Zigging and zagging

The botanical gardens here are truly phenomenal; I walked there yesterday, following the yellow zigs and zags on the roadside. Disarming how close the greenery is to the hustle and bustle of Orchard Road, but I suppose the same can be said of Central Park in New York. 

Under my umbrella

It's warm, but at around 3, it began to rain, and as we wandered, it refused to relent. Soggy in Singapore!

Texture, light

So much to see in Singapore; even looking up at the eaves of a mall on Orchard Road is a visual feast.

Look at the lights

I don't love all the holiday decorations in the city, but the lights wrapped around the trees in Midtown are charming in their way.

Long walks

The weather has been absolutely amazing this holiday weekend -- sunny and in the seventies. So we've spent the past two days wandering around Queens, through abandoned streets in Long Island City and the quaint tree-lined lanes of Sunnyside Gardens. (Above, a picture of water towers in the distance, as seen from the overpass bridging Sunnyside Yards.)

We sampled Hungarian/Transylvanian pastries at Chimney Cake NYC (get the one rolled in crushed walnut!); picked up a few books at Seaburn, which is having a great sale; and marveled at the cutest tiny little dog, kitted out in a gray hoodie and walking on his hind legs, on Skillman Avenue. A great weekend, and on Thursday, we're off to Singapore for a bit. Onward!

Winning

For the second year in a row, I "won" Nanowrimo (read: excreted 50,000 words in book-ish form in the month of November).

It's not much to read, but it's something -- something tangible that I can hold in my hand, in fact, as I've already converted this roughest of drafts into a perfect-bound trade-paper tome using a print-on-demand service. And that feels, well, pretty good.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thankful for our wonderful friends and family, for sharing good food with good people. Hope you had a great day too!

All fall down

The leaves have turned and are falling; I'll miss them overhead, but they're lovely in the gutters, too.

Flickr and fade

Oh, if only I lived in Amsterdam! At The Future of the Photography Museum, Foam offers an exhibition that includes the above: Erik Kessels made prints of every photograph uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period. In the Creative Review, Kessels said, "[The content of] image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines ... mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed. By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences."

I can't help but wonder: What 24 hours? Did I upload something then? Could there be a picture of my cat at the bottom of that very pile?

I saw the sign

Fact: this sign, from an old manufacturer on Steinway in Astoria, is incredibly cool, even in its current state of disrepair.