It was quite personal since there are only twelve graduates. Special gifts were awarded to each with amusing commentary concerning some quirk or talent.

It was especially nice to meet some of Parker’s school friends and some of his teachers. Unfortunately, I only captured a name here or there. Apologies.

Here are a few photos.

The Procession

Parker listening to remarks before receiving gift

Parker with his teacher Adel

Maggie, Meredith, Ed and Parker

Mark, Maggie, Meredith, Ed, Parker, Karen

By the time we finished all the arrangements it was 11 pm. So, we got up a 4 am to drive down to NYC. Mighty few people on the Taconic at that hour.

I spent the day in Manhattan starting at 7:15 am here at Rush Passport, a very efficient though also very expensive service. Lightened of $520 ($350 for the service and $170 for the State Dept.) we left Manhattan.

Karen and I then had breakfast at a diner in Bayonne NJ before dropping her at Newark Airport. She went ahead to Hong Kong.

I went to Harlem and had a nap at Andrea’s house. No one there but the cat. An hour’s snooze and I was off to one of my regular stops whenever I can at the 42nd St. library. this always includes a visit to the Reading Room on the top floor.

By 5 pm I had my new passport. I will leave for Hong Kong on Monday.

I tried hard to think up a scenario to blame Karen or anyone beside me for this gaff. But I have so far failed.

We have begun preparations for renovating our second floor bathroom. What better place to start than with a trip to Home Depot, list and credit card at the ready. Karen and I had already done some research online so we had a very specific stop to make in the toilet division of the plumbing department. We found our box right away, then my eye caught “Bold.Power.” on the end of an adjacent carton. What? Some marketing guru at Kohler has gone haywire or is just reflecting their own bathroom insecurities (desires?).

Is “Bold.” symptomatic of a narcissistic attachment to our bodily excreta? Or, are we supposed to feel “Bold.” when ensconced on the throne? For the males in the crowd, are “Bold.” and “Power.” supposed to call forth some new fulfillment from the vertical position? Perhaps we have been satisfied too long with the simpler idler pleasures of this position? Or maybe, we are supposed to elide these doubly emphatic periods into BoldPower, bringing back to mind the “shock and awe of the Bush years? Maybe there is an interpretive hint in the upper left corner of the box, “Virtually Plug-Free” and “Clean-Bowl Rinse”. With these kinds of assurance from marketing imagery, we will never again have to call on prune power.

So, having momentarily sated my amusement with the wondrous conjugation of corporate marketing prowess and nature, we wheeled our new toilet out to the car and a quick trip home. Though even this seemed fraught with questions about my Power. – Karen wondered aloud several times whether this box was really going to fit into our little Corolla. With a little huffing and scrunching, it did.

The Global Leader in Performance Thrones

When we got home and we carried the box into the front room, I studied its end panel a bit more closely.

I had hit the jack pot. Our choice for a throne promises to be “The Global Leader in Performance Toilets”! Who needs Moses when you can forever trash all of those embarrassingly ineffectual plungers.This update of 19th century engineering innovation achieves the holy grail banishing those blockages that cause such frequent finger pointing in every household.

Not only that, but ours is also “Powerful”, “Comfortable” and “Fast & Easy”. Really, the promise of this last claim seems to stretch credibility. All of my future visits to the loo will not be tests of my core strengths, every visit with come right along with speed and no sweat. I can leave my iPod Touch elsewhere because I will be done in less time than it takes tio bring up the WiFi. Unfortunately, this promise is about an entirely different Fast and Easy. The marketeers at Kohler have mixed messages to different audiences on the same end panel.This is a pitch to plumbers about how installation will be Fast and Easy.

Nevertheless, casting my eyes to the bottom right I feel reassured that I have purchased “The Complete Solution”.

On a recent visit to the relos in NJ we were gifted with part of their surplus garlic. They shop at Costco and buy in bulk. In this case, we got stuck with seven heads (bulbs, perhaps depending on your dialect) of garlic. These hung around for a couple of weeks until Karen and I finally got to reducing them to soup (we do have one head leftover). We cooked it up tonight. Not bad. But, I think that a little aging will improve it and I want to squeeze some lime over it (Karen and I recall some garlic soup we made a decade or so back that included this) when we next sit down.

Meanwhile, I have to finish up this posting soon. The computer may fog over terminally from garlic breath.

Thanks Ed and Meredith.

Checking that Karen has a Passport.

Now, it actually happened that someone got to the airport, presented her Passport, only to be informed that it wasn’t hers.

Is This Really Her Passport??

She departs with just one big bag!!

Karen departs for China

Karen will be showing mostly color and some black and white photos from her “Close to Home” series

Lishui is a city of 2.5 million about 250 miles south south west of Shanghai.

View Larger Map

Soon enough the living room had furniture, not all in the right place, but enough to create a pause.

When all of the boxes and furniture were in the house, most of the rooms looked like this.

Here are a few pictures taken with our new toy, a Nikon Coolpix 900 digital camera.
Most were taken at a “brunch” held at 52 Kinnaird on 12/26/98.

Meredith (Back of head ), Karen, Danielle (Dan), Andrea, John

Jonathan and Ed

Andrea and John

Maggie and Parker playing with “GOO”

- where is the picture of Uncle Mark cleaning it up?

Ed and Maggie at the playground…. Parker pulling from off-stage.

Several of the inmates have taken to flight and

landed in this year’s edition of the Yule tree….

Freeway, the albino cat, sneaking up on Neuron, the mouse, with a host of onlookers.

Karen organized an expedition with Nyla, Noah, and next door neighbor Teddy to Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills. Karen took these pictures. Due to a lengthy summer drought there was very little water coming over the falls.

I lagged behind and took some other photos. See below.

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Here are my photos. I found evidence that there was some sort of manufacturing or processing done on the sides of this ravine. Large riveted and welded containers and old pipes.

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