Sunday morning in New York came with a bit of a challenge. It had turned out that the convenient garage across the street didn’t open until 10:00am, which they had not told us until we deposited our car there Saturday evening, and we were supposed to have the rental car back to Avis by 10:05 Sunday morning, with a scant [...]

On our fourth morning in New York City, we rose early (for us) and took a Lyft to the closest car rental that had any kind of car at all within the city, which Richard had reserved days before with Avis. The office was about a mile from our hotel near Times Square, and across the street from Madison Square [...]

I had procured two tickets for “Wicked,” the NY Broadway show which elaborated the story of the two witches from The Wizard of Oz, several weeks before we left on our trip to the East. It was easy enough to get them online, but since we were somewhat close to departure, there was a kerfuffle about how we were going [...]

We slept in on our first morning in New York City, only getting up in time to order the Hyatt’s bare bones bag breakfast. This is part of what I love about vacations; I still get up and do my yoga each day, and may keep up my daily meditation (or not). But I don’t have the responsibilities of doing [...]

For this second leg of our trip to the east coast, I set about finding a hotel in New York City (NYC). This had never been difficult for me in the past; we had stayed at the Crowne Plaza at Times Square several times previously. It’s conveniently near the theater district, there are lots of restaurants, cab and Lyft drivers [...]

My beloved cousin, John Allen, died too young, not long after his 69th birthday, on April 1, 2020, in Toronto, early in the pandemic. Although he was a distant cousin (our shared ancestor is way back there about five generations), we had felt a strong connection since meeting more than twenty years ago. He reminded me a bit of my [...]

  I have an acquaintance who writes a blog called Snarky Senior. And boy, she has no qualms about being cheeky. It’s pretty entertaining, of course.   I’m not quite as in-your-face as she is, although I used to be when I was younger. But I found I was not attracting a lot of camaraderie with this approach, and although [...]

I had a song running through my head this past week, and realized it was from Camp Fire Girls’ camp, 1957. (I was actually singing it to my old peculiar tortoise shell cat, Leila, who loves being sung to.) I always thought that these were the words: “Ocky tocky oomba, ocky tocky oomba, hey diddle, hi diddle ho diddle ay,” [...]