On Saturday, I visited Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire.  The reason for the visit was to go to some haunted houses with my friends and generally celebrate Halloween, which we did successfully and which will be detailed in an entry very soon.

While at the park, a friend and I walked around with our cameras looking for anything good to photograph.  We happened upon a group of teenagers playing a concert.  They were quite good.

While looking at the people who were playing I was reminded of an episode from my own life.  I was a teenager in 1992, right at the height of the popularity of a band called Nirvana.  The band really took off and naturally every teenager in a band played their music.  It was around this time that I had my own first teenage romance with a guy who went to a neighboring high school.  The guy played in a band with his friends and the lead singer was my classmate and my new boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend.  There was a lot of tension between my new boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend.  It all seemed very important at the time, I guess.

One night, the new band was playing a show at a high school.  The lead singer belted out the words to “It Smells Like Teen Spirit,” not knowing that her microphone was not turned on, so no one could hear her.  It was fodder for many a nasty story thereafter.

Again, it all seemed important at the time.  I was at Canobie Lake with a bunch of friends who were either not born yet when all of this drama was taking place, living in another country anyway and we could not have known at the time that our paths would cross.

I always think that it is funny that sets of people cycle in and out of our lives all the time and those sets of people have nothing to do with each other.  None of these people have anything in common with the other set.  I grew up in North White Plains, New York.  My friends I went to Canobie with grew up in Saudi Arabia.  To them me telling the story about the malfunctioning microphone is pure theory.  They weren’t there and they didn’t see what took place.  They never visited the place that I can see so clearly in my mind.  Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about what people do or say in general, because they are at the end of the day, only in our lives temporarily.  The people we really like we stay in touch with and see again.  Nobody in our lives is really constant.

Well anyway, enough deep thinking for this evening.  Let’s have some photos!!!!

Well actually Friday night.  Hockey season has commenced and around these parts, that’s cause for celebration.

I do genuinely love the sport of hockey and in particular, minor league hockey.  The Providence Bruins, a team I’ve written about up here before, are a favorite of mine.  I get to see a lot of their games because of an arrangement through my job, but I’d go either way.  The games are just fun.

This was the season opener and the place was full.  Did I mention that the Bruins didn’t exactly win this one?  They were down 2-0 about five minutes into things.  Never mind though.  The season is long and they will have plenty of other opportunities.

To a great season my paper cranes, I mean Bruins:

As I stopped to take a photo of this man, my friend goes “what are you taking a photo of?” Well, a moment.  Just a moment I liked:

Why exactly do I love Honkfest?  Well there are the band names, like the Extraordinary Rendition Band, that obviously gets its name from its wonderful performances.  There are also the costumes the performers wear, which are wonderfully homespun and sometimes resemble your average sofa or curtains.

But the main reason I love Honkfest so much is the fact that the marching bands take songs that I profess to hate and turn them into music I like.  I don’t even know how they do this.  For example, (sorry to everyone out there) but I kind of hate Britney Spears’ music.  I mean I’m sure as a human she is fine, but I cannot stand her music.  Don’t worry.  I’m prepared for the hate mail, but so be it.  Today though one of the bands was performing “Toxic” and I was just standing there, singing and dancing along.  It was exceedingly pleasant.

Do you honkfest?  Come and Honkfest with me!!!!

You might see something beautiful:

Photos from my trip to Venice**

**Nope.  Its Providence, Rhode Island.  Who says New England is boring?

The museum of the Rhode Island School of Design is one of those New England hidden gems full of new art and old art and general creativity.

Newly added to the place is this intriguing little cafe.  I love finding these little undiscovered places.  And exposing them to the world on my blog!!!!

I’m not sure if I actually read that somewhere or if I actually just came up with that, but I do really think that is true.

Let’s go back here a second and this is going to be a weird one, but if you stick with me to the end, I promise the pay off will be good.  In 1996, I remember watching the Olympics and seeing Shannon Miller on the balance beam.  She was an excellent gymnast.  She over rotated a kind of a sideways back handspring into a split but adjusted her body to save the split and did the trick competently from what I could see.  I’m a gymnastics fan, not a judge but it looked fair to me.  The commentator at the time said “that’s what experience gets you,” those times when you know you’ve done something wrong and you need to save whatever you’ve done and you do it.  Its those moments that separate you from a hot shot phenom into an actual professional.

I’ve had tons of those types of moments on activities where I’ve had to save something.  Today was just one of those days.  We had a little snafu with our tour booking for the Boston Globe.  That snafu was completely my fault.  Oh disaster was imminent but I save us.  A little convincing, a little arm twisting and my back handspring was saved.

It got me to thinking.  If life were an endless string of perfect moments, wouldn’t that makes things really boring???  Isn’t life more interesting when things are thrown in there to throw things off balance occasionally?  What does our relentless pursuit of perfection get us other than boredom?  Of course we cannot live in a constant state of chaos, but throwing things off balance occasionally keeps things interesting, that’s what I think.

Oh and as an aside, any visit to the Globe means a visit to the paper carrying robots that wizzed passed us on our visit.  Who doesn’t love that?  First, a thoroughly excellent sign:

Oh and here is the robot passing by.  Thrillingly:

How did we get here?  I’m like a real New Yorker.  I mean there are New Yorkers that can tell you how to take a 6 train like nobody’s business.  Then there are people who remember a New York City of Run DMC imitators with boom boxes, Tower Records, the Bowery being a terrible neighborhood, Williamsburg not meaning hipster but meaning yet a more terrible neighborhood, Ed Koch, a polluted East River, dollar slices at Ray Famous Original pizza and a place that was associated with general mayhem.

To me a New Yorker is a person who spent their childhood in Manhattan.  Beyond childhood, you are just an impostor who thinks Carrie Bradshaw is a real person.

Imagine my surprise when this person turned into a Bostonian a few years ago and not just any Bostonian.  A semi-R dropping Yankee hater who refers to i-90 as “the pike.”  OK I will never stop loving the New York Rangers, but David Ortiz is basically like a demigod in my book and Gronkowski, Rob Gronkowski, leave a comment on this blog and I will just give you my phone number.

We’re at paragraph three and I haven’t made a point yet.  Can I be Yankee hating, Ortiz worshipping Bostonian and kinda sorta at times like New York?  Well, this past weekend I found out those two things could in fact coexist inside one self.

My three dear friends from the Kingdom of Bahrain, here on their yearly Eastern coastal visit proposed a sojourn to New York.  No way I was going to pass up that opportunity.  Their older relative, the manager of that traveling circus, demanded that we leave Boston no later than 3:45am.  We went careening down the Merritt Parkway to the sound of what I think was a Qatari love song.  Talk about two chapters of your life clashing rather awkwardly.

As we neared New York I entertained my friends from way afar with stories of my adventures in places with mythical names like Valhalla where I experienced things they had only heard about in movies.  Things like for example senior prom.  Which belongs only in a movie.

Our time in New York started with a walk across the Brooklyn bridge.  We landed in DUMBO, which I don’t remember being as nice as it was.  We encountered a French bulldog, which we all collectively bent down to pet.  Honestly, when I got a look at the owner, I thought he would never let us pet his dog in a million years and that he was going to be incredibly unfriendly.  He turned out to be super friendly and I wanted to ask what part of Boston he had grown up in.  BURN.  Well, at that particular moment I realized that maybe not all New Yorkers were as unfriendly as I had thought.  Maybe there were moments when I didn’t hate the city.

As with all of these crazed weekend trips, we ended up in Times Square, or as I like to call it  — hell.  OK maybe hell’s post office, but that place is really hell.  Overly aggressive Metal Hero Friends and Aloha Cats.  Next to me, an Irish mother and son were having quite the quarrel using an array of curse words I had never heard before.  I nearly turned to her and asked if I could record whatever regional variety of English she was speaking.  No way, I mean forget it.  But I guess I could have tried.

Oh and I encountered Times Square’s least clothed denizens — the desnudas.  Times Square is now populated by competing packs of painted naked ladies who told me they only agree to have their photo taken if they are paid.  Aggressively they say this.

This photography ninja still got their photo anyway.  Petting the French bulldog and talking to his amiable owner made me hate the city less.  But the demanding desnudas…..

Never mind.  Let’s just have some photos now:

Yesterday I was in H&M with a friend of mine who was on the hunt for a jacket or a sweatshirt of some kind.  He was going around looking at all the clothes and trying to find something that fit him.  He seems to love all of the trying on and choosing of clothes and all the rest of it.

I hate that stuff.  Whenever I go into a store, I feel like there are 5,000 pieces of clothing most of which I cannot wear, would not wear or cannot afford.  I do most of my shopping online where the choices are more limited and the window to buy things is smaller.  Now if you send me a ski shop, the story is different but that is another entry for another time of year.

While my friend was on the hunt for his sweatshirt, I spotted a kind of mannequin holding area.  There were so many mannequins and so interestingly arranged that I knew immediately that I had to take a photo or in this case, multiple photos.  I photograph mannequins a lot because I always imagine them having conversations with each other when no one else is around.  Kind of like when you are a kid and you imagine that your stuffed animals talk to each other when you aren’t around.

What exactly are they talking about???