A new year and new beginnings... but our Christmas tree and decorations
are still up around the house so I've left them up here as well... I need
to find time to do some Web page housekeeping.
We ended the old year with a return to the area (upstate New York) where
we used to live in order to celebrate a new beginning, the marriage of
a friend Nancy first came to know when they met in graduate school where
they were both studying for their master's degrees in education almost
fifteen years ago.
We drove into snow as we went west (although it was not a major storm and, besides, while we were gone, Rhode Island got an inch or so of snow as well). The first picture was taken behind our hotel (the Owego Treadway Inn) -- we had a ground floor room with sliding glass doors to a riverside
patio with a great wintery view. (The lighthouse is purely a decorative
element, there is no commercial boat traffic this far up the Susquehanna
-- in the summer you will find a lot of canoes and rowboats and kayaks.)
The wedding was in the Pumpelly House, a 1902 vintage Georgian-style mansion in the village of Owego, NY. (Those are the bride's sons standing in front of the Christmas tree --
since we moved to Rhode Island at the end of 1995, I have a mental picture
of them as boys, but now they are all young men in college and graduate
school.) It was a lovely ceremony with bride and groom reading to each
other -- and the groom at one point taking up his guitar and serenading
the bride.
There was food and drink and merriment and a champagne toast at midnight.
A good time was had by all.
We slept in a bit in the morning, not getting up until after eight o'clock... We stopped in Johnson City to spend an hour or so visiting with friends (and time refuses to stay frozen, their little girl is now a college student) and then, just for the sake of nostalgia, drove through Binghamton's west side and down the street where we had lived for fifteen years. The new owner of our old house has ripped out the hedges in the front and put new railings on the front porch and also had new siding put up on the house, changing its color from white to sort of a light beige. (Yeah, nothing stays the same...)
We slept in again this morning... not getting up until a few minutes past
nine. All of that driving (around six hours of actual driving each way)
was very tiring.
It's nice to have today as a day-off -- that lets us recover from having
had the past week off. (*grin*)
And speaking of a need to recover, I've got to recover from the weight
I've gained over the holiday period (uh, and also from the weight I gained
during autumn). Yea, I know, that is a recurrent theme around here. Wonder
if I can drop ten pounds in, say, the next six weeks or so?
Hey.... Happy New Year!
|
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| Winter on the Susquehanna |
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| The ceremony |
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| First dance |
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| Here we are... |
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