Busy Monday Placeholder

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

-Ithaka, by C.P. Cavafy

In between hearings and trial prep today, so this basically amounts to an entry to avoid posting nothing today.

The snow has arrived, finally.

Just a dusting, and barely cold enough to stick, but there it is. The forecast for tomorrow when I need to fly back to PC includes ice. How nice for me. If you don't read about it in the paper, I got there.

When Peg got off work last Friday, we jumped in the car and started down toward the Hudson Valley, with the goal of looking at neighborhoods where we might stay for the NYU semester, assuming that happens.

Our stop for the night was the Abbey in Peekskill, a wonderful old converted abbey that's been there since the Revolutionary War.

Everything about the stay was fabulous--the room, the meal, the service.

And the views the next morning over the Hudson were tough to beat.

Saturday morning we feasted at a fabulous family-run diner in Peekskill, then drove the 1 + 20 down into NYC. My blood pressure goes up just thinking about it.

Finally we parked the car, and found ourselves just a couple blocks from our target for the morning, the NYU School of Law.

We walked nearby neighborhoods where we'd seen apartments for rent. The place is an anthill of humanity, all seemingly under the age of 35, and all very, very loud in their speech. Jarring stuff for a small-town southerner. I think this is going to be a challenging few months, but worth it in the end.

After a few hours in the cacophony, we crawled back into the car and started up the Hudson toward West Point and our stop for the night, the Hotel Thayer, which adjoins the campus there.

It was certainly expensive enough, and the online photos made it look palatial, but like everything run by the Army it's a little tacky and frayed around the edges. We also happened to arrive just as the Cadets were wrapping up a drubbing of the Temple Owls in football (which explained why the room was so expensive, upon reflection), and the place was packed with alumni ranging from CEOs to tacky retired Army guys in polyester. We ate a little guacamole at their rooftop bar overlooking the Hudson, then retired to our room to watch M*A*S*H on the tablet and fall dead asleep before nine.

Peg dreamt of ghostly cadets trying to tell her something, a quite disturbing experience by all appearances.

The next morning we stopped at an old diner in town for piles of homemade corned beef hash and eggs florentine, served by a hispanic family who ran the place, then tried to get a visitor's pass to drive onto the campus only to be rejected as too early by a surly woman at the desk. There's a lot of surly at West Point. Were they getting paid?

So instead we drove US 9W up the west bank of the Hudson before turning left at Kingston into the Catskills. A lovely, misty drive that one, but lots of poverty on all sides during the trip. It was nice to get back to our familiar little valley, just in time to watch the Bills lose. So it goes.

Back to work.