After all the miles of holiday shopping, pounds of bags you’ve carried and stressful moments in busy parking lots, don’t you think it’s time to treat yourself to a day of pampering?

Check out the Chester Harvest Festival, all day Saturday. It includes live entertainment, games, food, and a pet costume parade. And, at Pier Village in Long Branch, they’re building scarecrows and hunting pumpkins on Saturday as well.

We pulled into this unpromising station for a tank of gas, and while it was pumping, my wife found three stylish straw sunhats inside...

Until yesterday and today, spring looked and felt a lot like what you see here. Click below to see full picture...

In today's resonant finale, we look back at the stairwell and all the neatly hung household cleaning implements it contains, each a tiny soul awaiting its moment in the schmutz...

In today's exciting episode, we reach the top of the stairs and look back...

Friends in Long Branch have just moved into their first home—a beautifui and cozy one in Craftsman style. One of my favorite parts of the house is the back stairs from the basement to the kitchen.

In the laundry room of a home in Long Branch, this tableau brought to mind an ocean liner and its escorts, a sovereign and its retainers...

At a lonely table for one, late at a wedding in Long Branch, burning the candle literally at one end, figuratively at both.

After the chafing dishes have been swept away, the wedding cake has been cut and the crowd has migrated to the dance floor, leave it to Mr. Lugubrious to find an altar of conjugal emptiness.

A wedding in Long Branch brings to mind John Updike's wonderful brief essay, "Women Dancing."

It depends on which side of the point-and-shoot you're on.

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On a bench on the promenade at Pier Village in Long Branch, a mother and daughter had a heart-to-heart while the menfolk did what menfolk do, at least if you ask the women.

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As seasonal as the weekenders who bask beneath them, palm trees on the Jersey Shore have to be replanted each summer, just ahead of the snowbirds who follow them north.

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My stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk next brought me to a bench where a young woman in a funny hat was taking pictures of her husband and twin boys as they munched on floppy white bread sandwiches. Clouds had covered the sun, but their radiance was undimmed.

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As I passed the refreshment stand (see yesterday's Plain Sight) and continued my stroll up the Long Branch boardwalk, a boy ran after me, waving a white piece of paper...

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Justine Pecora, a sophomore at Caldwell College, has spent the summer selling soft pretzels and ice cream and drinks and candy to people on the Long Branch boardwalk. It's a hard job, but there are compensations...

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Sleep on a park bench, even at high noon, and a cop is likely to tap you on the shoulder and tell you to move on.

Do the same thing on the boardwalk and you are left to your sweet dreams...

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You feel you will mess with the dude's vibe if you ask him to okay your beach badge.

Skateboarders get in free if they can grind the handrail alongside the stairs to the beach.

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While this fellow took the measure of the waves, two young women stood on the boardwalk, lost in thought.

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Sunday on the boardwalk at Pier Village in Long Branch...

It’s high summer, those hot days in mid-July, halfway between Memorial Day and Labor Day. The Jersey Shore is, of course, full of activity.