In New York...

The flight was delayed getting into Denver yesterday, delayed leaving, and delayed landing upon arrival at JFK. Unsurprisingly, it took nearly 30 minutes for baggage to start to arrive in the pick-up area.

Terminal 5 is a new facility, which meant a longish walk to the AirTrain station for a three-stop ride to Federal Circle, where the shuttle from Enterprise picked us up.

On the way to our hotel, I did something I don't think I ever did before: I took the wrong exit off the Cross Island Parkway onto the Long Island Expressway, and ended up heading into the city instead of out to Long Island. Fortunately, I realized my mistake before the skyline of Manhattan presented itself through the murk. Galina had a good chuckle.

Our Priceline.com hotel is the East Norwich Inn, a motel of whose existence I was not aware when I lived in the area, and a pleasant surprise. The Inn looks small from the outside, but is fairly large on the inside, albeit the halls and doorways are a little narrow for my taste. Generally speaking, the public areas of the hotel are a little tired-looking and there's a whiff of humidity in the air, but our room is large, airy, and (most important) comfortable, so we are pleased.

We got in pretty late last night, and went to sleep after midnight. Galina is drying her hair as I type and soon, we'll be on the road for the short trip to the house in Locust Valley to start the process of figuring out what to take, what to leave, and what to discard (one way or another).

There's something about being back on Long Island, but I can't tell if it's good or bad or what.

Cheers...

Jottings and mumblings...

As a very belated follow-up to the concept of "favorite," it occurs to me that my favorite statue is that of the Wingèd Nike of Samothrace, as depicted in the following pair of 1937 French stamps:


I fell in love with this statue when Galina and I visited The Louvre nearly 20 years ago.

And it occurs to me that the reason it is my favorite statue - not to take anything away from the old girl - is that my knowledge of sculpture in general is rather, um, thin.

Maybe there is a cause-and-effect there?

* * *The weather dweebs hinted that yesterday's rain would clear up today, which didn't quite happen, as it rained pretty much all day. We visited the house, dove into the stuff in the basement, and then took off to take care of some errands. In the end, we stopped at the IKEA store in Hicksville where I plugged in my laptop and went online to reserve a truck for Friday.

Then we went shopping. :^)

* * *One of the consequences of the widespread adoption of English as a lingua franca on the Web is having to be increasingly careful about using words you think you've seen or used.

Case in point: Having used expulsion earlier in a document, and even though expulse is a word (at least according to the OED), the synonym expel turns out to be the right word in the context of the document.

* * *I've been using a flash card application on my iPod and by golly, it's starting to pay off! There's hope for me yet!

Cheers...