Just before I went on vacation, I moved into a new place. A friend from undergrad at Geneseo and I are renting the whole house (we have shared a house before in Genseo, so he knows what he's getting into). I now have a separate room for private teaching and a nice big kitchen. The house is at the end of a dead end street in a diverse city neighborhood. Across the street is a housing complex so there are always kids wandering around. I no longer have to stack instrument cases on top of one another to get to the bathroom...

I spent seven days in Novia Scotia, a vacation with my family. It was an amazing trip; the weather was gorgeous, the air was salty and crisp, and the water was 40 freaking degrees (I went swimming and it hurt). I grew up near the ocean and spent weeks of my childhood summers at my grandparent's seaside cottage, so living in Rochester leaves me frequently pining for the sea. Lake beaches seem tame to me; they don't have the raw expanse or mystery of the ocean.



This is a picture of the Bay of Fundy, which has the largest tides in the world. In some places on the bay, the tides rise and fall more that fifty vertical feet. We went to a beach along the bay and in three hours the tide recessed close to a mile. We literally walked on the ocean floor. I took the picture above at Cape Split, which has high cliffs and extends into the middle of the bay. The view from the top is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.