9AM Day Fifty-Five

Shrove Tuesday

On our walk this morning we went the long way round and happened upon one of the Aireys PS kids waiting at the hall. He said he was early because it was Pancake Day and he was getting there to be sure he got some. I didn't have the heart to tell him they weren't starting until 11:30 and he would need to get some after school.

This encounter helped me decide to make pikelets for breakfast and channel my inner Auntie Flora

I made mine in the frying pan on the stove but Auntie Flora would make them for us on the hob of her Aga stove in her cottage-like house in Bacchus Marsh.

When friends come to stay and bring lovely flowers that last and last.

Valentine's day NYC style

I'm posting a whole lot here about the history of Valentine's Day to help me understand the absolute proliferation of things that were available up to and beyond February 14.  I've included some of the things I saw...

So here goes...

Each year on February 14th, many people exchange cards, candy, gifts or flowers with their special “valentine.” The day of romance we call Valentine's Day is named for a Christian martyr and dates back to the 5th century, but has origins in the Roman holiday Lupercalia.

 

The ancient Romans may also be responsible for the name of our modern day of love. Emperor Claudius II executed two men — both named Valentine — on Feb. 14 of different years in the 3rd century A.D. Their martyrdom was honored by the Catholic Church with the celebration of St. Valentine's Day.

We do know that the ancient Romans celebrated the feast of Lupercalia, a spring festival, on the 15th of February. With the introduction of Christianity, the holiday moved to the 14th of February--the saint day that celebrated several early Christian martyrs named Valentine.

In Great Britain, Valentine’s Day began to be popularly celebrated around the 17th century. By the middle of the 18th, it was common for friends and lovers of all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes, and by 1900 printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one’s feelings was discouraged. 

Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine’s Day greetings.
Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began selling the first mass-produced valentines in America. Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine,” made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as “scrap.” Today, according to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated 1 billion Valentine’s Day cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.) Women purchase approximately 85 percent of all valentines. (Source: The History Channel)

Relief

 What does one do to cool down after a hot hot day?
How does one get to sleep?
When the air conditioners do little not even circulate the air enough to feel cooler.
When the management office of the apartment block says they can't get the air conditioners fixed until Tuesday and this is Friday with the hot weekend coming up.
Not happy folks.

So relief comes in the form of a cool shower and heading to bed just slightly damp, window wide open (thank goodness we removed the guards so they can be opened completely).

Memories of hot nights as a child...one in particular. I'm lying in my bed at the back of the house and Mrs Marriott came to visit for some reason. I was whinging about being hot I guess and she said put your legs outside the sheets to allow yourself to be cool.

How things change...now I just fling the sheet off!

Water tanks

New York City’s skyline is dotted with wooden water towers that are easy to mistake for vanishing relics of the bygone eras of seltzer bottles and street gas lamps.
But what many New Yorkers don’t realize is the towers are hardly antiques — in fact, most drink and bathe from the water stored in them every day.
“When I tell people what I do for a living, they can’t believe it is still done,” said Kenny Lewis, foreman of the Rosenwach Tank Co.’s wood shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the only one like it in the city. “After people notice the tanks, they can’t believe how many there are.”
Most buildings in the city taller than six stories need some sort of water tower and pumping system to provide water pressure to tenants.
Rosenwach is one of two companies in the city that makes wood water towers. The other company is Isseks Brothers.
So why do people think wood water towers are relics of the past?
Because they look as though they are.
While many are more than 30 years old, even new ones look old because they are made of wood that isn’t painted or chemically treated (so as not to taint drinking water).Though the technology has become more efficient, the concept of gravity delivering water from a wood tank hasn’t changed in decades.
And while steel tanks are an option, they are more expensive, don’t provide as much insulation, require more maintenance and take longer to construct. The average wood tank holds 10,000 gallons of water and costs around $30,000. A steel tank of similar size could cost up to $120,000. But different buildings have their own specific needs.
“There are wood tanks, steel tanks, small tanks — hot, cold, round, square — it’s like a Dr. Seuss book,” said Andrew Rosenwach, the company’s fourth-generation owner.
Rosenwach estimates his company has about 10,000 tanks around the city, and can build up to 300 a year — though they’ve been suffering just like every one in the construction industry.
He said business should heat up with the weather. Every year they must clean natural sediment from the water off the bottom of the tank. More buildings have their maintenance done in the spring and summer, and if the tank is too leaky, a new one must be built.
With a crew of about six men, an old tank can be torn down and new one constructed in 24 hours, Rosenwach said. It takes two to three hours for pumps to fill them up.
“When you first set them up they leak, but when they fill [with water], the wood expands and becomes water tight,” Lewis said. “Then, it’s like a giant toilet. When people use water, the level goes down. A ballcock lets more in, and that water is pumped from the basement.”
Eventually the wood will rot though, which has kept the Rosenwachs working on the same buildings for generations. A tank can last 30-35 years depending on exposure to the elements. Rooftop tanks on the west side of Manhattan typically don’t last as long because they take more of a beating, Lewis said.“When we look at the skyline, we can tell which tanks are ours because they have tan roof covers and signature ‘R’ on the top,” Rosenwach said. “I’m always amazed what a vast amount of skyline we cover in such a small field.”

How the water tank works:
- A water tower is a simple device that uses gravity to provide water pressure.
- They provide water for domestic uses and fire supply.
- Most municipalities have tanks that can hold a day’s worth of water for their population.
- Many New York City buildings exceed the height the infrastructure’s water pressure can handle.
- Most structures taller than six stories need some sort of water tower and pump system of their own.
- Water is fed to buildings through pipes in the basement.
- Electric pumps push the water from the basement to roof.
- It takes 2-3 hours to fill the average 10,000-gallon tank.
- From the roof, gravity sends water to pipes throughout the building.
- As tenants use the water, the level in the tank goes down and, just like in a toilet, a ballcock lets more in

Is it a hothouse on the corner of this building's roof?

Opportunity

This store on Manhattan Avenue on my way to the bus always takes my eye. I thought I'd take the opportunity to get the photo of it. Tricky not to get me in the reflection too especially as I was juggling an umbrella ( you can just see it in the bottom left corner).
The sign in the window never changes- it wasn't really an opportunity to explore the store- it wasn't really open. I think it's an Op Shop/ second hand dealer.

Runes

Wow Bernadette did my runes at last!

What a great way to manage my thinking about what has happened and where I'm going!

It is such a nice process for helping make sense of some of the incomprehensible things that have happened of late.

Crossing Guard

School Crossing guards work near most of the schools I go to. Some are better than others- more diligent, more friendly.

This one is lovely.

According to websites...School Crossing Guards help children safely cross busy intersections on their way to and from school. School Crossing Guards control traffic flow around schools in the morning, at lunch time and at the end of the school day.
They are Civilian part time employees of the NYPD. The pay starts at $11.79 per hour and $13.83 an hour after three years. If they work 20+ hours a week they get health benefits.
There are no formal education or experience requirements for the job, but all candidates must be able to understand and be understood in English.
They must pass a qualifying medical examination, which includes drug screening and a character/background investigation, prior to appointment. And must also complete six (6) days of training at the Police Academy once appointed. She is out there in all weathers and always smiling.

Folded

 I used the process of shallow depth of field to capture my pile of folded towels...that's the "technical" part of this...the sotry part to the choice of folded towels and my life here in NYC is the lovely linen and towels one can purchase here- the quality and the cost are both great. The other story to folded towels is that there is of course only one way to fold towels...Maddy's way...fold in half length wise then in half again then in thirds this way edges can be out of sight when one stack them in the linen cupboard.

What would be a blog entry on February 2 be without a picture of Punxsutawney Phil. Fortunately for me I had a later start and got to see Phil do his "thing" live.

During the ceremony, which begins well before the winter sunrise, Phil emerges from his temporary home on Gobbler's Knob with his wife Phyllis and daughter Phelicia, located in a rural area about 2 miles (3.2 km) east of town. According to the tradition, if Phil sees his shadow and returns to his hole, he has predicted six more weeks of winter-like weather. If Phil does not see his shadow, he has predicted an "early spring."The date of Phil's prognostication is known as Groundhog Day in the United States and Canada, and has been celebrated since 1887.

I'm with Pat Kiernan on NY1 it's a rodent!

Despite the late start I was awake early so was tired on my return home so lay down on the couch for a nap and "on awaking" noticed the light on the water tank on top of the hotel next door. The ongoing challenge of capturing the light :)

Back in NYC

A conversation with Michele has put new purpose back into my blogging. Well getting back into it is the idea. We were talking about a reminder of an event and she had looked back at her blog and realized that it was around this time that our new kitchen was installed in 2011. Then she had looked at other things happening over the past couple of years.
I've been thinking about that conversation and since thought that I really should get some retrospective use of my photos and my blog so hopefully I'll be able and inspired to continue to do this and get things up on here.

Some of my fellow commuters

Having returned from the USVI I've spent a couple of days writing for work and it was the day to go and present some of the writing to the school. This journey involved a trip on the J train which goes over the Williamsburg Bridge. Great views down the river on the Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridges. All around me people were on their phones reading playing games and chatting to someone. I watched one woman who was holding her phone to her ear and I wasn't sure if someone was on the other end of the line as she was talking very quietly and chewing gum so it appeared she was talking constantly. This made me think (again) that some of those people one sees on the streets of NYC who are always talking to the voices they hear only need to hold a phone to their ear or even just have one of the blue tooth things in their ears to fit into the city people-scape.

I stopped off at 34th street and heading to the office from the N train. This bridge between buildings caught my eye. I've since looked it up and found the follwoing on the "Forgotten New York" website
Filigree and decoration like this would be deemed unnecessary, ostentatious and needlessly expensive in ensuing decades. Since 1925, when the overpass was built, inter-building bridges have gotten ever more utilitarian and boring.
But, when Gimbels’ Department Store, Macy’s great rival, decided to bridge West 32nd Street at its 6th Avenue flagship, they hired the Shreve and Lamb architectural firm. A few years later, the same firm designed the Empire State, the King of All Buildings.

I needed to get some pages printed off for the house purchase. A simple matter one would think however for who knows what reason the US still use feet and inches and also has paper sizes that no one else in the world uses. So having something printed on A4 was an issue. However I found via the web a  place where I just emailed my attachments and they printed them off on A4 paper (or perhaps they cut some paper down who knows).
I could have had the pages sent back to me but i chose to walk to 55th and Lex. A pleasant day to enjoy the sights and sounds of the city.
The difference in walking around the city during the working week is that there are so many more food trucks out offering a huge array of "cuisines". The "Halal Guys" have two carts on either side of the corner of 53rd and 6th. The queues are always long- apart from anything else i couldn't be bothered with the queue. I found a review/comment online about it....

The yellow umbrella is the food cart

 As it accompanies all places that are super hyped, I was bracing myself for some disappointment. It was a little cart at the corner of an intersection, and the line was short: only about half a block long. My friend got me a classic chicken and rice bowl, which was basically.. a bowl with chicken and rice. Nothing more nothing less, exactly what the name implies. After I got my bowl, I was instructed to a section devoted to the sauces. There was a thick white sauce, and a lighter red sauce. Do not be fooled by this "lighter" red sauce. It is one of the spiciest sauces I've ever put on anything ever.

I think the white sauce is where the money's at for this place. It is a mayonnaise-based sauce that is simply delicious with the food in your bowl. Most people drench their bowl in this sauce, and I followed suit. I have to admit, the seemingly mediocre bowl of chicken and rice suddenly tasted unique and delicious. However, I think the bottom line is that this place depends 100% on their white sauce, while their rice and chicken is nothing special. Still not a bad deal for like 6 bucks, and they give you a lot! Overall, these places never live up to their hype, but I think Halal Guys comes pretty close. It is a place you definitely want to check out if you're in the area.

Just like his mother

Michele was on Dylan watching and during the day sent me this photograph. The technology of it all still confounds me. I woke this morning to find the message and the photo on my phone. I saved the photo to the phone and then looked in photo stream on my computer and there the photo was- truly fantastic... magical! Both the technology and the photo.
I have kinda explained why the technology is magical and so to the photo subject being magical. When Bridie (Dylan's mother) was a toddler she was such a darling little girl (still is a darling). At about the same age as Dylan she would pick up larger items and carry them tucked under her arm, things like bottles or pottery figures (her father had made) or anything about the size of a wine bottle. She would pick it up and walk around with it tucked under her arm. You'd have to sneak up on her to get it away from her as she had the habit of flinging it as far away as possible if you looked like you were moving in to remove it from her.
Dylan was a little more productive with the gathering of the empty wine bottle- he was trying to put it in the griller and was having a bit of a fiddle with the knobs and buttons on the stove. Gotta love how he is just like his mum!

Monday in Manhattan

As I walked the platform on the 49th street station, glancing at the advertising posters I was thinking about the graffiti artist who used to draw a mustache on the faces on posters. It was so clever using the word as the moustache, spelt the correct way as far as I am concerned, that is with an “o” in it as opposed to the Microsoft way without. Then there it was ... a poster with the graffiti artists’ work enhancing the poster. I managed to get a shot just before the train arrived. 

Speaking of subways I forgot to write about another subway experience this one I had on Friday. I was at the 59th St stop, Columbus Circle, waiting for the C train. The stop is a busy one where two express trains (A & D) stop on one side of the platform and two local trains (C & B) stop on the other side of the platform. A couple of trains came... the B train arrived so I moved back to allow space for the hordes of people moving in and around the platform.  A few people maintained their stance at the edge of the platform waiting for the train. Along with some others, I noticed movement a little further along the platform...it was a rat ... on the platform not on the track...a rat was sniffing its way past people's feet. As it made its way along the platform, people shifted, startled, backing away from the way the rat was heading. A young woman standing reading her  book noticed and with a quick intake of breath moved back  from the edge... The rat continued on it’s way. Suddenly a man with his big thick boots on rushed from the direction the rat had come and kicked it onto the line. The rat didn’t hit the third rail and twitched considerably as did most people on the platform who had witnessed this violent event. I caught the eye of a fellow commuter and commented on how disconcerting it had all been. Another woman arrived on the platform and asked what was going on- I told her a rat had just been kicked off the platform she said she knew something had happened as everyone was looking down and around nervously. 

Then again another commuting incident...

When I got off the train at Zerega Avenue this morning it was snowing... lightly but still snow. Where did that come from? I checked on my phone and the weather forecast and no indication of it. I decided I really should have bright an umbrella given that Sue and Bernadette had been drenched getting home yesterday and this looked fairly long term. I went into the bodega next to the station and asked without much hope of service for an umbrella. My lack of hope in the service stems from earlier in the year when I tried to use their ATM and the guy allowed me to access it all ... you know dip the card, punch in all the details, say what account etc etc and wait for the money to pop out but not this time and as I was walking out he said "Oh it's out of money" Cold have told me that 15 minutes earlier. Anyway today I thought I would forgive him enough to patronize his store again. Just as I got to the window he moved away- now I'm not sure if it was a purposeful  move away or an on purpose one but he did return and did have an umbrella for $2.99 (I've tried to find the NY1 commercial that talks about knowing that these umbrellas only last 45 minutes- but couldn't found this one instead). Any way I said to the bodega guy- where did that snow come from? and he then began to chat- turns out he lives in Bay Ridge near where I used to live before moving here. He lives at the end of the R line on 95th Street and travels to nearly the end of the 6 line in the Bronx jut for the pleasure of selling me an umbrella in a bodega! I decided my early morning commute was fine compared to his at least 2 hour one!

And the umbrella is still relatively pristine as it has been gloriously sunny for the remainder of the day.

Can you see them?

Glancing out the window from the office I was standing in I noticed these cats making their way around the snowy Morningside Park on the other side of the street.

If you peer hard enough you can see the two black seated blobs/cats, halfway up the photo near the base of the tree.

They were huge- have to be feral cats as they wee much too large for domestic cats.
This reminds me of the first time I saw a feral cat. I was driving back to the house I was then living in in Donvale (Melbourne), it was dark and it felt like I had imagined seeing this enormous cat. I ws telling one of my housemates about it and he said "Oh it was a Fair Isle cat!" I kept imagining these cats roaming around the bush in Australia wearing little Fair Isle jumpers (sweaters).

Can't you imagine a cat in one of these?