Sean O’Grady and I spent last Sunday and Monday walking the streets of San Francisco and the paths of the Presidio, both of us equipped with cameras. Sean’s was in infrared (he does the blog: The Infrared Flaneur at http://tuckabold.blogspot.com) and mine in just plain digital RGB. On Sunday we walked out of his apartment building, past a man holding a green apple, past even a green garbage can, and down the hill to pretty chaos. Just past chaos, as one would certainly expect, there was this ramp from which you took, if you dared, the leap of faith into order. He didn’t, Sean did, and he came up out of the ocean blue listening to an organ play waves on its several pipes.

On Monday we entered the Presidio, an old military installation that is now a national park. We came upon the strangest tennis court either of us had ever seen. A sign told us to Go Higher, so we did.

The first week in May Jeannette and I flew to New York City to watch migrating warblers land in Central Park on their way south. We saw 33 species we had never seen before, including 16 new warblers. We got WOW looks at Blackburnian, Canada, Hooded, and many others. The family of birders is only slightly less interesting than families of birds. They pass along information about where birds highly-desirable-to-see can be found. They even have each other’s phone numbers and call when a rare sighting flies into the oaks.

We also made our way around parts of the city, taking pictures of our favorite skyscrapers.

I am particularly interested in “complicatedness.” Typically we walk everywhere, taking an avenue at a time and walking perhaps a couple of miles of its length. Lexington Avenue quickly bacame my favorite, for its ability to mix and mingle cars and cabs and fearless pedestrians. One of the birders told us that she liked tourists, but their propensity for obeying traffic lights was maddening.

We spent February of this year in Berlin. We rented a flat in an old unrenovated apartment building on Planckstrasse in what was East Berlin. We were two blocks from the Friedrichstrasse Train Station. Next to it was the Traenenpalast, or Palace of Tears, where West Berliners visiting relatives in East Berlin used to gather to return home. On our first day in town we went to see what progress had been made on the demolition of the Palace of the Republic. I wanted to photograph it before it was completely torn down. We then crossed into the park known as the Marx-Engels Forum, where there is perhaps the most effective public sculpture ever put up by the GDR (in Geman DDR). We often went walking at night through the city, when city lights made somewhat ominous Berlin’s old classical-style buildings.

Last month Sean, Stephanie, Rupert, and I parked at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and walked out to Land’s End. We found a labyrinth there. We also wanted to visit Cliff House, and we found a giant camera obscura there.

Please visit this section of the website for regular updates on David’s activities.