Louis was hired as a carpenter/woodworker, but says that everyone in his department simply refers to him as the bench man. He drives around Central Park in a van full of tools and bench slats, replacing the slats that are broken or rotted. He also installs the occasional donor plaques you may find on some of the individual benches.

Most of the time when I'm in Central Park, I'm on a long walk, but I'm happy that the benches are maintained well enough that I *can* use them whenever I want to. Back in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in the late 60s when I was a kid, you were lucky if a bench seat had 3 slats on it. An awful lot of them had none.

We finished up the day with a look into Macy*s windows. The 34th Street side was the same old "Miracle on 34th Street" windows, wonderful the first couple of times you see them, but after 20 years, not so magical for us. The Broadway windows were very strange. The theme was "Believe" and the window scenes seemed to be an encouragement to believe in robots and space aliens.

Andrew and dj_rose_red went inside, opened up a Macy*s charge card, and saved over 50% on a pile of clothing for her. I was exhausted and went home to walk the dog, remembering as I got to my front door that I hadn't brought my keys. Fortunately, the dog's 3x/week walker was at work at the vet a few blocks away, and he loaned me his key ring, but it meant my rest was delayed as I had to return the keys after walking the dog. Still, it beat the alternative.

dj_rose_red went home December 2 after going with me to Chinatown, walking around while I got acupuncture, and joining me for dim sum at Jing Fong, which I much prefer to Golden Unicorn. We tried a new dish for us: snails in black bean sauce. They were very tasty, but they take a long time to remove from the shell and eat. Thus, I would not order them again unless I was with a large group, because the portion size is large and ours were cold by the time we had consumed 1/4 of an order. No turnip cakes, but we did get taro cakes and their wonderful shrimp-stuffed Chinese eggplant.

( Three Macy*s pictures behind the cut. )

On to Saks Fifth Avenue, directly across from Rockefeller Center. The first time we did the walk, about 20 years ago, we went upstairs to, iirc, the ladies' coat department where there was a small little-known window that gave a spot-on view of the tree. We haven't been up there since then, and I don't know whether that window is still accessible to the public. (We also saw a fabulous Xmas tree on the 2nd floor of Gotham Books on Diamond Row, and we went to the bookstore for several more Xmas walks even though they never had the tree again after that.)


The Saks Fifth Avenue windows this year feature scenes from NPL member Mr. Tex's latest children's book, A Flake Like Mike, about how long ago all the snowflakes looked the same and fell all at once in a WHOOMP instead of gently flaking down, until Mike decided to be different. The sign on the window says that if you buy the book at Saks, they will donate $2 to St. Jude's Children's Hospital.

( From Saks Fifth Avenue down to Lord & Taylor, behind the cut )

This was the end of the miniature golf course in the Bergdorf Goodman windows on the east side of 5th Ave.

( The walk down Fifth Avenue continues )

Across 59th street from FAO Schwartz was POP Burgers, which none of us remembered seeing before. The back wall had Warhol reproductions. We did not eat here, but continued down to the corner of 59th and 5th.

Bergdorf Goodman has stores on the SE and SW corners of that intersection. The main store, on the SW corner, usually has fabulous windows full of definitely non-vegan arty displays (lots of fur and feathers), and is usually my favorite stop on the tour. The store on the SE corner, on the other hand, usually has boring windows, with things like men's ties and socks. However, this time, the auxiliary store windows included taxidermy as well as drawing-type wall art to show a fantasy world of winter sports. I find dead-animal art fascinating even if I'm not entirely comfortable with killing --> beauty.


This one is not exactly correct, but all part of the fun.

( Non-vegan window art behind the cut )

Pictures of snow monkeys we saw at the Central Park Zoo are here:
http://community.livejournal.com/baaaaabyanimals/3760657.html


We enjoyed the ants behind the glass, even though they were a little creepy, so to speak. I liked the magnified ant peekaboo (video or live cam? I couldn't tell) sign.

We finally left the zoo and went across the street to FAO Schwartz, where we looked at the giant stuffed animals for a while.

( Two pictures from FAO Schwartz are behind the cut )

Yesterday, Andrew, dj_rose_red, Poppy, and I went to my mother's house to celebrate Rose's being home, a sorta belated Thanksgiving, my 46th birthday on the 28th, and my mom's 71st birthday today. Poppy doesn't like to be picked up by anyone, and doesn't even like anyone but me and *sometimes* Andrew to touch him, but yesterday he decided to make nice with Andrew, who let Rose sit up front in the car. The dog climbed into Andrew's lap to look out the window, and I took this picture while Rose was in the florist getting her grandmother's birthday gift.


On the way home, the dog again climbed into Andrew's lap and let Andrew pet him all the way home. However, when the car was stopped and Andrew went to take the dog out of the car, the dog bit Andrew's hand and didn't let go, so now Andrew has some scabs from the bleeding and a painful bruise.

( More pictures here )

JoAnn and I used the barely-a-couple of hours of daylight after 5pm on Tuesday to walk around downtown Rochester. The Rochester tourism table at the convention had included a flyer with 3 phone numbers for 3 walking tours. You call from your cellphone and input a credit card number to get charged $5, and then you have access for the next 24 hours to call that number from your cellphone, punch in a number and hear information about that stop on the walking tour.

The flyer said where to start for each of the 3 tours, so I figured the recording on the phone would say "now turn left and walk..." as a museum audio guide would. However, the recording said "Number 2 on your map..." Uh, what map? (I checked with the tourism lady at the table the next day, and she knew nothing about any map. I must be the first customer they have had for the service.) Fortunately, I had a generic downtown map, no stop was more than 2 blocks from the one before it, and JoAnn and I were good at figuring out what they were talking about. The only thing was that we kept having to click the next number, listen for a sentence or two, and then hang up and walk to the next spot before calling back and listening again from the beginning of that stop.

It's actually a good thing that there was some brainwork necessary, because the walk itself was pretty damn boring. Apparently, most of the character of the downtown neighborhood was torn down when the city decided it didn't like having a lot of industry around the Genesee River, and they tore down the working buildings to build the convention center area. For the remaining buildings, the tour mostly gave what type of architecture it was and who the tenants were over the decades.

( Three interesting things on the tour, behind the cut. )

At the end of the long walk of August 31 was the trip over the Williamsburg Bridge back to Manhattan.


( A few more pictures from a few weeks ago. )

On August 31, I joined a walk of about 7-8 miles led by Shorewalkers VIP Cy Adler. There were about 20 of us. We met near the municipal building in Manhattan, near the Brooklyn Bridge. That's Cy in the middle, wearing the white hat, giving preliminary instructions.



This sign on the Brooklyn Bridge says it was erected by the cities of New York and Brooklyn in 1869-1883.


Many more pictures tomorrow.

I attended a joint outing of Shorewalkers and a hiking group back on August 9. I haven't posted about it because it was a bit disappointing. It was billed as an easy 7-mile hike. It was about 2 miles of an easy walk at the end, when we went out on the "pier" (actually a land bridge) that juts out from Piermont into the Hudson. The first part, about 6 miles inside Tallman State Park, was harder than the hike I did with Sue++, D Ness, and Atlantic up a mountain in Montana. The leader was a member of the hiking group rather than Shorewalkers and was one of those Jack LaLanne types who is elderly and extremely fit and therefore thinks that if he can do it at his age, then it must be a piece of cake for everyone else. I only had to get on my hands and knees to go downhill once, so in that respect it was easier than a day inspecting 2 bodegas that have trapdoors to access their basement.

There were 10 people altogether, none of whom knew each other, and it didn't seem as if any of us made a friend by the end of the day. If a British novelist had told our story, only 8 or 9 of us would have gotten out of the woods alive; I swear, the personalities were like in one of those murder mysteries where everyone in the group is suspected of killing someone obnoxious who it turns out was killed by someone on the outside with an old grudge.

These are two pictures I took inside Tallman State Park. I erased any that had people in them.




( Pictures of the pier, the river, and wildlife behind the cut. )

Today I had my first of 10 summer Tuesdays off (had to delay the start due to work commitments), and thought I'd post about that, but I got sidetracked farting around on Internet, so I'll continue the walking tour pictures ( here )

Sometimes we had to walk away from the canal to get to the next part of it.


( Moar things here, peeplz too )

Last Saturday, Noam and I joined a walking tour of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. It was led by a guide from http://www.shorewalkers.org -- $15 a year to join, with individual tours free to members and usually $3 to guests.

Since NYC is a small world, one of the 10 or so other people on the tour was someone Noam knew: a woman named Martha whom he had met at a party at lunchboy and otherwise_nyc's home. (Similarly, today at the ballet, Andrew and I quite unexpectedly ran into my walking friend Phil and his mother, who were seated 5 rows in front of us.)

We met at the F/G station at Smith and 9th Streets:


( Downstairs, outside, by the canal... )

This is somewhere between signage (only "GRANT" on the front of the monument) and landscape, but I like General Grant, and his horse, and the statue of them:


Near Grant is the Armory, which has been the subject of neighborhood meetings and protests lately (the print on those signs is too small to reproduce well here). NYC in its infinite wisdom wants to move the main homeless shelter intake from midtown Manhattan, 2-4 blocks from about 8 different subway lines, to Brooklyn, 4 blocks from only a single subway line (the C local during the day, the A local late night and weekends). Information here, if you're interested: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/nyregion/thecity/18disp.html

A walking tour of Atlantic Avenue from the East River to Bedford Avenue is here:
www.forgotten-ny.com/tour32/32.html

Last Sunday morning, there was a race in Central Park, so Kyoko, Phil, and I stuck to the byways of the north end of the park for our walk, with the highlight being the three Conservatory Gardens.



( Pictures of the fountain group referred to and many flowers behind the cut. )

Last Sunday morning, I walked for almost 2 hours, mostly in the Rambles, with some members of the Natural Living running and walking club.

This inscription is one of a few surrounding the larger-than-life sculpture of Alice in Wonderland:


( Birds, trees, and friends behind the cut. )

Ok there is a sign for the community garden, but it's an excuse to show more flowering trees.

This is the nicest community garden I've seen so far in Brooklyn -- lots of planting and no piles of rubbish -- a real testament to the lady they named it after. The print on the plaque detailing everything she did was too small to reproduce here, but I can assure you it is quite an accomplishment. The current state of the park and the many events held there tell the wonders of the people running this thing, especially considering how scary some of the surrounding blocks can be even at high noon.