Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that I’m never quite sure what to do with. Of course the four-day weekend and the food are nice, but I always end up feeling like a failure if I don’t do some sort of Norman Rockwell feast with friends and/or family.

I typically do my holiday traveling over Christmas, seldom leaving me with any money and/or vacation time to go anywhere for Thanksgiving. My closest family is several hundred miles away, and although I have a few friends here in NYC, they’re either out of town themselves, or they’re not close enough friends that I can simply invite myself to whatever they have going on.

So, I ended up going to Niko’s, a Mediterranean restaurant I really like at 76th and Broadway on the Upper West Side. I’ve been to this restaurant several times before and have never been disappointed. I got their Thanksgiving special, which included: salad, bread, roasted leg of lamb, potatoes, stuffing, dressing, veggies, cranberries, pumpkin pie, half a carafe of wine, and coffee. It was a nice meal, but it would have been nice to not be eating alone. Better luck next year, I guess.

Speaking of holiday travels, I’ll be visiting my parents in Raleigh, North Carolina for Christmas. I normally dread going down there (once you’ve seen one Wal-Mart store, you’ve pretty much seen them all), but it’s been a few years since I’ve been there, and it should be a nice change of pace from New York City for a few days.

Hopefully I’ll be able to survive the 9-hour train ride on Amtrak each way. Normally I love trains, but my last few experiences with Amtrak have been less than pleasant; more often than not it feels like a Greyhound bus on rails.

Other than that, I’ve been busy getting this new blog and website put together. I’m pretty happy with the way the blog looks and works, but I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the Photo Galleries. Right now I’ve got them set up as a separate blog with a WordPress plug-in, but I’m mulling the idea of incorporating them into this blog so that people don’t have to register twice to leave comments. And I haven’t even begun thinking about how to do the Portfolio section yet… Stay tuned.