ThomasLitchford

Blogging is likely to be quiet for a few days as I visit with my family and friends and try to come to grips with turning 30.

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Friday morning, I was working on the computer when Danielle said she thought it would be a good idea to drive out to Waverly, New York, to see her grandparents. I hummed and hawed and said, Sure, call them and ask if it’s OK.
Of course it was OK. They hadn’t seen Sean since March. So [...]

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What is it about August? Is it the heat, the humidity, that just saps away motivation and ambition?
Newport is incredibly full of end-of-summer vacationers trying frantically to relax before the kids are back in school. I can see it in their faces: an urgent need to maintain the schedule of fun, to Fit It All [...]

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My latest Milspouse blog post is up.
I’ve known for a long time that I needed to have a will drawn up, but, as usual, I put it off. Beyond needing a lawyer, I had no idea what was involved, and, hey, lawyers are expensive, aren’t they? After Sean was born, though, I couldn’t keep putting [...]

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My latest Milspouse.com post is available: Champion of the Back Deck:
We have indoor cats for a reason: we want to keep them safe. They’re less likely to get hit by a car, get fleas, get into fights, or get sick—in fact, I’m thinking about following the same policy with our son Sean.

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Yesterday my doctor told me I had to ease up on my coffee intake. The conversation went something like this:
Doc: I bet you drink a lot of coffee.
Me: That depends on what you consider a lot.
Doc: How many cups would you say you drink in a day?
Me: Well, how big is a standard cup of [...]

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Deciding which of New York’s bookstores to visit should not have been difficult. There are a lot of choices—Barnes & Noble, Borders, Housing Works, St. Mark’s, Gotham Book Mart—but the one to see is the one we (kind of) stumbled on: Strand Books.
We arrived in the city with a long mental list of potential things [...]

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My latest post, Ground Zero, is up at Milspouse.com.
When we arrived we weren’t sure that what we were looking at was actually Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. First we saw the PATH terminal and a fence. We couldn’t see the site itself until we walked across a footbridge that overlooked [...]

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The most concise explanation I have read this morning of why New York is sometimes called Gotham is from a letter to the editor of the Times from 1989, shortly after Michael Keaton first put the badass into Batman (honestly, Adam West’s Batman seems like a total wuss by comparison). Basically, Gotham is a reference [...]

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Much has been written about Manhattan, and New York City in general, but after visiting the city last week for the first time, I feel compelled to offer some thoughts.
I’ve always been intimidated by New York. It holds no romance for me, only fear. It is the Big City of all big cities. The way [...]

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