Sunday bird blogging

A catbird in 6BC, a garden on Sixth Street in the East Village.

Saturday reflections

More reflections on 34th Street. 

I had a really good class today, enjoying being back in person after last week's Zoom teaching, and I stopped to pick up a few groceries on the way home. Then I managed not only to trip and fall when I stepped off the curb, but to bang into a flexible post marking off the bike lane on my way down and slam it to the ground with my chest. 

No serious damage done, fortunately, but I am sore. Everywhere. Also, although actual New Yorkers are nothing like their scary reputation for indifference and cold-heartedness, by the time the eighth or ninth person had joined the crowd around me and asked if I was all right, I would have preferred a lot less attention.

I was very grateful for their many helping hands when I was trying to get my ass up off the asphalt though.

Urban poetry

A church in the East Village that is obviously still awaiting renovation. But I love that sky.

Blast from the past

This is a three-bedroom condo in San Francisco that recently sold for $1.2 million dollars. I like the way it's designed and I used to know the neighborhood very well because I lived there for most of my childhood.

In that very same flat. That is now a million-dollar condo.

This is a picture of me doing homework in what was then the kitchen and is now the living room; the window behind me is the same window in the corner in the modern photo.

Obviously old buildings get renovated, especially if they're in a city like San Francisco where the real estate is even more insanely valued than Manhattan. But that's not what made these new pictures such a gut punch for me. Although this flat was always kind of a dump, by the time we moved out it would have been a compliment to call it a slum. It's been the setting for a hundred nightmares that would make Stephen King wake up screaming, and now it looks so—nice.

I shouldn't be shocked that it's been renovated; I've undergone a few renovations myself since the years when that was my home. But I wouldn't spend a night there for $1.2 million dollars.

Bonus reflections

A detail from the previous image, like a small abstract art piece.

Saturday reflections

Reflections on West 34th Street.

I was fortunately not affected by the flooding caused by the Biblical rains yesterday (in my neighborhood we got 6 inches of rain in just a few hours) except for having to teach on Zoom today instead of in person.

And scrambling to change the lesson plan at the last minute to work remotely. Which it did. Mostly.

Sunday bird blogging

An Eastern phoebe in Central Park last spring.

Saturday reflections

(I never actually clicked on Publish last night, so it's not really Saturday, but I'm not going to change the title.)

Columns of contrasting reflections on West 34th Street in Manhattan.

Astronomy Tuesday

Paul Byrne (@ThePlanetaryGuy) posted this image of Mars on the site formerly known as Twitter today. He wrote, “I think it's incredible that we're living in an era when we can fly a helicopter on another planet—and see the images it takes on our phones.”

Me too.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Paul Byrne

Saturday reflections

Reflections by Hudson Yards on the West Side, featuring The Vessel, the copper-clad public art in the center of the complex.

The Vessel opened in 2019 and there were long lines to climb it so I never bothered. The first suicide occurred less than a year after it opened. Then there was another. Then another. The Vessel was closed; you could look but you couldn't climb. It reopened briefly, there was another suicide, and now it's closed again, just taking up space in the middle of Manhattan.

I feel like I should be able to say something interesting or profound about that because I really have a visceral dislike of Hudson Yards, which has always seemed to me to try way too hard to be New York Cool without really understanding what that is, but it's Saturday night and I'm tired from teaching today, so profundity is way beyond my capabilities at the moment. But I love these reflections.

Urban poetry

Bicycles in Central Park. I took these pictures with the new phone, and it does a decent job of capturing detail. Some pictures, like the reflection shot from last Saturday, are less impressive; I can tell it's a phone picture and the Canon would have done a much better job.

But the phone weighs a lot less and is always in my purse, and that's no small advantage.

Astronomy Tuesday

Comet Nishimura was only discovered last month but it's already developed quite an impressive tail from its interactions with the solar wind.

Credit and Copyright: Peter Kennett