Mike:
Welcome to Planet Batler - the official site of Mike and Natasha + family. This whole thing is just getting off the ground, and I don't think I'll put the word out about it existing until I get it up and running.
For the purposes of this blog, we're going to assume that you already know us (and maybe even like us). We'd like to use this to keep everyone up to date with our various adventures/misadventures throughout the years. Hopefully, this won't just be another one of my two-week projects that I get sick of. Only time will tell.
For those of you who don't know, we have been living in Falls Church, Virginia just outside of Washington DC for the past year. We're actually closer to Vienna, VA but the Postal Service thinks otherwise. I'm working and Natasha stays home with Jon (who is 15 months old, by the way) and teaches/tutors Russian.
I suppose I'll start out the blog with one of our recent trips: New York City. The place is sort of a dump really, but I can see why some people might like the atmosphere. We got to see a pretty good chunk of the real life in the city, from the Jersey ghettos (where we were privileged to see a drug deal taking place) to Broadway to the UN building, which is smaller than it looks on TV/movies. The WTC site is still not much more than a hole in the ground (tribute to Ralph Nagin). As far as big cities go, NYC doesn't have much to offer another than lots of big business. I guess we're just much more used to DC or Moscow, where there's always something large and/or inspirational around you can go see for free.
Naturally, Natasha loved the experience of being there, I made sarcastic comments about high population density making people crazy, and Jon was happy until he got hungry. I guess I just summed up all of our family vacations there, didn't I?