Two Months Out

Here was my last rolling session before my mastectomy, which was exactly two months ago today. This was on September 26th; my surgery was on October 8th, so I did have one more weekend to play with, but looking back to my October posts, I see that the forecast had been blustery on the following weekend and I decided to focus on shutting down the garden and doing the attendant freezing and pesto making. Funny thing is it's been so warm that the chard roots that I didn't bother pulling out have grown another helping of leaves, plus a few of the beets came along, so I do have at least one more picking!

Anyways, I never got around to posting about the 26th but it was a fun day on Jamaica Bay and I actually had 3 separate things to pick from - there was dinghy racing, a kayak paddle, and a family fun seining trip with the canoe committee. I decided to go with the canoes in my kayak partly because I thought seining sounded like fun (and it was!) but also partly because I actually thought this was going to be my last paddle for a rather long time, and I wanted to get in some good playing, which I would be able to do better with the slower-moving canoes.

On October 10th, I did what has actually been my only post about my health issues so far. The lack of subsequent updates was partly because I got veryveryvery busy with work after I finished my 3 weeks of medical leave, but also partly because (and this is going to sound weird but it's actually fantastic) this somehow didn't end up feeling like that big a deal! Some people have cancer ordeals. I'd rate what I've been through so far as more of a cancer hassle. I was fortunate in a number of ways - my ob-gyn steered me to an excellent pair of surgeons; the cancer hadn't spread beyond the original tumor (ended up being stage 2A); I did get to keep most of my lymph nodes (they used to just take 'em as a matter of course but they now actually test 'em while you're on the table, and although it did turn out that they took 7, not just the one closest to the tumor as I'd originally thought was the case immediately after surgery, the average person has 20 to 30 in each armpit, so I've got a good batch of those left, and I think that helps the healing); and then the things I can take personal credit for are being in good condition when I went in, and then getting up and about again as quickly as I could while following directions. I also had a few friends (hope they see this!) who have been through cancer themselves and told me their own recovery stories, which I think really helped to put me in the right frame of mind - plus a couple of people who I've known who didn't recover (my awesome clubmate Joe Glickman and my wonderful Aunt Char, I miss them both) but stayed so strong and positive that I couldn't help but be inspired by their examples - they faced their much worse outlooks and treatments with such strength, worthy of emulation.

Can't resist putting in a little moral here - women over 40, do get your mammograms but also keep up with your self-exams, and pay attention to how you look - a mammogram I had in the spring missed this when it maybe should have caught it, but I found it in time through a self-exam that I did because I had seen a weird asymmetry develop during the summer. If I'd been regular about those self-exam I would almost certainly have caught it even sooner. I didn't end up paying for that delay, but that was sheer luck.

With all that going for me, recovery went much faster than I ever dreamed it would, and one month almost to the day (November 7th), TQ and our friend Frank took me out for my first post-surgical paddle. We kept it short and gentle, only going to the "Jeep Marsh" (a typical destination for one of Sebago's open paddles, just a couple of miles), just squeezing in there as the tide was rising and then hanging out chatting and watching brants fly by and the marsh fill up, but boy, it was wonderful being back out there so quickly. 

I've only gotten in one paddle since then, but there's also been hiking and carolling and visits to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (a friend of mine is doing the NYC ID thing where you get free access to a bunch of cultural institutions, but only if you appear in person at each institution and register, so I joined her on a couple of those) and Irish music and stuff - so here at 2 months out I'd say I'm pretty much back to my normal life. YOWZA.

It's not OVER, but really, so far so good. Hopefully the cancer is OVER (fingers crossed, knocking wood, all that good stuff), but there are still some medical stuffs to do that will last for a few more months. There's some ongoing reconstruction stuff done during weekly visit that's a little tedious and uncomfortable but not too bad. The test results were pretty close to the point where an oncologist might say a person didn't need chemo, but in my case there were a couple of mitigating factors that made my oncologist recommend it - however, since it was kind of a precautionary measure, she did present me with 2 choices of regimen - an old-school one that is a hair more effective and takes half as long, but is pretty much guaranteed to make you feel like you got hit by a truck (to use Nurse Thelma, my oncologist's nurse's, exact words) and make your hair fall out - sort of the classic picture you get when you think of chemo, right? - or a newer version that takes twice as long, but that leaves most people able to carry on a normal life. I've been to 2 of my 8 infusions and so far it hasn't really knocked me off my stride too badly, just a little bit of an upset stomach, and I'm hoping it stays that way - I just couldn't imagine choosing the harsher version, Thelma said people mostly pick that just to get it over with faster but I've been amazed at how normal my life has been through all of this once I got past the initial recuperation phase (I was runnin' 'round with Flat Stanley by the middle of week 3), and I'm absolutely delighted that that's been possible.

Last photo - I took this reprise of the "It's blowin' a gale in Midwood" shot I've done twice before shortly before the chemo cut - "chemo lite" doesn't make your hair fall out like "chemo classic" but it can cause shedding. Nurse Thelma's recommendation was to go much shorter so that the hair is lighter and doesn't need to be yanked back in a ponytail. Fortunately I'd grown just enough hair since my last donation that going to a just-below-the-chin bob resulted in a ponytail long enough to donate! And so far no noticeable thinning, so once again - so far so good! 

Holiday Hymns for Hounds - Union Square, 12/5/2015

Well, I think I may have a new holiday tradition to add to the seeing-the-windows one I've been doing with a friend for years. It's funny, I get annoyed by the force-fed holiday music in the stores this time of year - but boy, I do still love actually singing Christmas carols! Actually I really enjoy choral singing in general; I didn't grow up doing it but I somehow fell into singing with the very good choir at Brick Presbyterian Church when I was living on the Upper East Side, did that for a few years but then when I moved to Brooklyn, it got harder to get up there, and then when I took up paddling, I finally let it go after a few tries at singing and then joining in something on the water proved that that was trying to squeeze too much into a day. Having moved farther out into Brooklyn, I don't think I would've stuck with the choir even if I hadn't gotten into wanting to spend my weekend time out on the water, but it was something I did like doing and I was sorry to have to let it go. 

I especially enjoyed the holiday singing, though, so when my much more singerly friend Vicky posted a Facebook link to an article with non-touristy ways to celebrate Christmas in NYC that included the Messiah performance her group, the Queens Oratorio Society, performs, and mentioned that she was also going to join in on the Holiday Hymns for Hounds, I jumped in on that as soon as I was sure that I would be done enough with my forecast marathon at work to make it to rehearsals. It turned out that I'd already missed the first rehearsal by the time I was sure of that (oops), but the way the Facebook group for the event was worded, it sounded like as long as I could make the second one, it would be fine.

Rehearsal itself ended up being "plenty good fun", to borrow a phrase from my youth in Hawaii - here was my Facebook post about it: Only in Brooklyn. In Studio C, a bunch of people practicing Christmas carols to get ready to raise some funds for NYC animal rescue organizations (Union Square at noon tomorrow). Two studios over, Sean Paul and Busta Rhymes doing something rap-tacular. Gotta give a little shout-out to Complete Music Studios - you'd think that the ordinary folks might get short shrift when the actual rock stars are in the house. You would think wrong, they totally took good care of us! Fun night, looking forward to singing again tomorrow! Union Square at noon!

And the singing was great fun, and we got to play with the pups for whom we were raising funds, and we raised $200 for Mighty Mutts and Ollie's Place with an hour and a half or so of singing, and then we went up to the cafe in Whole Foods for some thawing-out (it was actually a lovely warm day but usually when I'm outside in the wintertime I'm doing stuff, so I totally underdressed for two hours of standing still), then Vicky and I went and looked at the sparklies in the holiday market, and tried a slice of crack pie (no actual crack involved, just addictive levels of butter and sugar, yumyumyum) it was just a really, really fun day.  

Here's Vicky and me - happy happy! I think this photo that Vicky took and posted is the first social-media sighting of my chemo 'do, short enough that I don't have to do much with it - haven't noticed any shedding so far but treating it gently is supposed to help, plus I've been getting surprising numbers of compliments! My foot-long ponytail is sitting in the living room waiting for me to send it to the hair donation folks, it'll get there eventually. 

Here are some of the hounds!

This is Rita. So cute, so sweet, does the adorable head tilt when you chirp at her, and if my life were currently in a form that would allow dog ownership I think I might have been making inquiries.

"I'm Copper! I'm a hound dog!" Copper shows off his shake-paws trick -

takes his treat politely

and finishes off with a happy ear-flappy shake.

Angelo with a couple of the carolers - not on the website but another very sweet dog. He's a leaner - if he liked you he would lean on your leg and then you couldn't walk away because he would fall over and you wouldn't want to do that, now would you? 

And here we are singing. There was talk afterwards of adding some Hanukkah songs to the mix next year, but this year it was all traditional carols and pop favorites - with occasional "dog lyrics" thrown in for fun. I had a great time, I'll be back for this next year if the young women who organized it run it again! BTW, prize for longest distance travelled to sing here goes to the gentleman in the hat with the sign and the soprano in the red hat behind Vicky - they were visiting from Australia and they were totally going the non-tourist route - it was great having them join us! 

Excerpt from Sunday Bonus Escape - Two Swans and a Goat...

or is that a Pterodactyl? 

Clubmate Dotty L. organized an absolutely splendid Bonus Escape for the club on Sunday, which TQ and I were able to attend. It was billed as a Use Up the Leftovers Paddle (paddle followed by a fantastic feast of Thanksgiving leftovers), nota Bonus Escape, but that's what it was for me. It was so lovely that I just couldn't resist a little frolicking, first since my surgery in October and possibly a little foolhardy as I haven't specifically been cleared for kayak frolicking (how do I even explain this to the plastic surgeon who's tending to my reconstruction?), but I was careful, sliding into all of the braces off the back deck, not flinging myself into them, and everything came out OK...

We had 19 kayaks and for a time we were joined by active sailing committee member Pat in his handsome Goat Island skiff, I Am Zenia, Pterodactyl (IamZ,P for short). Pat stayed out lots longer than the rest of us and as he was finally coming back to the dock, he was joined by a pair of mute swans. These are kind of problematic birds - they're not native to this country, they out-compete native waterbirds, and they can be quite nasty (the one with the raised wings was hissing at me, clearly felt that I was invading his turf but fortunately didn't go beyond visual threats and some small-kine talking stink) but...ooooh, look how pretty, especially when accompanying an attractive hand-made wooden boat.

I've posted more pix from the day (plus these ones) on Flickr, click here to see those. No captions but it was a pretty straightforward paddle - we got ready, Dotty gave us a pre-paddle briefing with the game plan, which was to paddle around Canarsie Pol, come back, put boats away, and then eat some good food and drink some good drinks - and then we did that. Unfortunately the dining pix didn't come out well but the time of the bay was beautiful! And if you want a little more backup on the reasons I gave for not being in love with the beeeyootiful schvansies, the New York Times just posted an article that does a nice job of describing how they got here and why they're rather troublesome. Click here to read that.

Escape from Black Friday 2015

They'll never find us here in the Devil's Den!

 

Happy Thanksgiving From NYC!

Rollover Day for the Point Comfort 23, Or, The Biggest Boat Sebago Ever Rolled!

As I think I'd mentioned here a while back, we had a very exciting event at Sebago on November 7th. Holy cow, that long ago? I was thinking weekend before last but it was the weekend before the weekend before last - did I mention work's been crazy? Yes? Repeatedly, you say? Oops, sorry. Anyways, to get back to the point, it was the day when we rolled the biggest boat we've ever rolled - and on dry land, even!

Kayak committee members are always rolling our kayaks, but on the 7th, a whole crew of Sebagoites got together to roll the Point Comfort 23, the sharp new committee boat/safety boat that Sebago's new boatbuilding committee has been working on all summer. As you can see above, they've been constructing her upside-down, so all we've seen of her is her bottom (hehhehheh, I said bottom, hehheh -- and a fine bottom it is, innit?). The photo above was taken back in October, at the beginning of the final piece of this stage of construction, namely painting; a few coats of paint later and it was time to turn her over so that work on her interior can begin. 

It was an impressive effort, and I'd been cleared to paddle at this point but not to help lift twenty-three foot boats, so I took lots and lots and LOTS of pictures, which I finally had time to sort through last weekend, when Saturday ended up being a quiet day of catching up at home. Click here to visit the Flickr album. 

No captions, but the stages were - 1. Rolling the boat (unfortunately TQ and I only caught the tail end of that, Jim had rigged up pulleys to help stabilize and it looked like it would've been an interesting process to observe); 2. Bringing our antique war canoe back into the boat shed and raising her up to her winter home; 3. Preparing the base to receive the now rightside-up boat (this was an interesting combination of brute force - the fellas had a blast with the sledgehammers! - and the finest attention to detail - final adjustments involved a laser levelling device for precision) 4. Moving the boat back into the shed - and then finally the results of the naming contest (the winner was Canarsian).

And of course after that we had a feast. This IS the Sebago Canoe Club we're talking about!  

Link #2 - Great Hokule'a article in the New York Times!

Argh! It was such a good plan - link a day for the rest of the week and then I couldn't even keep up with that. What a week! Anyways, finally coming back with the second link, which is to a great article about Hokule'a in the NY Times (illustrated online with this beautiful photo by Na’alehu Anthony of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and ‘Oiwi TV). 

It's from a while back, I didn't have a chance to go look at it when the word went out among some of my friends at Halawai but fortunately Sam Low, author of Hawaiki Rising (that's his FB page, here's the Goodreads review), reposted it last week. Very good article, nice to see extensive mention of 'Iolani alumna Jenna Ishii! :D 

 Hokule'a is in South Africa now - I think I saw on the PVS website that they are now actually as far from Hawai'i as they are going to be, and it looks like they are having an amazing visit there. Continued best wishes to the wa'a and her crew, I'm so looking forward to her visit here in June! Click here for the article. Enjoy!

Good news for the Peking (with special bad food-pun)

So. Wow. Work. So much work. Albakitty came from some deep overwork silly place, I said something to someone who was looking for FB kitties about all the kitties being busy at the G20, and offered a nice fluffy albatross instead, and then I thought, "Hey, he actually looks a little bit like a kitty" and then of course I had to go play with him on MSPaint and there you go, Albakitty. Hoping things quiet down next week, I have about 3 sets of photos I haven't had time to go through yet. Figured I would post Albakitty just to confuse people and/or let folks know I didn't go anywhere (just my cubicle).  
For the rest of this week, I have a few links to share. I'll start with the good news about the Peking that's been circulating on the salty sites recently - the Peking has finally found a new home! Flat Stanley could so easily have gone off on another tangent when we visited the Peking in late October, but that post had already gotten way more complicated then I probably should have let it, seeing as Flat Stanley's post was supposed to be for first graders, so I didn't go into that.  However, with this new news, it's time to say YAY and share it!

As you may or may not know, the fate of that handsome old cargo ship has been up in the air for a time; the South Street Seaport has been in the retrenching process, oh, pretty much since Hurricane Sandy, and at some point in the recent past, they made the hard decision to let one of the three tall ships in their collection go and the lot fell on the largest of the three, the Peking. It's sad, I'll miss seeing her, but the substantial silver lining is that the Wavertree, their other really big tall ship (I'm counting Pioneer as a tall ship, so she's the third) is now off being overhauled - she's never really been open to the public, as far as I can recall, but I was lucky enough to get to spend an afternoon hanging out in her wardroom one winter when what was supposed to be a short stop to rinse out the Rosemary Ruth's water tanks ended up having to be extended until the current lessened (here was the trip report from that day, that was a fun one to write), and as I recall, she was really quite lovely, and I was tickled when I read posts on The Old Salt Blog and Tugster about her being sent over to Cadell's in Staten Island for some serious TLC.

But I was even more tickled last week when I read that the last loose end in the South Street Seaport shuffle of the ships was tied up and that the hundred and four year old (!) Peking had found a new home (and a wonderfully appropriate one) in Hamburg, Germany, the very city where she was built in 1911. Click here to read more about it on the Working Harbor Committee blog.

And to close, here is the worst photographic food-pun I've ever made. OK, I think it's the ONLY photographic food-pun I've ever made, but still. Get it? Get it? HA HA HA HA HA! 

albakitty.

howzit?

A little more subway art -

Big doin's at the club this weekend, the club succeeded in rolling the biggest boat we've ever rolled - on dry land! Plus I got to go paddling - never dreamed I would be back on the water just a month after my surgery but I was and although it was a short one, it was great. Will post about both of those soon, haven't had a chance to go through my pictures from the rollover yet, hope I can squeeze that in soon although I have a busy week ahead.

However, my last post (er, I mean the last Frogma post, by guest blogger Flat Stanley) talked a lot about the Arts for Transit program, and I thought it was rather serendipitous that one of the SD cards I used yesterday turned out to still have the photos from the fishless fishing trip I mentioned in one of my Hawaii posts but never actually posted about on it, so those got uploaded again, including a set of a subway art feature that pretty much stopped me in my tracks as I was heading for the boat. I rode the Franklin Avenue Shuttle from Prospect Park to get to Broad Channel; I'd never done that before and the stained glass installation there is absolutely spectacular. It's called Life and Continued Growth, it's by artist Eric Prior, here's the artist's explanation of the work, and here are my pictures. Click on the first one for better view, this is it for words today. Enjoy!

 

Flat Stanley Visits NYC Part 2 - and now the more usual New Yorky stuff (plus kind of a lot about trains)

Note from Bonnie - once again today, I'm turning my blog over to Flat Stanley, who's visiting me from Ms. Rozell's class in Texas. Hi, Ms. Rozell's class! For more about who Flat Stanley is and why we're playing tourist, check yesterday's post. Take it away, Stanley!

********************

Thanks, Bonnie! So at the end of the last post, we were just about to go down into the subway to head on into Manhattan. Brooklyn is a great borough and you could just visit there for a week and not get bored at all, but there are a couple of really famous NYC landmarks that we can get to really easily from Grand Army Plaza, and Bonnie decided that we should go see a couple of those too, so we're on our way! 

We're still in Brooklyn, but I just wanted to show you this neat subway art. This looks kind of old-fashioned but it's actually part of a program where the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority, the group that runs the public transportation) brings in artists to do station-wide art projects that make being in the subway a lot more interesting and fun. A lot of the older subway stations actually have beautiful mosaics and other decorations because they were built right around the beginning of the 20th century, when there was a thing called the City Beautiful movement, when city planners tried to make things that even everyday people used into something beautiful. 

Later in the 20th century, NYC fell on some hard times - have you ever seen pictures of subway cars all covered in graffiti? That was in the 70's when the city almost went bankrupt! The subways actually got to be scary places to go, and the stations that were built or re-done then were not beautiful at all, and the old ones that had been beautiful got all sad and dirty, but then the city started to recover and things got better. The nice old stuff that had was still there was cleaned up, and then somebody thought of doing this artist program to make the stations that were too dreary to do anything about look nice, and it's worked out great! Bonnie actually thought this plaque might have been from the old days but when she looked it up on Google she found out that an artist named Jane Greengold was invited to decorate this station in 1995. The little band of mosaic tile at the top is probably from the old days but the plaque is part of Ms. Greengold's station-wide nod to the Soldiers and Sailors Arch, just upstairs in Grand Army Plaza. You can read a little bit more about it here if you want to. 

Ms. Greengold called her theme "Wings for the IRT: The Irresistible Romance of Travel", but to a New Yorker, "IRT" also stands for "Interborough Rapid Transit", which was the name of the first company to run a subway line in New York City. The first subway line started in 1904 and it was only in Manhattan, but then it spread out, and the Grand Army Plaza station was part of that company way back when. New York's a big city with lots of people who want to get around, so another company came along to see if they could make some money doing that too; that one started as Brooklyn Rapid Transit and then when they started going to Manhattan they changed to Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, "BMT". Then the city decided that they should actually run their own subway line too, and that was called the Independent Subway, which got shortened to "IND". The two other ones ended up not making their owners enough money after a while, and the city ended up taking them both over in 1940 and gradually blending the 3 systems (which had been built as totally separate!) into 1. You can tell somebody's a real old-school "Noo Yawker" if they talk about taking the IRT or the BMT instead of calling their line by a letter or a number (like Bonnie rides the B or the Q to work and she didn't really know all this stuff by heart, she sort of knew about it but we had to go to this site to get all the details).

Anyways, sorry, wow, that was a lot about the subway, wasn't it? But it's kind of neat how it got to be the way it is today. I'll try not to talk quite so much after this! 

Now we're in Manhattan looking down Wall Street. This is more what you think of when you think of New York City, isn't it? This is way way way downtown, but it's called Wall Street because a long time ago this is where the wall that marked the north end of the city was. Back then the city was still called New Amsterdam, it was Dutch too. This is where the New York Stock Exchange is, and although more people are starting to live down here (the real estate people love making up cute names for neighborhoods and they call this FiDi, short for Financial District), it used to just be banks, banks and more banks! If we had a little more time we could walk down and see the stock exchange but the day was actually going a little faster than Bonnie had expected it to!  

And what she really wanted to do was take me for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. This is a fantastic thing to do if you ever come to New York City - it doesn't take very long, the views are incredible (I'll show you some of those in a minute!) and it's actually free! 

Here we are inside the ferry terminal. Bonnie had actually had a day off from work the day we did all of this, but it was a work day and it was getting pretty close to rush hour - that's why there are so many people here, they're all waiting to get on the boat and go home to Staten Island (which is also full of houses and trees and is a much quieter place to live that Manhattan, which is really busy). 

The ferry boats are nice and big, though, so there's plenty of room for everybody. We're riding the Spirit of America today, getting ready to cross upper New York Harbor - there's somebody we HAVE to say hi to out there! 

And here we go! We're looking back at downtown; there's another ferry waiting to load up, at the height of rush hour a ferry leaves that terminal every 15 minutes! It takes about 25 minutes to cross the harbor so at rush hour you always pass another ferry going the other way. We're also looking up the East River - that's the river that runs along the east side of Manhattan, but it's also called the East River because that's the river a boat would take to go east out into Long Island Sound.

Further out in NY Harbor - I wish it was a prettier day because when the sky is blue and the sun is shining on the glass buildings, this is a spectacular view! Here you can also see the Hudson, which runs along the west side of Manhattan. The Hudson is also sometimes called the North River, because that's the river a boat would take to go north to Albany and beyond. The Lenape, whose territory this was at one time, called the Hudson "Muhheakantuck", meaning "river that flows both ways", because the Hudson (along with all of the major waterways that surround NYC) is tidal, coming in and going out with the moon - so for a little over six hours it flows north, and then it slows down, and stops, and then starts up again going south, and does that for a little over six hours, and then slows down and stops and starts up going north again and does that again and again pretty much forever. This is great for people in boats (especially little ones like Bonnie likes) because if you time your trip right you can go from Manhattan to, oh, say, the Statue of Liberty and back and have the current helping you out the whole time. If you time it wrong, it can be a huge pain, so most boaters around here know how to read their current tables! 

And speaking of the Statue of Liberty - 

There she is! The Lady in the Harbor. You guys probably all know a lot about her already, and of course everybody knows what she looks like, but how can you come to NYC without at least seeing her? Off to the right is a little bit of Ellis Island, where a whole lot of peoples' grandparents and great grandparents first came to the United States. We didn't go there today, that would be a whole extra blog post, but Bonnie's been there and when people ask her what they should do if they are visiting NYC, she usually recommends that. She's never actually been to visit the Statue of Liberty, but she's sailed and paddled past a zillion times and just never gets tired of seeing the Statue. 

We're playing tourist out here on the water today, and a lot of people do like to play here, but there's a lot of work that still goes on in NY Harbor, the city grew up where it did because of this beautiful sheltered harbor. Here's a tugboat not too far from Staten Island, probably waiting to go collect a barge they're going to take somewhere. Every Labor Day Weekend there's a big tugboat race up by Manhattan, Bonnie says it's fantastic! 

And this is the only shot we actually took ON Staten Island - there are some great places to visit on Staten Island but again, we just didn't have time - hint: if you ever mail yourself to NYC, make sure the person you mail yourself to has more than one day to take you around! We're getting back on the same ferry we just got off of - they make everybody get off of the ferry when it lands even if you're going straight back, so the crew can do a quick clean-up without falling over people. 

Looking up the Kill van Kull, which goes on behind Staten Island. You see the word "Kill" in a lot of place names around here, the Kill Van Kull runs into the Arthur Kill, which goes by the Fresh Kills landfill, and there's Peekskill and Fishkill and Catskill and Peterskill, but it's not because New Yorkers are really angry all the time (they can be sometimes, but mostly they aren't, just like most people), it's another one of those Dutch words, and it just means a creek or other narrow body of water. The Kill van Kull is still a very busy area for commercial shipping - you can see a few of the big ships that have to go in there to get to where they need to ti load or unload - Bonnie's been back there in a kayak and she says it's fun to see the big ships going by, but little boats have to be really careful because the big guys don't have much room to move in there! 

There's another Staten Island Ferry - now we're going back to Manhattan and they're on their way where we just were. 

When we'd started out this afternoon we thought we would finish with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, but we're running out of daylight, so instead we'll just walk up and take a picture of it. We passed the tall ship Peking on the way - this is a HUGE old ship and is part of the South Street Museum fleet - unfortunately they're looking for someone to buy the Peking as it's really expensive to take care of a ship like this, and the museum has another slightly smaller one, the Wavertree, that they've decided to concentrate on. She's off in drydock being fixed up now, should be beautiful when she comes back!

And you can just see the bridge in the distance. So we'll just walk a little further north - 

And there she is, the Brooklyn Bridge, standing here across the East River since 1883. It's really too bad we didn't have time to walk across, that would've been a perfect end to my day here!

Off in the background you can see the slightly newer Manhattan Bridge, which opened in 1909. You can walk across that one too but the Brooklyn Bridge is more designed with walkers in mind. Further north from there - can't see it from here - is the Williamsburg Bridge, which opened in 1903. A good way to remember the order is just to think of a fancy car - BMW! One more thing about the Brooklyn Bridge - remember how yesterday I was talking about how Brooklyn wasn't always part of NYC? This bridge being built may have been one of the things that helped make that happen; before that, you could only get to Manhattan by ferry and this bridge connected the two cities in a way they'd never been before.

And that was all we had time for in my day in NYC! I'll be heading back to Texas soon, I had fun during my short visit to NY and I hope you enjoyed my stories about the place!