Pallbearing

Amy’s grandma passed away. We went up to New Jersey for the funeral.

Never been a pallbearer before. First time for everything. Most of the pallbearer duty consists of just placing a hand atop the casket as it rolls on a wheeled stand from funeral home to church, but some lifting is needed needed when it comes to the curb. As I struggle with the handle and wrestle the casket those few vertical inches, my mind tries to form some metaphor about the weight of mortality, but it’s just a heavy casket.

Praying Mantis in Funeral Home Casket Selections

Back in the funeral home, a praying mantis hangs out — literally — from a floor lamp, and an array of casket selections can be viewed in the office. After the funeral mass and burial ceremony, I spy an oblique cube headstone. It is, to say the least, unique. We then retire to a nearby diner for brunch. The pickles are amazing.

Bound Brook Cemetery: Cube Headstone
Pickled Vegetables Pickles

New York, the next day. We look at Asian art at The Met and eat sushi at Kiku. The waiter says they have a shipment of some excellent Toro in the sashimi selection. I order a piece. It’s $4, but is the most amazing fatty melt-in-your-mouth chunk of tuna I have ever eaten. Along with a few pieces of salmon it is one of those sashimi meals where I am sad to come to the end. Outside, a view of Midtown Manhattan.

Looking towards midtown from Kiku Sushi in Chelsea Metropolitan Museum of Art

It all feels so material and bodily. I feel like I should be grieving more, not touring about New York and absorbing classical art and raw fish. But I’ve always had this numb matter-of-factness about death, and a hope from tenets of my faith regarding the afterlife. A heavy casket, but lighter at least by the weight of a soul redeemed.

Times Square-42nd St Station

Upstate NY Adventures

We went up to the Albany, NY area at the end of July to see Amy’s cousin Jason get married, and also visit her grandma. Along the way we saw some exotic northern destinations like Schenectady, Niskayuna, Guilderland, and Rensselaer. Continue reading Upstate NY Adventures

Fourth of July 2011

We had a lazy, lazy Fourth of July and simply viewed fireworks from the condo parking garage rooftop. There was a lot going on, though, and I was able to get a decent timelapse of this show going on just a couple of miles away:

Fourth of July 2011 Fireworks Timelapse

Set to tinny 1913 Sousa, as always.

Car

We got a car. Having a car is probably normal for a lot of you but it hasn’t always been for me. Continue reading Car

iPhone

My gateway to iOS was a second-generation iPod Touch gifted to me by Mom for Christmas in 2009. For a while that served as my music player and secondary mobile device alongside the Nokia 5800 and later the HTC Magic, but more and more I found myself just wifi-tethering the iPod Touch to the phones to use for handheld computing, to the point that I decided to dispense with the unwieldiness of a double-device lifestyle and just get an iPhone. Continue reading iPhone

HTC Magic 32B AKA T-Mobile MyTouch

First off, I refuse to call it the “MyTouch.” Starting a proper noun with such a strong possessive pronoun just confuses the use of any article — or any other possessive pronouns — preceding the name. “A MyTouch.” “The MyTouch.” “My MyTouch.” “Your MyTouch.” Plus, it sounds like the setup for a bad “your mom” joke. No, I will refer to it at all times by its actual model name, the HTC Magic. I bought mine at a Costco cellphone stand for about $200 and a 2 year contract extension on my T-Mobile account. (This turned out to be a mistake, as the contract price dropped to $99 not long after.) Continue reading HTC Magic 32B AKA T-Mobile MyTouch