It started as a pipe dream a few years back, and slowly became a challenge: take a week-long trip, just the two of us, to celebrate our tenth anniversary in the summer of 2015. Would the kids (and more importantly, would we) be ready for a week apart? Where would we go that was exotic […]

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I’ve always enjoyed the extra challenge of a trail race, and some of my favorite races were the annual trail races I ran in California as part of the Xterra series. I ran the Leatherman’s Loop in April, but I had yet to run a trail race in Connecticut. I read about a race called […]

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Another weekend, another race, right? These towns aren’t going to run themselves… A quick scan of the spreadsheet of Connecticut races on the group’s website yielded a hit in Plainville, about a 40 minute drive up Rt. 8. I’d never been there, or really heard of the place, but when I arrived, it was clear […]

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After Milford, I felt like I was on a roll. Another weekend? I’ll try another race, this one in a town I’d never visited before, New London. The start and finish were in the picturesque center of town, with great old buildings and the war memorial. You can never really tell with the added population […]

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After seeing a number of “Run 169 Towns” shirts at Mt. Washington, I checked up on the group and thought it would be a fun thing to do. This race on the fourth of July was the first one nearby in a town I’d never run before, so we all headed over to Milford to […]

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After running my first Mt. Washington Road Race on the 21st, I thought I’d try to keep things going and sign up for a local 5K later on in the month. I’d never been to Derby, though it’s not far from Woodbridge, and we were free that weekend, so it fit the bill. It was […]

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I remember this race mostly because it was the occasion of Grace’s first fun run. She ran with me around the track at Cheshire High School, mostly recovered from her traumatic run-in with the costumed mascot, and got a giant t-shirt to remember it by. For my part, it was an uneventful, fairly sluggish 5K, […]

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Preparing for the start of the Mt. Washington Road Race this weekend, I saw a number of runners with nice-looking shirts featuring the outline of the state of Connecticut, silhouettes of runners, and the words “RUN 169 TOWNS, DEBTICONN.ORG” I looked up the address when I got home, and discovered wonderfully ramshackle website for the […]

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Through some miracle of email magic and friends in high places, Dad managed to get us both into the Mt. Washington Road Race this year, despite us both having failed in the increasingly competitive lottery entry system. I had been running all winter, thanks to our treadmill, but my workouts had been shorter, and less […]

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We’re enjoying the last day of our brief trip to Alaska today before we head to Seattle for Memorial Day Weekend tomorrow. Though both girls have been here before, in some ways this trip has felt like the first time they’ve really experienced the travel, the excitement, and the beauty of Alaska. It was Lucy’s […]

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The first Nitrate Picture Show was a good excuse to return to Rochester for the first time in seven years, now “only” a six-hour drive from New Haven. I drove with a couple of Film & Media Studies grad students also heading to the festival, and it wasn’t too bad. Rochester seemed the same as […]

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A year ago, I attended my first FIAF Congress in Skopje, Macedonia. This year, the proceedings took place in Sydney and Canberra, Australia, and as actual affiliates of the group, we were entitled to send a representative. Having been to New Zealand twice, I was intrigued to visit Australia, and though I saw what seemed […]

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And there you have it. Forty years old, with my girls, their forty gifts, and the thought that as tough as 40 was to swallow, don’t even get me started on 50…

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We’re nearly there… This photo was taken in May of last year, at the International Federation of Film Archives Congress in Skopje, Macedonia, as I presented the results of some voting during my first year at the Congress. It feels like yesterday that I was a student, reading about events like this, but there you […]

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One of the first photos Grace ever took, as we sat in the office in West L.A. She was holding my SLR, which seemed like it weighed about half what she did, and she struggled to hold it up and get her finger on the shutter at the same time. I feel old in this […]

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