Author David Foster Wallace took his own life a few days ago, sadly. We’re lucky enough to have things like his commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, at least, which is something I feel like I should read once a week. It’s the best advice for living that I’ve read in a very long time. Maybe ever.

(Thanks to my sister Niki for the link to the speech.)

Okay, so it’s not really speaking. It’s babbling. We were visiting our good friends Dan & Sarah the week before last, and just like that, sitting in their living room, Evie discovered her consonants.

Warning: For anyone who is not related to Evie or otherwise curious about her micro-developments, this video will be even less interesting than amateur photos of the State of Liberty. I promise.

We had my nephew Shane and his fiancée Vicky out for a visit to the Hudson Valley. They spent some with us up in the Hudson Valley, meeting Evie for the first time.

Our Upstate week was followed by a quick trip down to the city to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, with the requisite stop at the halfway point.

We headed out for a quick cruise on the Staten Island Ferry, which has a new, beautifully designed terminal, and is the best (and free) way to check out the Statue of Liberty. (I took about 30 pics of the Statue of Liberty, forgetting how ridiculously boring and unnecessary they would be when I downloaded them from my camera. That’s how awesome the Statue of Liberty is: it makes you think that your picture, the twenty-seven millionth picture of it ever taken, will be interesting.)

We ended our NYC day overlooking the city lights with a bottle of champagne to celebrate our visitors’ big news: Shane’s ultra-suave proposal at the top of Rockefeller Center, followed by Vicky’s YES!

A big congrats to you both—we miss having you here with us!

Thanks to this quick little tool, you can see the point directly on the opposite side of the Earth from where you stand. Under the left-hand crosshairs is where Emma and I live, just east of the Hudson River.

It turns out that digging straight down through our back garden (notwithstanding the molten core and all that) would lead us to a point in the Indian Ocean, off of the southwest coast of Australia (right side of the image above). Next time I talk to my relatives in Adelaide I’ll take comfort in the fact that they’re really only 8,000 miles away, just about straight down.