Actually it was Hercules in New York, starring a heavily accented Austrian born future American politician by the name of…

Well, you know who I am talking about:

Yeah, this guy.  Want to see some pictures of the Hercules that was in Boston?  Too bad.  I’m going to tell a story first.  

Now I am a pretty busy person.  I work, I go to school, I ski, I am the founder, publisher, managing editor and art director of this blog.  I complain on Facebook about the green line constantly.  I watch Pawn Stars.  I mean I’m literally busy from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.  So, what do I need more than anything?  A day off.  A day off to be lazy, not to have to be anywhere at a certain time.  Just to be lazy.  And on Friday my dream came true.  I had a day off.  And what did I do?  I slept.  I mean I think I slept for the majority of the day.  Pathetic.  A whole day wasted because of Mr. Hercules up there.  

Usually I venture out to the snow storm, but this time the reports of the incredibly freezing temperatures scared me so I stayed indoors.  Eyes closed.  UH.  Never again.

And this Hercules struck again this weekend, when I couldn’t go skiing because of him.  Not because there wasn’t enough snow.  Because there was too much snow.  Hence other people wanted to see too.  Well, anyway, the skiing gods will once again be on my side.  Skiing gods, do you hear me?  I want to ski.

Anyway, I’d like to offer these photos to the skiing gods, for it is just a good day skiing I seek.  Nothing more, nothing less:

You can reason with a person.  Sometimes.  You can reason with animals, maybe pets and not wild ones.

But you cannot reason with a mountain.  It does not listen to you.  It does what it wants.  You just have to get out of the way.

Forget anything else.  That is the first lesson in skiing.  You have to respect the mountain.  Otherwise, the adventure will end badly.

I went to Killington for the first ski trip of the season.  I’ve been there before but I had a bad experience because I was an inexperienced skier and I didn’t know how to ski the difficult trails in the higher mountain.  Since it was the first ski trip of the season, I skied a few greens and a few blues.  Strangely I felt more comfortable on the blues.

I just got a few photos.  The rest of the time was spent skiing.  Yeah, that is a first:

And the full view:

Let’s hope for a fruitful new year:

Well, a day late, but here goes.  Merry Christmas to my worldwide audience of blog readers.  I am always impressed by the number of people who read this blog or happen upon it in a Google search.  I hope that when you do visit, you find yourself amused by the photos and the commentary.

I would have written this yesterday, but well, I was celebrating Christmas.  As you do.

In the style of this blog, I won’t post a normal photo of Santa Claus doing normal things.  I mean he’s been seen up here in his Hawaiian shirt and his bikini.  Why start being normal now.  So here goes:

What’s he doing on the back of the dragon?  Well, we aren’t meant to know, I guess.  Maybe Rudolph broke his leg and couldn’t lead the eight tiny reindeer.  Santa had to find a replacement.  Quick thinker that he is.

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I visited the Elms and Marble House this past weekend.  The Elms has this really wonderful garden that looks like some kind of garden out of a movie about stereotypical rich people who pop their collars and call each other “Muffy.”  I love it.

Of course I wanted to image this fake movie about the rich people late at night and what that would have been like.  A bit more sinister, I guess:

Last weekend I visited a most curious place called Newport, Rhode Island.  It isn’t that far from Boston and doesn’t seen that exotic, but in a lot of ways it is.

In the late 19th century, Newport was the playground of the rich.  Really, really, really insanely rich people like the Vanderbilts and Astors and other such swells.  They built these enormous houses that brought in the best craftsmen from Europe and points beyond.  They built massive mansions that can almost be called castles.  And they lived in them for eight to ten weeks out of the year.  Those were the days.

Then in 1912, the fun stopped.  The government imposed income taxes and the houses fell pray to what we all fall pray to in America.  Taxes.  And death, but that came later.  The houses were given to city of Newport for nickels and are now museums.

I’ve visited these houses before and always got the same impression.  Wow, these are beautiful places, but what must it have been like to live in a place like that?  The halls are enormous, the bedrooms and ballrooms like museums.  I guess if you were brought up in that style, you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, but some part of me kept thinking of my own house, small as it, as possibly more comfortable than one of these places.  Sure, it would be nice if the shower actually worked correctly and didn’t scald me all the time, but otherwise, I like my apartment.

I also wonder sometimes if when the people lived there, did they once think that other people, total strangers would one day be traipsing through it.

And also a note.  I took these with the camera I call Rick.  I left Chumlee at home and just brought little Chumlee with me.  Luckily, my father (who is the actual owner of Rick) gave me Rick on the off chance I wanted to photograph the mansions, which are usually super off limits to any kind of photographing.  Well, nobody seemed to care, so I snapped away.  Nobody seemed to really care, to be honest and I got some really nice shots of the inside of these houses:

Things not to do:

Work two jobs and go to graduate school at the same time.

But this situation in my life creates a lot of opportunities for taking really good photos.  Because my hands are free and I am bored, so I go nuts with picture taking.

And hence the results:

In the Museum of Fine Arts: