📸 Day 10: Travel.
Of which we did a lot this year. The first trip was to San Francisco to see some of its tilted houses or, in this case, a tilted hotel.
📸 Day 9: Baking.
A box of Honolulu’s finest malassadas. We learned about the place from our Lyft driver who turned out to be a fellow Serbian immigrant. Small world.
📸 Day 8: Grinch.
No photos of the guy on my camera roll, but is this Tawny Frogmouth we saw at the Norfolk Zoo not a spitting image? Just paint him green and call it a day.
📸 Day 7: Solstice.
These stone pillars at the Kadinjača monument in Western Serbia are not exactly Stonehenge, but maybe they do align with the stars? Incidentally, the Yugoslav World War 2 monument architecture is the only kind of brutalism I can get behind.
📸 Day 6: Sparkle.
You don’t have to wait for the holiday season to light some sparklers. This one was from a trip to the Outer Banks, cropped to protect the innocent.
📸 Day 5: Beard.
The owner of the beard is Father Damien of Molokai, a 19th century Belgian Catholic priest whose statue stands in front of the Hawaiʻi State Capitol. He cared for leprosy patients on the island for more than a decade until himself succumbing to it, age 49.
Let the year-in-review season begin. First up is flying, courtesy of Flighty. Here’s hoping for fewer miles travelled in 2026!
Readers from Philadelphia or Philly-adjacent, please help me make sense of the place. From my limited time there, it seems to have fallen into the uncanny valley of American cities: has some history but it’s no Boston, some finance-looking people walking down the streets but it ain’t Manhattan, some tall buildings but not Chicago. Is the best thing about it that it’s a short and pleasant train ride away from both DC and NYC? Surely there’s more, but what is it?
🚄 On board the next-generation Acela. By looks alone, the “bullet-train” icon was deserved. The trip itself is marginally less rocky and maybe a few minutes faster than the “old” Acela, which was itself a minimal improvement over the Amtrak regional. It’s the tracks not the trains, alas.
Most hotels have introduced a bunch of cost-cutting measures under the guise of “saving the environment”, but this is something I can get behind. Even the tiniest leftovers are good for making your own liquid soap.
