Posted on July 30, 2009 by Moonraking
Creative destruction = Joseph Schumpeter’s account of capitalism’s dynamism based on innovation and the destruction and abandonment of the old.
I’m just the 10,001st person to complain about it in print, but Harvard Square has become an outdoor mall. What’s distressing is not just the loss of all the old book stores, record stores, cafes and [...]
Filed under: books, travels | Tagged: Harvard Square | 9 Comments »
Posted on July 30, 2009 by Moonraking
R.H. Reny, the founder of Maine department store chain Renys, died last week.
We got really into the Ellsworth Renys a couple years ago. My favorite items (this was the year the girls were three) were coloring books marked down to 99 cents. They have a little of everything, clothes, food, drug store stuff, all cheap. [...]
Filed under: travels | Tagged: true crime | 1 Comment »
Posted on July 26, 2009 by Moonraking
A visit to Mt Desert Island is obviously all about Acadia National Park, the ocean, lakes, hiking trails, etc. But I thought it would be fun, as we near the conclusion of a long stay, to comment on some of the consumer options available here.
Terrible crap in Bar Harbor. Needless to say, you have to [...]
Filed under: travels | Tagged: Mount Desert Island | 1 Comment »
Posted on June 16, 2009 by Moonraking
I feel guilty about our mini-van’s gas-guzzler qualities. But for 17 driving hours on the road with two kids and two cats, it definitely has some big advantages over a car. (The trip took three gas fill-ups — about $100.)
The cats did well. They were in two separate cat containers. I think they missed one [...]
Filed under: travels | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 19, 2009 by Moonraking
We took an economical, two day one night spring break trip to Louisville. Stayed in the historic Galt Hotel on the riverfront which in the 19th century hosted such guests as “Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Booth, Charles Dickens, P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb, and presidents Lincoln, Grant, Taylor, Hayes and Buchanan.” And now us. We [...]
Filed under: art, food, travels | 2 Comments »
Posted on December 30, 2008 by Moonraking
San Miguel de Allende is a beautiful and somewhat strange town. It’s filled with narrow, cobblestone streets and has something of the feel of an Italian hill town. My aunt lives in a beautiful house way up on a hill — to climb her actual street you really have to gird your muscles and get [...]
Filed under: food, kids/family life, travels | Tagged: San Miguel de Allende | 3 Comments »
Posted on December 30, 2008 by Moonraking
We were going to depart San Miguel the way we’d come: some combination of buses and cabs. San Miguel de Allende is about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Mexico City and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get there. In retrospect, given how tiring the trip was overall, it probably would’ve [...]
Filed under: travels | 1 Comment »
Posted on December 23, 2008 by Moonraking
We are in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for the holidays, staying in my aunt’s house.
Christmas is a big deal here. There are pinatas and other holiday decorations all over the town. And there’s a neat tradition of nightly Posadas over the 9 (?) nights up to Xmas. There’s one big one for the town [...]
Filed under: kids/family life, travels | 4 Comments »
Posted on August 10, 2008 by Moonraking
Our final stop on this summer tour was to visit our friends Melissa and Steve in the Adirondacks, an area I don’t know well at all. They recently acquired a pretty amazing place, a former 9-bedroom hotel from the late nineteenth century on a peninsula on Raquette Lake, the site of one of the [...]
Filed under: travels | Tagged: Adirondacks | 1 Comment »
Posted on August 3, 2008 by Moonraking
After writing the last post, we did get some fishing action: the easy kind, mackerel off a pier. We went to the very pretty (aptly named) Pretty Marsh harbor dock. As one of the other people fishing pointed out to us, the mackerel were feeding, swarming in schools. You’d see what looked [...]
Filed under: D.I.Y., food, travels | Tagged: fishing | 3 Comments »