This is a typical cross-street in our neck of the New York City woods - the Upper East Side. We moved here in August last year, but I've never actually put up any photos of it. So, here it is.

Where we are in the far east of the neighbourhood, it's all large apartment buildings (lots of bricks), some nicer than others, but all stupidly expensive.

The flower beds lining the street are replanted from time to time with something appropriate for the season. Here we've got an autumn motif going on.

This is Third Avenue, one of eight north-south avenues running through the hood. Third in particular is lined with a myriad of diners, cafes and restaurants, so come here for food. Stick to Second Avenue to get shit-faced in its myriad of bars, and First Avenue for the more necessary things in life such as hardware stores, gift shops, tailors and the like.

Heading west from Third Avenue, the apartment buildings start to thin out and townhouses start to take over.

For any fans of the 2006 movie The Devil Wears Prada, this was Miranda's townhouse. The Upper East Side is one of New York's most affluent neighbourhoods, and this is a good example of why that is. Go check out the movie to get an idea of how plush some of these are inside!

Many of these properties are worth some number of millions of dollars. All that money, and no front yard. Probably no back yard either. That's gotta suck! They make do though, like this for example.

And they all get into the Halloween spirit!

Park Avenue is lined with nothing but mammoth apartment buildings and the occasional hotel, probably all of them with awesome rooftops! Our building's rooftop is off-limits according to the sign on the door (not that it stopped me going up there for a look), but the view from just five storeys up isn't too impressive in this city.

Then we come to Madison Avenue, lined with all of your high end shopping 'needs'. Speaking of Prada, here it is...

There's Gucci across the street...

Just up the street is D&G...

And across from that is Ralph Lauren. You name it and it'll most likely be along here somewhere. The tourists with more dollars than sense go to Fifth Avenue; those in the know stick to Madison in the Upper East Side.

Finally we hit Central Park, marking the western border of the Upper East Side. The park partially makes up not having your own yard :)

Here's a man on a horse.

On Fifth Avenue alongside Central Park we stumbled on yet another parade for something or other. There seems to be a parade every other weekend for one thing or another.

I have no idea what this particular parade was all about, but it was clearly something for the Hispanics.

We finished our little walk at a random hippy-dippy coffee shop, selling every type of coffee and tea there is. So anyway, that's a taste of where we've been living for the last 14 months, and likely will until we eventually leave the city.

Kristina and I fly out this morning for the 12-hour haul to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, home to the tallest building in the world, a man-made island group in the shape of a palm tree, and sand - a lot of sand! We arrive early Thursday morning local time, and depart again exactly a week later. About this time last year, Emirates were offering dirt-cheap return flights between New York and Dubai for travel agents, but we weren't in a position to take advantage of them at the time. Fast forward a year, they've put out the same offer, and now we're going! A quick check of the weather is pretty much as expected - I don't think it changes much :)

After a total of 26 hours on a plane for the round trip, we're pretty bloody sick of flying but Dubai was definitely worth it! We got stuck into the culture, the religion, the sand, and the affluence which included drinking 24-karat gold flakes in our coffee (true story!). All of the photos, videos, and stories to follow from what is a very unique destination. Incidentally, the shot on the right is a mountain range we flew over in the west of Iran, and somewhere in the distance over there is Iraq. Trippy.

Autumn is in full swing up here in the north! The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which backs into Central Park, has a rooftop bar that is only open during the summer. Today was the last day it was open for the season so Kristina and I went up to check out the fall colours. The tall, skinny building on the far-left is 432 Park Avenue. It's still under construction but at 426 metres (1,396 feet) it will be the third-tallest building in the US and the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere. Apartment prices start at around $17 million, and top out at over $82 million. Damn! For the rest of us, here is a stunning 360-degree view from up there, and here is what $82 million buys you.

Over the last few days, work has been underway to set up Central Park for the finish of the New York City Marathon this Sunday. While biking over the finish line on my way to work this morning I found some sort of presentation going on. I'm not sure what it was all about, but regardless this will be where I'll be crossing in a time of 3:30, hopefully ;)

A year after simply going out to take photos of the race for this website, and getting an unexpected but overwhelming urge to be amongst it all, tomorrow I'll be in it myself :) In April 2011 I ran the Paris Marathon without training and finished in a time of 4:49. Since the start of summer I've been dragging my ass to Central Park and actually training for this one. I'm nervous, I'm excited, I'm all the usual things, but most of all I just hope to do as well as I possibly can because I'm not sure I can be bothered putting myself through another one of these hehe. The weather forecast is for cold and blustery winds, but no rain. I'm aiming for a time of 3:30, and I've been eating plenty of carbs to help get me there, so we'll see :)

Today I busted my hump running one of the biggest events on the international marathon calendar - the New York City Marathon! It was my second marathon after running the Paris Marathon back in 2011, but that event is small-fry compared to this so I was absolutely thrilled to have my name pulled out of the hat in the lottery for a spot (given I had no other means to qualify for this). Unlike Paris, I did actually do some training for this one. I had an ambitious goal for a finishing time of 3:30, but realistically I was hoping for anything under four hours. Well my final time was 4:19:53, so a little slower than I'd hoped but I'll take it, and 29 minutes faster than Paris (4:48:59). The last third of the race was just as grueling as Paris was, but at least this time I was able to continue running for the bulk of it. Had my training not suffered a couple setbacks (such as this) it may have been a different story, but I'm happy all the same :) With a proper training regimen I'm positive I could pull off a sub-four hour time, but frankly that's unlikely to happen. I'm really not a fan of running at all hehe; I just enjoy a physical challenge and wanted to see what I could do (and tick a cliché box on the bucket list). Now for the recovery. I can't really walk at the moment (it's more of a hobble), and if Paris is anything to go by I won't be doing much for the next few days.

All the photos and videos from Dubai, and the usual blathering on by me, are here!

Kristina works for Liberty Travel (which I'm sure is common knowledge given all the tripping around we do), an Australian-owned chain of travel agencies in various parts of the US. Kristina runs a branch of Liberty just a couple blocks up the street from our apartment in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but this morning one of their branches over in Queens was robbed in broad daylight by these two scumbags. They burst in about 10am waving guns around, tied up the seven staff with plastic ties (one of whom is eight-months pregnant), and made off with their cell phones and about $150. A similar incident took place nearby the previous afternoon, though it's unknown if the two are related. For some reason unbeknown to me (or Kristina), many of these retail shops are not fitted with silent alarms or even security cameras. They're practically sitting ducks! Kristina gets the occasional weirdo wandering in from time to time (some are actually quite funny, like a guy who spun around in circles, collapsed from dizziness and then left), but this is pretty serious stuff and the lack of security measures is frightening. Anyway, news article here. I've suggested Kristina asks for danger money :)

The case is pretty beat up (and held together by electrical tape) but the iPhone 4 it has held for almost four years is about as flawless as the day I bought it. However, my patience with the phone has finally run out. It's getting increasingly and prohibitively slow as the months and the resource-hungry iOS updates tick by, and it only supports 3G so web browsing is like waiting for paint to dry. So after the usual resistance I've finally upgraded, though not to the new iPhone 6. I had a play with it at the Apple Store tonight and decided I'm not a fan (nor am I a fan of other makes of phones on the market), so I saved some money and opted for its predecessor which I like much better - the iPhone 5S. In another four years I'll think about buying another one :)

Today was Veterans Day here in the US of A, a holiday (for some folk, not me) honouring people who have served in the US Armed Forces. I've lost count of how many parades Fifth Avenue sees every year, but this is yet another one.

Anyway, while that was going on, I was at work on the next block over on Sixth Avenue. At about three o'clock this afternoon I started hearing a lot of sirens, which in and of itself isn't uncommon, but when the choppers start roaring overhead it's usually a sign that something good is going on. Sure enough, five minute later I got a push-alert on my phone about an armed heist at a jewellery store (or "jewelry" as they spell it here) just a few blocks away in the Diamond District. I was in the mood to stretch my legs so I moseyed on down there hehe.

These things never fail to draw a crowd (I'm not the only idiot). Taking advantage of the parade going on, two pricks posing as delivery workers entered an eighth-floor store halfway down the street here, forced a worker to open the safe at gunpoint, and made off with the loot, disappearing into the throngs of people watching the parade. I can't help but think you'd need to have some serious cajones, or some serious stupidity (or both), to attempt something like this. 95% of the time these people get caught so why bother, and as can be seen in this news article these two were all over surveillance cameras in the area so it's only a matter of time. Be that as it may, the Diamond District is one of the world's largest shopping districts for diamonds and fine jewellery, and one of the primary centres of the global diamond industry. Total receipts for the value of a single day's trade on the block average $400 million, according to Wikipedia's sources. So if you're going to commit an armed robbery it makes sense to do it here hehe. Certainly more sense than robbing a travel agency (see above), but those two were clearly more stupidity than cajones.

I had an early meeting this morning and so was out and about much earlier than usual. This was the scenery in Central Park on my way in to work - still looking amazing in the autumn colours! As I write this however, the first few snow flurries of the winter season are starting to fall outside, and the next week or so is forecast to be bloody dismal. I swear this is my last northern winter!

Two weeks ago the toilet started to randomly bubble and gurgle a few times a day, for just a few seconds at a time. In my ignorance I didn't think much of it, until I took a big whiz this afternoon and it wouldn't flush away hahaha! I got the landlord on the horn, and next thing there's a Mexican taking the throne room to pieces. It turns out the pipes under our apartment were pretty clogged up with nothing in particular, and it took them four hours to sort it out (by which point I really needed another whiz - lots of orange juice for lunch). When they were done putting the John back together they gave the bathroom a thorough cleaning hehe - hard workers those little guys ;) So there you go, that was my day.

Someone sent me a message on Facebook recently asking if this was me hehe. Well, it's not. This photo came from this article here entitled "People won't stop trying to take selfies with bears". Apparently this is becoming an increasing problem in California's Lake Tahoe.

Although it's not me in that photo, it is me in this one hahaha! This was taken during my 26th-birthday trip to Canada. This big black fella was wandering by the roadside somewhere outside of Banff, Alberta. Either side of me out of shot were about a dozen tourists all doing the same thing hehe. Idiots :)

Temperatures here have been at or below freezing for over a week now (a little earlier than normal), and upstate New York around the Buffalo area has seen so much snow in past few days with so much more forecast to follow that city officials are worried the area may get more snowfall this week than the rest of the whole winter combined, wiping out entire storm budgets in one event. The above is a nice before-and-after showing what just a couple days of snow can do in these parts hehe. There is so much snow on the ground up there in fact that they aren't even able to plough it, instead sending in dump trucks to haul it away. More info here. Down here in New York City we've had none to speak of so far but it's only a matter of time. So, here we go again - my final northern winter!

Thanksgiving Day is this coming Thursday, already! Kristina is heading home to Texas on Tuesday to spend it with her family, but work commitments mean I can't be there for it this year. So we raided the supermarket tonight for some typical Thanksgiving grub and had an early feast here instead. Turkey, stuffing, spuds, mac and cheese, corn bread, and cranberry sauce - yummy! Oh, and pumpkin pie for dessert!