A Salute to You on New Year's Eve!

Salute!

I hope you have had a healthy, happy and prosperous 2010 and that the new year will bring more of the same.  Or better!

Thank you for visiting this blog in the six months it has been around.  Please come back next year and see more of Hartford.

Here you see Marquis de Lafayette saluting the Connecticut State Capitol.  You saw them in the summer and fall, too.

No One Was in the Stores

Except maybe the Apple Store.

Jack Likes to Shovel Snow

My neighbor Jack is almost 80.  That's right.  80.  He still plows his driveway and shovels his sidewalk.  Jack lives on a corner, so his sidewalk is twice as long as others.

Jack jogs daily.  He competes in road races and is looking forward to this summer's races when he can compete in the class for 80-and-up instead of the kids 70-79 years old.

Jack is outside daily in every season, planting and pruning, mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, painting his house and doing anything else he can think of to stay busy and break a sweat.

Elizabeth Park after the snow

The blizzard is over.  In Hartford, it wasn't as bad as the forecasters predicted.  The snow was only 8 - 10 inches, but the wind continued to blow so there are drifts.

It was much worse south of Hartford.  New York City received 29 inches of snow.  Most people in Hartford stayed home on Monday, so the roads were surprisingly empty.  I had fun.

Blizzard

Hartford finally got some meaningful snow on Sunday.  It is a blizzard, with winds gusting up to 35 miles per hour.  A snowfall of 12 to 20 inches is predicted before the storm ends on Monday afternoon.

I expect to be running around on Monday seeing what pictures I can make.

Mark Twain

The first volume of Mark Twain's three volume autobiography -- published one hundred years after his death in 1910 -- is a best seller.   Would you have guessed that a dense 760 page autobiography by a man who died a century ago would be #3 on the New York Times' Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list?  Not me.

Mark Twain was a long-time resident of Hartford.

Yesterday's Hartford Courant ran a good story about the Twain autobiography, which the history- or literary-minded among you might enjoy.

Christmas

A child is born.