Happy New Year!

Hope that everyone had a wonderful and festive New Year! Just a quick update of how my celebrations went. For the beginning of the week, I was back at the office trying to catch up before the post-holiday deluge begins. But on Wednesday evening, I hopped a Concord Coach up to Bangor, Maine, to celebrate with Sarah's family. Her parents are from upstate New York, but she has roots (grandparents, uncle/aunt) in Maine.

The ride wasn't bad--first of all, they had WiFi on the bus with a moderately fast connection--and I could actually connect to it, unlike BoltBus. It was an express bus from South Station to Bangor (one stop, in Portland, ME)--about 4-5 hours on a bus, but not too bad. Traffic was annoying getting out of town, but it quickly cleared up.


My netbook battery held its own quite well, maybe getting to ~60% charge.

Had a fun day touring around Bangor, thanks to Sarah's parents. The city is filled with many wonderful old buildings, including this Ralph Adams Cram church (All Souls Congregational Church; Sarah's family are long time parishoners):


The river that passes right through the middle of town freezes over, with a neat pattern of buckled ice at the edges. Also, the tide swelled the rivers up to impressive levels (~2' below the bridges) the next day.


At a Chinese buffet dinner with the extended family, I was vastly amused by the soft serve ice cream machine--it has a selectable multi-flavor syrup co-extrusion machine, which flavors the vanilla ice cream!



I believe options included butter pecan, strawberry, blueberry, and bubble gum flavors. Food technology can be scary sometimes. Also, there was, um, strawberry residue at the bottom of my bowl, under the butter pecan... cross contamination issues.

Then that evening, we did the city's First Night celebration--Downtown Bangor's Downtown Countdown. It was fun--caught a bluegrass band, and then a fusion jazz band, playing in the most incongruous setting I could think of--the City Hall Council Chambers: a space that was fluorescent lit, with low-pile carpet, and the council benches behind them.


I had a mental image of, "Meanwhile, at the downtown jazz club...," with the city council members crowded around a table in a darkened club, trying to have a meeting over the din.

Bangor's New Year's event is wonderfully unpretentious and downscale--they have a beach ball with Christmas lights taped to it...


And come midnight, they throw it off the roof of the building:


Happy New Year! [bounce]

Anyway, we drove back on Friday (New Year's Day), after a wonderful lunch with S.'s family--our original plan was Saturday, but there was a winter storm watch for the weekend, so we decided to get out of there early. A very nice trip, and many thanks to the extended family for their hospitality!