This is the beginning of my blog. I am nearing my 60th year and this is now the year of the dog on the chinese calender. Since there is a cycle of 12 years for each of the year signs, I have returned to the 5th cycle of the "Year of the Dog". To help celebrate my birthday, Linda and I took what is her school "spring" break and took off for New York, NY. We are of the understanding that many folks are taking off for vacations spots like Hawaii for instance. We on the other hand have opted to go to the big apple. In order to maximize our time here, we flew on Alaska Airlines> Delta Airlines> Song Airlines. We haven't fully understood what that sequence means as to who owns what or who operates whatever. However, our flight was at 10:00 pm Friday night February 17th, and we nearly joyfully arrived on Saturday Morning before 6:00 am so we could have the whole day ahead of us.

6:00 am at JFK waiting for a bus to get us up into mid-town Manhattan is a long wait when it is 26 degrees out! 40 minutes of this was enough, we worked out with two other travelers to share a taxi and we got delivered to within a few blocks from our reservations at the Pickwick Hotel. From this point on our luck has been working out well. Before 7:00 am, we were tucked into a bed here to take a nap, thankful that the hotel let us check in early (I think of this as really early, I can think of occasions that a hotel thought that 4:00 pm as "early")

One of our discoveries during the process of getting from home to NY was nice, we passed TWO Deborah Butterfield sculptures. The only one we had been familiar with is Styr located on Ankeny field at Whitman College. We love these bronze sculptures of horses fashioned from driftwood elements. There is one in the Delta terminal at SFO, the second one we saw was on the grass in the traffic island in New York on Madison Avenue near 54th Street!