This here is George Washington, the first president of the United States (1789 to 1797), and today is his day. On the third Monday of every February the 'Muricans celebrate Washington's Birthday, a federal holiday primarily in his honour but also an occasion to celebrate all presidents, and their general ineffectiveness and questionable decision-making.

Taking a look down the list of past US presidents, it really is a collection of very unattractive men. John Adams here, who succeeded Washington in 1797, takes my pick for the best head of hair.

Even Abraham Lincoln here, the country's 16th president (1861 until his assassination in April 1865) and among its best-known, was not a good-looking dude hehe!

One notable omission from that list is a woman (and up until recently, a coloured man). Well that may change in 2016. US presidents are allowed to serve only two four-year terms in office. Obama was re-elected for his second at the end of 2012 (commencing January 2013) so in 2017 he's out. Hillary Clinton here, wife of former president Bill Clinton, is widely predicted to be in the running to take over. Lord help us.

Recognise this? If you were a Breaking Bad fan you will. And you'll of course recognise Walter White there, played by Bryan Cranston (probably better known prior to Breaking Bad as the dad in sitcom Malcolm in the Middle).

When I got back from Zurich a few weeks ago I found this flyer for a Broadway show, starring none other than the man himself!

All The Way is a political play following Lyndon B. Johnson's first year in office as US President in 1963/64, a role he assumed upon the assassination of President Kennedy. The star-studded cast was headed up by Cranston as LBJ. To his right is another face you may recognise - Michael McKean, who pops up from time to time in various movies and TV shows. Anyway, Kristina and I went to check it out tonight. We were clearly just two of many Breaking Bad fans in the audience based on the reception Cranston received before and after the show. Very cool :)

This here is The Hurricane Club on Park Avenue South. As far as I can figure it's simply a venue and bar for hire. As part of her job as a travel agent, Kristina often attends random marketing events for various international hotels, resorts, cruises and the like. This one was a launch party for Breathless Resorts and Spas. Plus-ones are usually not invited to these things, but it's not hard to smuggle yourself in ;)

Notice the tapestries all over the walls - good stuff! As well as the (piss-poor) DJ, there was also a sax player wandering around. Kristina's workmate stole his hat.

Kristina usually stumbles home steaming-drunk from these events, and I can see why. Two open bars serving virtually anything you want for free is a recipe for a good hangover the next day. The coconuts here were filled with rum and so forth, and frankly they were addictive. Then they rolled out this huge pig, and bloody hell I haven't had pork this good in a long time!

And there was this setup. A dozen flasks filled with liquids of various fragrances, each one supposedly meant to achieve something. For example this green one here, gardenia, is supposed to help with memory recall. Elsewhere there was a cherry flask that was supposedly a female aphrodisiac, and a cinnamon flask that was supposedly a male aphrodisiac hehe.

The idea is you're given a breathing tube with two nozzles to shove up your nose, and you then hook the tube up to a flask and breathe as normal. Brilliant! I had a good snort on the gardenia there to give my memory a boost, and the cinnamon male aphrodisiac. I don't think either of them worked ;)

A month ago I was in Switzerland for work, and now I'm being called back to London for a couple weeks for more work stuff. I'm a travelin' man! During the last big snow storm a week ago I mentioned I'd been able to get out on the bike just once in six weeks due to the snow, ice, and arctic temperatures. Well now it's twice in seven weeks, but even so that's utterly piss-poor by my standards and my legs are itching! When my speedo here doesn't detect any movement in about ten days it puts itself to sleep. Before now I don't think it's slept at all since I got to New York 20 months ago! Maybe I'll hire one of the Boris Bikes in London and go nuts :) Anyway, I'm flying out tonight, and will be back in the land of the Queen in time for breakfast tomorrow.

Right, made it to London and my hotel in one piece. I'm staying at The Montcalm at The Brewery near the financial district of central London. I turned up about 9am and could tell that was somewhat earlier than they would prefer. They struggled to find a room that was ready for me, and eventually gave up and just upgraded me instead hehe. Last time I was in London for work I also stayed here (convenient location) and I'd forgotten how 'nice' this place is. In fact it's a little too nice for me. I'm a simple guy - I like simple things, but here everybody makes a fuss of you.

Two well-dressed gentlemen stand by the front door to open it for you with a "Good morning sir. Have a nice day sir. Can I get you an umbrella sir? Can I wipe your arse for you sir?" When I arrived, the lady at reception immediately offered me a hot towel. What do I want a hot towel for, is my face dirty? When she realised there were no rooms ready yet, she asked me to take a seat for a few minutes while she sorted something out. Almost immediately after sitting down, another chick just sort of materialized out of thin air with a big tray of coffee for me. She painstakingly laid it all out on the table in front of me: poured the coffee, placed a little thing of milk, neatly placed a little napkin on my saucer followed by two sachets of sugar, two of raw sugar, one of artificial sweetener, and then some biscuits. By the time she was done the coffee was almost cold!

Once they'd found a room for me, reception lady motioned for someone to help me with my one whole piece of luggage. I think his name was Ramen, like the noodles. She also sent someone off to fetch me an iron since the room doesn't have one included. The hotel is the former site of Britain's first purpose-built mass-production brewery, dating back to around 1750 and closing in 1976. It's a beautiful heritage-listed building and an utterly confusing maze of rooms, stairs and corridors. It therefore took a while for Ramen to show me to my room, giving him ample time to educate me on the building's history. The whole time I was feeling a bit awkward because I knew he was obviously hoping to receive a small tip for his troubles (albeit rare by UK standards), but I hadn't raided a cash machine yet and didn't have any money hehe. When we eventually found my room, some doofus was standing there waiting for us with an iron and an ironing board hahaha! Why not just let yourself in and leave it somewhere?! I suspect he was perhaps expecting a tip too but left empty handed. Ramen Noodles then proceeded to bang on about every last detail of my room. Here's the air conditioning, here's the light switch, there's the toilet and blah blah bloody blah! By now I'd had enough of all this in my sleep-deprived state and really just wanted everyone to piss off and leave me alone. So I asked him where the nearest cash machine is because I have no money (i.e. don't expect a tip). Well that soon got rid of him ;)

When he was finally gone I noticed this huge window into the bathroom! That's a little weird isn't it? You can make yourself comfortable on the bed and enjoy a front row seat to whatever your significant other is doing in there. There is a blind you can lower but still, I couldn't figure that one out. I later realised it's so you can watch TV (on the wall in front of the bed) while you're taking a bath or whatever. There's a speaker in the bathroom ceiling that's hooked up to the TV. That's all fine in theory but in reality the window just steams up so you can't see a damn thing anyway, unless you keep wiping it which just creates a big smeary mess. So yes, that's my hotel.

The heading says it all. It's been a long week of work and catching up with friends, including folk I've worked with closely from New York but never actually met hehe. This is the view looking north from the 40th floor of the Heron Tower in central London. It was still under construction when I left London in 2011.

From exotic sushi to exotic desserts and far too much to drink in between, I'm getting fatter by the day! Another week of this and I'll start looking like that dessert.

The view from my office in London. Ugh. Looking forward to getting back to my view in New York!

So it's been another long week of work and catching up folk I haven't seen in an age. In fact, apart from last Monday night and the one prior, I've been out on the lash every night since I got here. I think I've downed more booze in the last two weeks than I did all last year. This here is The Royal Oak in Marlow, a typically-gorgeous wee country pub outside of London that Katie and I ventured out to last weekend. I really do miss these!

Last night I was taken to this place, Bounce - a bar calling itself the "home of ping pong". Apparently the modern-day rules of table tennis were drawn up and patented on this site in 1901. Yup, despite how good the Asians are at it today, the game actually originated in England. The bar itself is massive and full of drunk people going nuts on ping pong tables hahaha! Interesting.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I board a plane back to New York. It initially felt really quite weird being back in London again, and although that eventually wore off, and although London really is a fantastic city and a small part of me does miss it, the bulk of me does not. It was great for the few years that I lived here but I'm happy to have moved on, and frankly I really am missing New York. And my wife of course ;)

This is Boeing's 777-200 - the same plane that disappeared two days ago en route to Beijing, China from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I first heard about all of this yesterday morning UK-time when I woke up to catch my own flight back to New York on a Boeing 777-300 (same family of aircraft but slightly larger). Not the best thing to read about en route to the airport but hey. I then get to the airport and find out that, for whatever reason, our plane has been replaced with a 777-200, i.e. the same plane hehe. Good thing I'm not a nervous flyer ;) Because the 200 has fewer seats than the 300, I was asked if I would volunteer to be bumped to a later flight in return for compensation, which I agreed to but in the end it wasn't necessary. The latest news is they still have no idea where the Malaysian Airlines plane is or what the hell happened to it. Scary shit!

Spring is in the air! After one of the worst winters on record, the country is slowly warming up and we're all getting back on our bikes and feet.

Including me. I average close to 4,000km per year on the bike (around the 2,500 mile mark). However, the last 1,000km alone have taken an entire half-year to achieve, such was the winter. I'll make up for it this summer :)

At 9:15am this morning, someone near the intersection of 116th Street and Park Avenue in the Upper Manhattan neighbourhood of East Harlem called the gas company to report a strong smell of gas. 15 minutes later at 9:30am, while the gas company was en route, a colossal explosion ripped through the hood causing two adjacent five-storey, 100-year-old apartment buildings to completely collapse.

This is about 40 blocks north of where Kristina and I live. I went for a look-see (of course) after work but could only get within a couple blocks of it. Although it was eight hours later, the smell of smoke in the air was acute and several folk were wearing breathing masks. So far three people are confirmed dead, dozens injured, and several unaccounted for.

This is the site of yesterday's gas explosion in East Harlem. A block and a half is as close as I could get to it on the ground.

Up in the air though, the train lines running in and out of Grand Central Station run right past the site. As you can see, there's nothing left of the two apartment buildings that collapsed. The explosion itself, felt for several blocks and knocking items off nearby supermarket shelves, was so immense that it has created a massive sinkhole in the ground. Local residents had apparently been complaining about a smell of gas for weeks before someone finally called the gas company out. Shortly after taking these shots I got a push alert on my phone saying an eighth body has just been pulled from the rubble.

Out on the bikes with Kristina today, lapping up this weather that borders on spring-like. We followed the northern half of the Manhattan Waterfront Greenway, part of which actually heads inland from the water (because the full waterfront loop around the island isn't fully complete yet) and right past Wednesday's gas explosion in East Harlem. I didn't notice this when I was checking this out on Thursday but a bunch of vehicles that were parked right in the path of the blast have been moved under the adjacent rail bridge here. This SUV was parked out front with two detectives sitting in it (NYPD or FBI, depending on who you ask) on some sort of stakeout.

Believe it or not they both survived and somehow managed to pull themselves out, but their coffee and doughnuts went everywhere.

The one on the right used to be an Acura (Honda) MDX. The one on the left is completely unrecognisable.

From there we carried on, detouring from the Greenway a bit which involved a steep climb up about 200 steps from one road to another, much to Kristina's displeasure.

Getting on towards the tip of Manhattan in the Washington Heights area, this is Sylvan Terrace lined with antique wooden row houses. Due to New York City fire codes, wooden buildings are extremely rare nowadays amidst the concrete jungle that is the Big Apple.

Sylvan Terrace leads up to the Morris-Jumel Mansion - the oldest house in the borough of Manhattan. The mansion was built in 1765. In 1776, General George Washington used the mansion as his temporary headquarters during the American Revolution. Washington went on to be the first president of the new United States of America. The mansion later hosted many other distinguished visitors, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams - themselves all future presidents. Today, the house is lavishly decorated with period furnishings, and is open to the public as a historic house museum.

This (tiny) photo stolen from Wikipedia shows the mansion up on the hill overlooking the former Polo Grounds in 1905.

And this is what it overlooks today hehe. Lovely.

From there we carried on again along the Greenway around the northern tip of Manhattan and back down along the Hudson River. And speaking of George Washington, this is the George Washington Bridge - the world's busiest motor vehicle bridge carrying approximately 102 million vehicles per year and named after the man himself. Plonked right underneath it is the Little Red Lighthouse, the last surviving lighthouse on Manhattan Island. It was built in 1921 as part of a project to improve Hudson River navigational aids. When the George Washington Bridge was completed in 1931 however, the lighthouse was considered obsolete as the bridge pier was illuminated. The lighthouse subsequently ceased operation in 1947. Bike rides in New York are always full of random points of interest :)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, from me and my Guinness (complete with shamrock on top).

Protests outside my office building in Midtown Manhattan are not uncommon given the number of companies with offices in the building. At least one of them manages to piss somebody off sooner or later. Today this mob of campaigners set up camp out front, complete with a blow-up woman with Russian President Vladimir Putin's face stuck on it, in protest at one such company for its apparent involvement with the whole Crimea situation in Ukraine. After I took this photo and wandered off to grab some lunch, I was hastily followed by the two women on the far left. When they caught up with me they started speaking to me in Russian. I said "No Russian sorry", to which their facial expressions and general body language suggested they didn't believe me. This went on for a bit before one of them finally asked "Why are you in New York?" "I live here." "Where do you work?" "Up there", pointing to my building. "Where are you going?" "To feed my face." "Why were you taking photo?" "Because my wife and I have been following the Crimea situation so I took a photo of your little protest for her." Given the weird confrontation unfolding, telling them the photo is for some random website probably wouldn't have gone down too well. I showed them this one and only photo on my iPhone and their demeanour suddenly went from one of suspicion to one of apology. They went on to say "The Russian government plays games" hehe, and they apparently had some 'issues' earlier today, whatever that means. I never thought of myself as looking like a Russian spy but there you go. After all that we actually ended up talking for a while. They are Ukrainian and completely opposed to Russia's interference. I imagine I would be too.

Just another conference call at work :) So then, March 20th today, officially the first day of spring after what has been the seventh snowiest winter in New York City's history. Close to 60 inches of the white stuff has fallen in Central Park since the start of December, and it snowed on 24 days or about 26% of the winter season. There were 29 days at or below freezing, with the coldest temperature recorded in Central Park as -15 C (4 F) on January 7th. And guess what I was doing that day - riding my bike around town hahaha! Now, bring on the heat!

Getting Cycle Barbie here ready for the Five Boro Bike Tour in May (which I did myself last year) - 40 miles of fun time through all five boroughs of the Big Apple. We managed 30 today in time for sunset, over to New Jersey and back.

They call it March Madness, and mad it is. College Basketball is a big deal over here, and in fact it has a larger following in some part of the US than even the professional NBA league. Every March sees the start of the annual NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Championship, a single-elimination tournament featuring 68 college basketball teams to determine the national championship team. It's all over the TV, it's all over the news - you can't get away from it. The tournament was created in 1939, and over the course of two-and-a-half weeks those 68 teams are whittled down to just one.

Kristina's brothers are mad for this stuff, and every year they get a bunch of folks together to create a pool with each of us contributing brackets at $20 a pop (with 1st, 2nd, and 3rd in the pool at the end of the tournament winning a cut of that). And wouldn't you know it, after the first two rounds with 16 teams remaining, look whose bracket is in first-equal place out 25. Yup, the foreign kid - me ;)

Check this out! This here is an interactive photo taken from the spire of One World Trade Center at 1,792 feet (546m) in the air in Lower Manhattan, showing stunning 360-degree views of the New York City metropolitan area.

In related news, a 16-year-old was arrested last week after sneaking into the World Trade Center construction site through a hole in the fence at 4am on Sunday morning. He took an elevator to the 88th floor, climbed the remaining flight of stairs to the very top floor (104th) past a sleeping security guard (who has since been fired), accessed the rooftop, and climbed a ladder all the way to the antenna. He spent a couple hours up there taking photos hahaha! He was finally spotted by a construction worker on his way back down. More info here.

This is One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, as seen from the 9/11 Memorial where the Twin Towers once stood. It's the tallest building in the western hemisphere, and it's in the news again.

It made news headlines last week when a 16-year-old was arrested for sneaking into the complex in the middle of the night and making it all the way to the rooftop, where he spent the next two hours taking photos. Well these are not those photos. They are stills taken from the helmet-mounted camera of a BASE jumper, when he and two of his chums jumped from the top of the tower last September before vanishing into the night. Police have spent five months trying to find them, and now they have after the three posted footage of their jump to YouTube here. More info here.

In April 2011, I ran the Paris Marathon. Although I intended to, I never ended up training for it, at all (combination of work and enjoying the short time I was living in Paris instead). I did a lot of competitive running during high school, but nothing more than 8km (5 mile) cross country races. Regardless, and like a lot of folk, I'd always wanted to run a marathon, just to say I had and to see what sort of time I could do. Despite the lack (or complete absence) of targeted training, I do a lot of cycling, and physical fitness isn't a problem. I ended up completing the half in 1:50, and running on until about the 32km-mark (20 miles) when the legs couldn't take it anymore. Cycling is one thing, but running is altogether something else, and the legs just couldn't keep it up any longer. I walked all but the final mile when I forced them to run across the finish line for a final time of 4:49. Painful stuff, and I couldn't walk at all for the next two days hahaha!

Last November I watched the New York City Marathon as it passed by our apartment, and it hit me as I watched everybody struggle past that I really wanted to be among them. Unlike the Paris Marathon though, the New York Marathon is bloody difficult to get into. There is a lottery system however, which was my only realistic shot. I entered back in January, and just now received the email above confirming my name has been pulled out of the hat :) Now to put a training plan together. I haven't decided on a realistic target time yet but I'm tentatively thinking 3:30. If I can pull it off I'll look like these two birds at the finish line. If not, I'll look like that grumpy one on the left.