The title will be somewhat misleading.

As one who only spent a mere week mucking about the hallowed halls and entrails of central NJ, I am ill-equipped to make any sort of mention about the qualities that I witnessed.

But let’s suffice to say that I found it to be….less offensive than I was bracing myself for.     In fact, for the most part, I was rather happy and enjoyed my stay.

That all being said, here are some random pics to amuse your eyestalks:

On Sunday, May 2nd, at 15:00 UTC, thousands of shutterbugs all over the world picked up their cameras and shot a picture for the A Moment in Time, a project sponsored by The New York Times to try to capture a single instance of the world in photography.

They will compile these images into some presentations and consider them for inclusion in an upcoming book.   Frankly, I don’t really care what happens to them so much as I think the concept is fascinating.

I was so intrigued, and I was awake at 10am on Sunday (which is what 15:00 UTC translates to), so I went and participated.

The picture I ended up submitting was this one:

But I took quite a few others; here they are.    Did I pick the right moment?   What would you have chosen as your moment?

When I was a child, hunting for the perfect Christmas tree was a family tradition that we did each year, consisting of bundling up, traveling an hour or so to a tree farm, and spending the next four hours hiking amongst the 70 acres of carefully cultivated holiday shrubbery until we had narrowed the field of 187,322 trees to that one, special, Tree-of-All-Trees that the angels endorsed, poets lamented, and would fit within both our living room and my parents’ budget.    We’d hack it down with an old-fashioned hand saw (because we love the manual labor) and hoof it back across the tundra to the car.    The balance of the day was then spent thawing our limbs, dragging the tree inside, and after decorating it, spending the next 7 hours picking needles out of the shag.

It was…memorable.

Ontop of this, I would then spend the next month or so sneezing my ass off everytime I was in the house because, as it would have it, I am allergic to pine trees.   (My personal hell is filled with wreaths.) However, I loved them so much (or so I thought) that I put up with it and simply walked around in a Benadryl-fueled haze for the majority of the season.    No wonder the holidays were always so jolly!

These days I’ve forgone the drug-enhanced fun of real trees for the less-nasally-frictive practice of putting up a fake tree that does a reasonable job of approximating The Tree and saves the family a small fortune in Kleenex.    However, we wanted my son to have the family bonding fun of hiking the wooded wilderness in preparation for Christmas (it serves as a penance for sins, I figure), so we took him along when Grandpa and Amy went to locate their shrub of choice.

The below is the resulting photologue of the day, which was terribly nice (completely unlike the arctic temps I was subjected to in my childhood) and lovely lighting for photography.     Keston had a blast.

The weather the other night was so nice, it would have been a shame had we not gone out and enjoyed it, so we tripped up to Clear Lake (which is anything but clear) and enjoyed some time outdoors.

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