Your Custom Text Here
The double hoot of a steam train jolted me awake. I peeked out the window above my bed. A wispy gray tuft billowed behind a massive coal-burning locomotive as it chuffed across fields of Amish farmland toward Paradise, Pa.
People come to these pleasant hills of Lancaster County for its countryside shops selling fruit and shoofly pie and its quiet, winding roads with the only sound the click-clacking of horse-drawn buggies. But we came for the rumbling, the soot and the clanging. We came for the trains.
The weekend trip was only half over, and already we had waved at them, climbed up them, rode on them and eaten inside of them. And yes -- I recalled that morning as I looked around the narrow room with small crisply curtained windows where I woke up -- I was actually sleeping in a caboose.
The New York Times
"The high-flying Hollywood crowd took Acapulco to the moon with it in the 1950's and 60's then went on to their next playground. Although the names of the clubs, the style of the music and the clientele have changed since La Perla was opened in 1949, Acapulco has always been counted on for night life. Now a new generation of impresarios is taking over the clubs that their parents built, and raucous foam parties on the beach and writhing on dance platforms until 4 a.m. is often followed by more dancing at an after-hours club until morning breaks. The disco anthems will be ringing in your ears all day as you lie on the beach and recover."
"Like many of his peers — educated, employed, urban-dwelling young adults — Jason McGuinness receives monthly assistance from his parents, in the form of a $300 check and the payment of his cellphone bill.
This is not the largesse of wealthy families doled out through trust funds. Nor is the money a couple of $20 bills tucked into a card at the holidays. Mr. McGuinness and others like him are the beneficiaries of an increasingly common subsidy arriving regularly from Mom and Dad, something like a family fellowship.
It helps to pay for housing, bills and travel expenses, and the support has been increasing for the past two decades as education is extended, marriage is delayed and young people take the scenic route from adolescence to adulthood."
"Most people don't like to think about their real estate broker throwing back drinks and gyrating on a dance floor to 'It's Raining Men.' but like the holiday party, it happens once a year, ready or not.
For a buyer or seller looking to discover what a firm values, its demographic, its 'personality' (let alone its quotient for fun), much can be gleaned from the annual holiday party. While the success of the soiree is no indication of whether these real estate professionals can close a deal the parties do give an indication of how the company may treat clients based on how they treat one another - and themselves."
A Life Between Jobs
"Many young people in the workplace are finding that quitting their job is becoming the satisfying new alternative to the standard, entry-level benefit for vacation. As they found out, the two weeks allowed to most young employees is barely enough time to visit their parents for Christmas, go to a friend's wedding and take a long weekend.
'Normal life,' Taylor Aikin said, 'maintaining relationships with people who don't live nearby, requires at least two weeks of your life a year.'
For others like him, the solution is simple: Stop jockeying with senior employees for the prime vacation weeks. Quit and start again — but first, get away."
The New York Times
"The piercer — whose day is usually spent inserting rings into the eyebrows and navels of teenage girls — snapped on purple latex gloves and lifted a four-millimeter-wide sterilized needle to William Donelson's hand.
'I'm set,' Mr. Donelson said with a deep breath. He watched as the needle pierced the fleshy webbing between his thumb and forefinger and a microchip was slid under his skin. At last he would be able to do what he had long imagined: enhance his body's powers through technology.
By inserting the chip, a radio frequency identification device, Mr. Donelson would literally have at his fingertips the same magic that makes security gates swing open with a swipe of a card, and bridge and tunnel traffic flow smoothly with an E-ZPass. With a wave of his hand he planned to log on to his computer, open doors and unlock his car."
"When Peter Toner, an agent at Prudential California Realty in La Jolla, Calif., arrived in San Diego from England 10 years ago to practice real estate, he realized the city had a market quirk unlike any he had encountered. There were properties listed with a price range as opposed to a set price. Rather than being listed at $550,000, say, a house might be put on the market for $510,000 to $565,000.
Variable pricing, also known as 'value-range marketing' or 'range pricing,' has gained popularity in the San Diego area over the last decade, becoming an established peculiarity of the region’s real estate market."
