We had a high quality thunderstorm blow through town last night. The camera caught an orangey-red sky whenever lightning flashed. If these pictures don't appear very sharp it's because the auto focus doesn't work well at night. Using manual focus has convinced me that it is time for bifocals.
There was a note in the elevator when I came home this evening that reminded me of Friday. It was an unusual day in that in that there were several instances of thunder and lightning. The first woke me at 2:29 a.m. A really loud clap of thunder woke me for good several hours later. As I was putting my shoes on to leave for work the skies opened up and I decided I would take the nine o'clock bus to work.
The weather was pleasant enough that evening that I walked from the bus stop at 118th St. to 72nd, stopping every once in a while to do a bit of shopping.
I don't know if it was the recent warm spell, or knowing that cooler weather was on the way, but this past weekend was the weekend of long walks. A Saturday shopping trip took me all the way downtown. I walked from City Hall to the East River then up under the Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges before turning inland and grabbing a train at the 2nd Avenue F/V station.
Maybe I was overly tired but the train ride was confusing! The F train was waiting so I jumped on. As sometimes happens at that station the train just sat there so I eagerly ran across the platform when the V arrived. Only it wasn't a V train it was a C train. The good news was that meant I didn't have to switch trains, as the C goes to 116th Street. The bad news was the C doesn't run on the V line. I figured that problem would eventually sort itself out. The train did run express on the local tracks, which caused the conductor to announce "if you missed any of the local stops you're going to have to take the downtown train from here. Sorry about that." as we pulled into 34th Street.
At 42nd St. the conductor announced the next stop would be 59th St.
At 47-50 Rockefeller Center the conductor announced the next stop would be 59th St.
At. 7th Avenue the conductor announced the next stop would be 59th St.
The next stop was 59th St.
We then made all the proper local stops before arriving at 116th.
Sunday was another nice day so I combined birthday shopping with a long walk. Until I got off at 34th Street, the C train made all the stops it was supposed to make and none that it shouldn't. That was a good sign! My plan was to walk uptown along 9th Avenue, do my shopping, and hop on a train when I got tired.
I found a birthday gift at Delphinium Home. I would not normally shop there, it's out of the way and a bit too much for my taste, except that the first time I came across it I was looking for a girly present for someone (someone who thinks I am going straight to hell no less). The store was cute and looked like it held suitably girly stuff so I walked in out of curiosity. As I opened the door Julianne Moore walked out.
You know there's nothing quite like a gratuitous celebrity sighting to perk up a reader's interest in a long story. Anyway, thirty blocks uptown from Delphinium my energy is beginning to flag. Somehow I have the strength to summon up a brilliant idea! Not only is the idea brilliant but it includes the possibility of a gratuitous celebrity look-alike sighting.
The new Jacques Torres chocolate shop is only a couple blocks away. I'll stop in and get a chocolate chip cookie. To my disappointment the woman who sort of looks like Cynthia Nixon isn't working. The cookie, while delicious, is a big mess. They keep them warm so the chocolate is half-melted, and the cookie itself is mostly chocolate held together by the smallest amount of dough possible.
Back on Amsterdam, I'm happily struggling with the messy cookie. Around 80th Street I see the shadow of the water tank against the construction netting and think that it would make a nice picture.
Fifteen blocks later I'm closing in on 96th Street. I've walked nearly four miles and it's another mile-and-a-half if I don't take the subway. Boarding the 2 the elderly woman I sit down across from gives me a big smile. I get to my building, notice that one of our elevators is out of order, go up to my apartment and wash up so I can make dinner.
That's when I see why the woman on the train smiled at me. The chocolate from Jacque Torres' messy chocolate chip cookie is smeared over a good third of my chin. Nice. Thanks smiling train lady and the dozens of Upper West Siders who saw me and said nothing.
This evening I got home, gathered the mail (the 1040 form arrived!), noticed one of the elevators was still out and went up to my apartment.
The speed of sound in air and the speed of light differ such that you can estimate how far away a thunderstorm is by counting the seconds between when lightning flashes and when you hear thunder. If there is a five second difference between flash and crash the lightning is about a mile away. A one second difference means the lightning hit about a thousand feet away.
One clap of thunder on Friday was loud and happened simultaneously with the lightning. What the lightning hit was the water tank on top of our building, six stories above my apartment. The bolt of electricity found its way to ground by zapping a piece of elevator equipment. No serious damage other than the fried elevator part.
There were intense thunderstorms the first two nights I was in Minnesota. Lots of lightning and rain but little damage. Here's a video from the second night (sorry for the cough at the start).
There was a torrential downpour as I was walking home this evening.
Greensburg, Kansas was leveled by a tornado Friday night. The tornado killed at least nine people and completely destroyed the downtown. Nearly all buildings in Greensburg were demolished by the mile-and-a-half wide tornado. More severe storms are near Greensburg as I write this on Saturday night.
If you've read this site for more than a year you may recall that I visited the world's largest hand-dug well in Greensburg last year. You can catch glimpses of the big well water tower in this KAKE video via the New York Times.
I almost didn't visit the well. I needed to get from Great Bend to Denver so I could catch a flight the next morning. It was early in the morning when I drove through Greensburg. The well didn't open until noon. I continued on to Mullinville and took lots of pictures of M.T. Liggett's artwork.
Even though there were four hundred miles remaining to drive that day I could tell I was purposely taking my time taking photographs. By 11 a.m. I finished and got back in the car. Gee, I thought, if I hurried back to Greensburg there will be enough time to walk around town for a few minutes, pick up a bottle of water, and pay a quick visit to the well.
The pictures above are of buildings that were along Main Street or just off of Main Street.
The last few days I've felt like I've been coming down with something. I came home last night, ate dinner, put together the animated gif linked below and then fell asleep on the couch around 8:30. Woke up around 11:00 only to climb into bed. Woke up around six this morning only to fall asleep until 10:00. It still feels like I'm coming down with something but so far no cold has arrived.
As I watched the clouds roll across the sky Monday night I thought they might make for a good animation. Take a look at the resulting time lapse view. There's ten photos taken over a 5-6 minute period. Each picture is a 15-second long exposure, with 17 seconds between the start of each photo. In addition to the moving clouds you can see the constellation rotate. The reddish thing at upper left, the thing that looks like a jellyfish, is either a lens flare or a major astronomical discovery.
15 degrees in Morningside Park.
81 degrees Fahrenheit in the office.
There's been a nearly 70 degree difference in the outside and inside temperatures this week. Our office is warm and dry. The other alternative would be cold. Office mate Lisa and I decided that too warm was better than too cold.
One benefit to a warm, dry office is that we can make raisins. I lost a couple of grapes last month. When I found them a few days later they had turned into very tasty raisins.
I can't believe I missed this. A few feet away from the emerging daffodils in Morningside Park is an entire grove of daffodils in bloom. As someone with a bit of education in weather and climate I know enough to not attribute this winter's lack of winter on global warming. However, the extreme unusualness of the recent warm weather (24 straight days above normal, on half those days the lows have been at least as warm as the normal highs), and the sight of flowers blooming in early-January does make a person worry that these are ominous signs of things to come.
That last picture is of a dandelion, not a daffodil. Don't think that I don't know the difference! It and a bunch of clover were blooming in the little triangle of land north of the Grant Memorial.
Fame! I'm quoted in an article about weather blogging in the current issue of Weatherwise. Such words of wisdom.
Since I had the day off today I went downtown for lunch at Bouley Bakery Market. Not the excellent restaurant next door but the take-out sandwich place on the corner. The butternut squash soup had the look and consistency of a soft-boiled egg yolk and was excellent. The sandwich was skate wing, avocado, capers and lemon sauce on a baguette. Certain species of skate have been listed as critically endangered. I don't know if this was one of them. Perhaps the best food portion of the meal was the little walnut roll that came with the soup. I could have eaten a dozen of them. Lunch at the cafeteria tomorrow is going to be a major come down.
Whether it is good or an omen of impending environmental disaster, I also enjoyed eating lunch outside on January 2nd. The table was protected from the wind and was actually quite warm and perhaps too sunny. Please don't tell Dr. Ratner or she'll scold me.
Last night, while I was trying to figure out why my internet connection died (thanks Time-Warner), I noticed a bright white cloud to the south. Usually nighttime clouds are a jaundiced yellow, not bright white. It was also a standing cloud. Instead of moving with the wind it was staying put, forming on the right side and dying on the left. Bright white standing clouds aren't that common so I took a few long-exposure pictures. To add to the unusualness, I got lucky and captured a semi-rare cloud formation known as a Kelvin-Helmholtz cloud.
You can see the waves on the right in the bottom photo (which is a blow up of the middle picture). Usually these clouds form downwind of a mountain range. Last night they would have been forming between the denser dry air near the ground and warm, humid air above. Interesting!
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