On Thanksgiving the city was eerily quiet. You could have frolicked around in the middle of Beacon Street and no one would have cared. It was so quiet that as we got ready to catch a train to my parents' house I had a foreboding that maybe the T wasn't running after all, contrary to what the papers said. It was in fact running and it got us to South Station quickly enough, since hardly anyone got on at most of the stops.

South Station, however, was nearly as crowded as rush hour on a weekday. You could tell the difference, though, by a more relaxed attitude and less frantic rushing around. The briefcases of the work week were gone, and had been replaced by, oddly enough, baked goods. I had thought Cynthia and I would look funny carrying a box of postre de tres leches, a magically delicious Honduran cake, on the train with us, but when the train was called a throng of people holding cakes and pies made their way out to the platform. Desserts were everywhere: on seats, on laps, in the overhead luggage racks. Everyone had baked in the city, it seems, and everyone was taking the products of their labors to the scattered suburbs for admission to Thanksgiving dinner.

Surprise! In an astonishingly successful attempt to not get any schoolwork done over break, I have redesigned my site, switched to Greymatter, and made the main pages mostly standards-compliant. Honestly, I never would have anticipated that my Cataloging class would involve so much about web standards and XHTML and so forth, but it got me all inspired and now look what we have. Hopefully this will look good on more different screen sizes than the previous design, and be a bit more elegant too.

On that note, I would love any feedback you may have about how this looks on your computer in particular. I designed it in Firefox 1.0.7 while looking at a 1024 x 768 resolution 17" screen in Windows XP, and I've also checked to see that it looks good in IE 6.0.29 on the same machine. If you have something different, please let me know if it looks okay or if anything is significantly different than in these screenshots: index top | index bottom | archives top | archives bottom | photo galleries | single post top | single post bottom .

The archives are up to date and all the recent posts are living there, so if you wanted to read or check comments on anything I wrote recently (robots, wives, list of things I haven't written about) that is where to go. In other news, I've added a page for the various photo galleries that I've made so that you don't have to search through archives for them.

That is all for now. Enjoy!