Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Blizzard, and Rosemary Ruth sails home (on Tugster)

And here are a couple of pictures from my morning commute -

Here's the view out the subway window on the Manhattan Bridge - looking north up the East River. Ordinarily, looking this direction, one would see the Williamsburg Bridge. Not the case today. BTW the pier in the relative foreground is Pier 42, a former banana pier. There's still a sign on it featuring a bunch of bananas - tried to find a picture, no luck. The area it's in is actually neat place to wander - along the river, under the bridges - and is next in line for "parkification" (a presentation of the very earliest stages of planning was one of the agenda items on the agenda at the community board meeting I attended not long ago about out of interest in the Tribeca boathouse situation). There is actually a little natural beach some way further down, near the Brooklyn Bridge - it will be interesting to see how they treat that. Would be very easy to turn into access for cartop or folding kayakers - all that needs to happen is space put into a barrier - and there are a couple of people working to try to make that happen. The usual concerns about liability are in play as they always are, though. The East River does have some strong currents, and there's always concern among the people in charge that if you make it easy to get to the water, eventually somebody's going to drown & then there'll be a lawsuit. That's just NYC for ya.


Walking down Broadway in the snow.


The word "yuck" may have featured prominently on this morning's post, but actually I'm somewhat enjoying the blizzard. If I'd thought of it, I might tried to get out on the harbor, just to see how things were out there - I've done that before & it can be sort of fun. The trick, as usual, is choosing the right gear. In this case, it's all about the boat. Here is my idea of the perfect boat for a blizzard in New York Harbor:


Of course the one little bummer about it was that TQ & I decided to postpone Valentine's Day. He was talking to a snowplow driver this morning & the gentleman told him that it was a very good day to not drive if that was an option. Wednesdays & Thursdays being TQ's days off, and both of us being in complete agreement that our plans tonight were not worth him ending up with his car in a ditch, or worse, he decided to listen to the snow-driving professional. Smart, my guy. I was looking forward to seeing him tonight but I'm not a big enough fan of Valentine's Day to want him to do anything stupid.

Now, I had some other pictures I was going to post but I went over to Tugster to look for pictures or interesting info about the banana pier - surprisingly, didn't find any of those, but he had some pictures I really enjoyed seeing, taken when he joined Richard in retrieving the Rosemary Ruth from Tottenville (I unfortunately couldn't have made that trip without cloning myself - so glad Tugster posted!). In fact, I think I may detect the makings of a maritime soap opera...could the interest Tugster seems to be taking in the sweet little pinkie schooner's shapely bottom mean that he's recovering from the spell cast by the alluringly bulbous-bowed, but distant Alice?

Stay tuned for our next exciting episode!

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