Man, except for the subway story, I haven't written a substantive journal entry here for a while. All these things keep happening, and I keep wanting to write about them, but then other things come up. It just goes to show that, no matter my best intentions to get to it eventually, if I don't write about an event right away, it never gets written about.

So here is a quick rundown of all the recent things I wanted to write about but didn't:

• The BBC documentary crew who interviewed me for television here at our place.
  
• My dad's trip all over Eastern Europe.
  
• Laura's new job.
  
• The splendid Thanksgiving we had with Shana and Margee and Emmy and Liz and Cory.
  
• The part-time work I just got, temporarily, at Sesame Street.
  
• The fire that destroyed a ramshackle garage five doors down from here.
  
• The postcard we got from our friend Scott on a trip in China.
  
• How much we both loved Ocean's 11, and how much we both liked but didn't love Harry Potter.
  
• The entire actual novel I just received from a friend in the body of an email message. (Too cool!)
  
• The eeriness of visiting downtown Manhattan at night, with that gaping hole in the skyline.
  

There's more stuff that I'm sure I'm forgetting—and writing news too, although for that you'll have to visit missionaryman.

The thing is, we took pictures of the fire and everything, and I hate to let them go to waste. So here are some pix of the garage burning down the street from us:

You can't see it very well, but there were three or four big fire engines there, including a hook-and-ladder truck, and twenty or more of New York's bravest.

Now, this last picture is what was left of the garage the next day. The burned-out vehicle used to be a BMW SUV. Ouch! But fortunately that was about the most serious casualty.

The white building to the left, though, had just barely been rehabbed, and the new tenants had just moved in. The fire really messed up the top-floor apartment, though the lower floors were pretty much ruined by water damage from the firefighting efforts. The firemen dragged hoses in through the front door of the house, then sprayed water from the second-floor windows down onto the roof of the garage. It was a surreal sight.

No one was hurt, but man, is this city is seeming like a dangerous place to live lately!