The Other Don Kelly

We took a trip down to Philadelphia last Saturday, just before the great lockdown. We went down to visit Ben and Candace, and as a concession to the epidemic we decided to just go for a bike ride and then eat lunch at their place. This was too bad, because they know so many really cool little hole-in-the-wall neighborhoods and eateries, but it was still a beautiful day and we wanted to see the cherry blossoms; lunch was bound to be awesome either way and we could take a raincheck on their new restaurant discoveries…

Anyway, we arrived around 11:00 and, since Candace had to take a work-related call, we did a little visiting at their new place first. (New to me at least, since I hadn’t seen it yet — it’s a beautiful, light-filled apartment with an enormous kitchen.) We got rolling around noon: through the neighborhood, out onto the bike path along MLK Drive, then across the Falls Bridge and into Manayunk via the Schuylkill River Trail. We did some riding on the paved path at Wissahickon and visited the Flat Rock Dam, then made our way back along Kelly Drive. Plenty of people out and about here: bikers, hikers, runners, it was actually almost too crowded for comfortable cycling. (I’m guessing that, like us, everyone else decided to avoid other people by doing an outdoor activity.) Once back in the neighborhood we stopped for take-out at a place called Taco Taco — huge burritos and some chips with salsa, so we got our restaurant fix after all, then we hit the road.

Awesome visit, and here are some photos:

We’re now deep into the first week of our national “social distancing” experiment. Anne took to it pretty well, and I think that, except for the obsessive hand-washing, I was born for this. We’ve been finding things to do while staying in, and getting out for some avoid-other-people walks and bike rides. I’m not sure how long this will last or what the end game might be, but we at least are doing OK, so far.

I just re-read World War Z for the umpteenth time, and now I’m re-reading Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy, a small book (a monograph?) from a historical demographics elective I took in college. Not sure why these are my reading choices right now, must be something in the air… Both books are interesting, WWZ for its pass-the-popcorn tale of an apocalyptic pandemic (especially the early denial, and then panic, phases), and the plague book for its look at public health measures and policy, once the unthinkable becomes the new normal — by the 1650’s, plague had been endemic in northern Italy for two centuries. The comparisons, from each book, with our own situation are very insightful.

In other news, I was down visiting my parents for a few days, to help out while my mom got a procedure done. I went down Thursday night and came home Sunday, and I brought just about everything I could think of: some books, the laptop, a scanning printer, and the bike.

The procedure was a success, though it took longer and involved more waiting than I would have liked; it didn’t help that I disliked the book I brought (Rama II by Arthur C. Clark “with” someone else; I should have spotted this as a red flag). It was so annoying I couldn’t even hate-read it… I spent other time down there hanging with my parents, helping my mom with some IT issues, and scanning old photographs. (I was going to post some here, but I’m not really happy with the scan quality. I may have to re-do them.)

I tried riding Allaire Sunday morning, it’s not far from my parents’ house, but realized (once I got there) that I’d left my cycling shoes back at their place — D’OH! Oh well, I got in a decent towpath ride yesterday, down to Riegelsville for lunch, for a round-trip total of 40 miles.

Messing with a few things here…

…winter was half over!

I don’t have much to say about that (winter, that is), it’s been pretty lame as far as winter sports or activities go, mostly snow-free and unseasonably warm. Oh well, we’ll have to plan a trip north I guess, if we want to do any skiing or skating.

Meantime, Groundhog Day has come and gone, and so has the Superbowl, and so has the Superbowl of Chili in Easton. Of course I went, as did John R, Eric, George and Doug & Lori. Good times, we were through the door early and got our chili on, including maybe a little on our clothes. D&L took off after that, and the rest of us went for coffee at Easton Market, followed by drinks at Two Rivers, where George’s girlfriend Jessica met us. We were all stuffed, but she was hungry and got food while we drank, then she gave us all a lift home. Another one in the books!

By the way, here’s what I wrote about it in 2004, and here’s what I wrote in 2005. Lotta chili under those bridges.

Merry Christmas! We just ate the biggest breakfast… Now Anne and Ben are out biking to a rare book store, and Emmi & Kyle are on a walk through the neighborhood, and I have a few minutes downtime.

Little Women

We saw this last night. I didn’t want to see this, only decided to go (at the last moment) because everyone else was going, and really expected I’d have to “grin and bear it” through this movie, but I found it compelling, an awesome story well told, and with visually stunning cinematography — it didn’t hurt that lead actress Saiorse Ronan was pretty easy on the eyes, as was everyone else in the movie.

It was also fun to see Laura Dern in another movie so soon after Marriage Story, and in a role so different from her part there.

Photo Catch-Up: UPDATE

I had a bit of a failed experiment here: I’ve been “curating” my photos, meaning I’ve been adding tags etc in my home photo editor and then posting them to Flickr. I also have a plugin here on the blog which supposedly lets me publish Flickr albums here, but I just tried it and it didn’t work. Oh well, if you want to see my newly posted photos you’ll have to check out my Flickr account.

Anne and I had a bit of an “Easton day” yesterday.

There was a lecture at the Canal Museum in the afternoon: the Lafayette College Library’s director of digital studies gave a presentation on “Old Maps and New Technology,” basically about digitizing historic maps and using them with GIS, and it was right up my alley. (I was surprised that Anne wanted to go too, but she also enjoyed it, and we bumped into my friend Kirk there, which was a pleasant surprise too.) We also took a little tour of the current exhibit, which concerned changes to the Lehigh Valley landscape over the past centuries and was heavy on old maps and aerial photography, and had a pleasant conversation with the speaker.

After that we were meeting Kathryn and Beth for dinner at a new place downtown (Aman’s Artisan Indian Cuisine, and very good), but we had some time to kill first so we walked around Center Square — I scoped out some of the new downtown amenities for the maps — and stopped in at Pearly Bakers. We walked over and met them for dinner, then we all went across the street to a place I’d never even seen before, called Oak.

This was a sort of Washington, DC-style, upscale steak house: three stories and an enclosed rooftop bar, exposed brick and wood and architecture — we ended up on the roof, at a table with a small fire in the middle, and continued our dinner conversation for another few minutes. We only stopped in for a drink and a look-see, no idea how the food is (yet) but the place looked awesome.

We were actually home pretty early, like before 9:00, so I spent the evening updating OpenStreetMap.

(I’m also in the middle of working through some photo curating: The other day I moved my photo collection over to the new machine, which was much easier than I thought it would be, then finally finished catching up with adding metadata tags to my old photos. Once I was caught up with that I started importing photos — my backlog goes all the way back to 2015 — and posting them to Flickr. Check them out, yo! And stay tuned for plenty more.)

Tonight I’ll be playing with my cello ensemble. Time to go practice.