Monday, January 28, 2008

Vineyards on Long Island

Now, from the title you might be thinking I am refering to the wineyard's of Long Island, but, alas, I am not. I am refering to a number of meetings I attended for the Vineyard church in Long Island. This last weekend I went to a meeting led by my new friend Clint on the "ministry of the prophetic" for a couple churches on Long Island. It was very cool. After the weekend, on the ride home, Jay (my cousin) and I decided to take a detour through NYC (since Long Island is position on the other side of the City) to have dinner so we headed to SoHo where we shopped on the street a bit and ate at Dojo's (a small place I recall having walked past about 10+ years ago but nearly forgot about.) Enjoy the pics.


Clint prepairing to speak at the meeting.

Clint in full stride. It is worth mentioning that as we chatted about the weekend on Thursday night (Clint had started revising some notes for the weekend) the next time I spok with clint on Friday morning, he had been up all night long. Despite that fact, Clint delivered a very cool message that contained a metric ton of thought provoking insights and we had a great time praying together and hearing from the Lord.

In the above picture we were about to enter the city on our little dinner detour through MYC on the way home to Frenchtown, NJ, from Long Island.

The shots are a little dark but it was a sllightly overcast day on a Saturday afternoon. This pic was taken about 1 minute past this awefully dreary moment as we were leaving Queens on the Long Island Expressway. There was this industrial looking building spewing spoke and completely surrounded by acres of graveyard headstones (they wrapped all around the complex and were so may that you couldn't see the ground.) I suppose people in the NYC area have to die and be burried somewhere?

This us Jay and were dropped the Jeep in a corner lot in SoHo and started hitting some stores, street vendors and walking up toward Dojo for dinner.

I am not sure if this shot really captures it, but there is this moment on the street in Soho when the sun is going down that the big billowing older building with their large but ornate architectures seem to glow light out of their windows and while you are still in New York City, you are no longer standing beside the monolithic corporate giants of Manhattan, but a slightly older version of the city with a quaint and more beautiful history. In contrast, while you still might walk by a 200+ year old structure now housing "the GAP," next door there might be a unique magazine store that is filled with every "rag" made around the world, floor to ceiling (even an entire wall devoted to Graphic Design... I am sure I saw jay smile wide-eyed as he wispered "I am overwhelmed...")
A few blocks south of here, and a couple blocks east we parked the Jeep on Broome St. Unbeknownst to us at the time, at least until later when we were drive out toward the Holland Tunnel to go home, we were just one block off of the apartment of the now deceased Heath Ledger. As we were driving out there were flowers stacked against the building and a baracade around the entrance to the apartment. I have to say that there is something personally surreal about being so geographically close to large publicized events like his death. On a more general note, it is always sad when anyone young dies (not to diminish the deaths of older people.) It just seems sad.

[click and drag the image to slide the view around]

View Map of Location for Heath Ledger's Apartment

Visiting with my Sister Katy

I havenn't blogged in a while and so I thought I would throw a few pictures up of some fun i had with Katy over New Year's week. She came up for a visit and we ran all over New Jersey, and also spent some time in PA and NY. It was a lot of running but also a lot of fun. Enjoy the pics!

Katy and I went to a Broadway show at the famous Lyceum Theater in the exact spot where the big New Years party happens each year.

This is what the street looked like the afternoon before the big New Year's "Ball Drop" on Broadway.

Afterwards the traffic heading home was completely crazy. Don't get me wrong New York City traffic is usually pretty crazy but it took us FOREVER to get out of the city.

(more shots of how nuts it was at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon before New Year's)

Thisis my and Katy (I like this pic, but I am guessing she will take exception) at a nice New Jersey diner in my town (NJ is a Diner community... everyone hangs out and makes friends at the diners... more to come on that in a future blog.)

Later in the week, Katy and I ran down to these two towns that straddle the Delaware River (New Hope on the PA side and Lambertville on the NJ side) to hang out, hit some book stores, grab coffee and eat lunch. This is a very cool town. In fact, it is on my list for "convenient places to live that are closer to work and other major highways and roads."

(More Lambertville)

Then Katy and I went to Princeton (as in Einstein and the TV show House), and since Princeton is notorious for being filled with people of struggling intelligence, Katy bought these teeth just to fit in.

We later went to the City of Brotherly Lover (Philli, PA) where we did the whole historical thing and saw the Liberty Bell, and a number of historical buildings. That was a ton of fun. After that we went and saw the sequal to National Treasure, which has an American history-type adventurous nature. It was definitely a fun day. (above is the Liberty Bell)

This is Liberty Hall where the Declaration of Independance was signed.

This is the actual room where the Declaration of Independance was signed.

After the historical tour and the movie we sat down at a steak house is South Philli for dinner where Katy posed for this "Brady Bunch"-style shot. After that we hit the Ikea next door and drove the hour and fifteen minutes home (I can say that it is nice living so close to two major metro areas. They are like adventures just waiting for you to get off of the couch and explore!)