Snowy Clement and Hartford

White covers Trinity’s campus and accents the Neo-Gothic architecture, but the modernist skyline of Hartford in the distance perpetually suggests what else might architecturally be. Though I love twentieth century architecture, there’s little argument that it would have been the wrong choice for a small liberal arts college. It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that many of these old-looking buildings are less than 100 years old; in essence, they were built to be old-fashioned from the start. Most east-coast schools are a sort of academic Disneyland—one constructed long enough ago that we forgot about the artifice and now see only authenticity.

Snowy Clement and Hartford

LSC and Hartford

With Hartford’s skyline looking on in the background, the brutalist facade of Trinity College’s LSC matches the carefully graded dirt of its adjacent quad before a thick layer of new sod was applied.

LSC and Hartford

Exam Dawn

Waking pre-dawn to be sure an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant and a Statistical Mechanics exam are both finished when they need to be turns out to have some upsides—namely, this gigantic panorama of an incredible Hartford dawn. (This one is definitely worth clicking through to Flickr and further clicking to zoom to 100% scale.)

Exam Dawn

Connecticut’s Marine Layer

This is a sight I haven’t seen since I lived in the Bay Area: a layer of low-lying clouds caused by a temperature inversion that look remarkably like the marine layer. Though I know the origins aren’t the same in the Central Valley of Connecticut, that mix of perfectly clear sky and rolling clouds brought me back in time and made rising at dawn worth it.

Connecticut's Marine Layer

Lunch on an Amsterdam Canal

I was semi-impressed to see the pigeons waiting patiently far away from this lunch-enjoyer in Amsterdam, but then I saw the green writing as his feet. While I’m sure that simple graffiti or utility markings are the true meaning of the lines, I like to imagine instead that they represent some kind of arcane invocation that protects his sandwich from avian interference.

Lunch on an Amsterdam Canal