This past weekend my fiancèe and a friend visited me up here at Yale, and we ended up going around for the weekend. We had a great time going around New York City and some small New England towns in Connecticut. 

This one is of us all on the end of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was raining miserably.

Typical tired, yawning me on a subway with Tiff.

And I can't leave out the old-timey green post boxes in NYC.

I finally got to see the Flatiron Building.

We went into the Lego Store, and they had a huge, lego Gandalf from Lord of the Rings, so I decided to take a "cool" selfie with the lego Gandalf,

Inside the original Macy's they have old wooden escalators, complete with the wooden stairs.

And this may be my favorite picture of the weekend. This is us four on the top of East Rock Park, a cliff that overlooks the City of New Haven. If you know what you're looking at, you can easily spot most of Yale's campus, along with the port of New Haven and the rest of the City. It really is a wonderful view from the top of East Rock. 

I also had my first day working at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library today, and it was really amazing. As someone who loves history, this is pretty much a dream job. There isn't a more thorough rare materials library in the nation, and many even argue that this is the most thorough and expansive rare book and manuscript library in the world. Here's just a few of the things I worked with today:

This is a 16th century genealogy of a French nobility family.

 These are tickets and invitations to meet Mussolini in 1937 in Tripoli, Libya at his inauguration when he was inaugurated as Governor General of Libya.

Any student of U.S. History or Government will know who this person is: Alexis de Toqueville...possibly the most famous writer on early American democracy. I worked with much of his handwritten letter collection today.

 This is an indentured apprenticeship contract from the mid-1500s in England.

This is an indentured servant contract for a girl named Ann Smith in the 1700s.

This is a vellum-bound book on religious topics.

This is probably the coolest thing I've seen at the Beinecke because of its modern day validity. This is a bond for a Dutch dike-maintenance company in the 1700s. It just so happens that this is still a live bond, so it has to travel back to the Netherlands every 10 years for interest to be collected. Can you believe this old document still collects Euros to this day!?

 This is also really cool... it's a royal decree from Queen Mary and King Phillip of England in the 1500s.

And it was only my first day. Among other things, I also handled part of our expansive ancient papyrus collection, which is thousands of 3rd century BC documents written in languages like Aramaic on papyrus.