a charged one here in New York. I spent the day in Brooklyn with these folks, eating bagels and drinking beer, and generally congratulating them for not fucking up this time:

Dekalb Avenue in Fort Greene was celebratory, not least due to us.

I also made this photo of a hopeful-looking dog, who looked to be reveling in the good weather and festivity on his brownstone stoop.

What else has been transpiring? My life has in the main consisted of tons of very fulfilling schoolwork, the odd night out on the town, explorations of Midtown East (I strongly recommend a certain French bakery at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and 27th Street!), and a fair bit of wintery cycling around the city.

And speaking of the latter, here are a couple of photos I took during a recent excursion to the Southernmost reaches of Brooklyn and Queens. First, Coney Island as seen from Brighton Beach (which the GTA4 players among my readership might know better as Hove Beach).

And now a late afternoon view of the Marine Parkway Bridge from Far Rockaway (which is apparently too peripheral and devoid of ethnic gangsters to merit its own videogame correlate).

That’s all for now. Next time will be sooner.