The flight home went off without a hitch. No extra inspections at customs, despite importing a Persian rug, which are subject to special rules. I spent two days at home and then continued on my westward journey to Chicago, where my new apartment waited for me. Since then, I’ve been:

• unpacking (my books have multiplied so that I’ve now been assigned my own six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide bookshelf in the living room)
• rearranging the apartment (we think the television does not need to be the center of the living room)
• shopping (there is a very cheap and very good produce store a block away from my house!)
• working at my job at Residential Computing

Consequently there has not been much time for thinking, writing, or organizing of pictures. However, it is a story that needs to be told. I think it will come in snippets, sometimes without pictures, for a while, because the richness of the experience defies any comprehensive treatise. There are portraits, tableaus, and landscapes, short stories and long narratives, reflections and analyses. And photographs; about six hundred of them.

My goal is to post a few bits every day.

One of the most amusing newspaper articles I’ve read in a long time. My Dad’s friend Gordon told us about it, and he tried to read it out loud to us, using a Maine accent for the quotations, but he was not able to get through even the first few paragraphs while keeping a straight face.