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The Shake Shack closes for the season on Friday so I made one last visit earlier this evening. A shack burger, fries and chocolate shake, they were out of today's special, chocolate hazelnut, hit the spot. It was twenty degrees warmer than normal today. That made eating dinner in the park on the last day of November all the more enjoyable. Snow showers are forecast for Monday.
M&M's Pirate Pearls were today's vending machine treat. Johnny Depp loves 'em! I tried them for the first time today. I thought they tasted okay, but I prefer regular chocolate over white chocolate.
The color palette was limited. Some of the candies were imprinted with ships. Other imprints included cannons, swords and skulls. There was a fifth design but I couldn't make out what it was.
Nothing to say today so I dug up these photos from a few months ago.
Kitty was a bit scared when I found her yesterday afternoon. She was much better after I fed her milk and a piece of pumpkin pie. We had turkey for dinner and vanilla ice cream for dessert tonight. Kitty misses her friend and wants to hurry home. I will take good care of her until she returns home.
Happy Thanksgiving everbody! I'm not sure what these berries have to do with the holiday but I think they are pretty.
I'll be off the internet for a few days and so should you.
Following up on yesterday's post, if you ever want to make people disappear go to the top of Mount Morris and take a few photos. The camera shy guys loitering up there vanish in a hurry!
The old fire tower is still standing. The tower was completed in 1857 and is the last of eleven fire towers that used to be in Manhattan. Emergency repairs, I assume the white beams in the top photo, were made in 1994. That would indicate that the railings at the top have been missing for at least twelve years.
I mentioned yesterday that a set of not-so-bad looking steps were cut off with a chain link fence. There were no safety warnings on the west side steps, which featured an exposed length of rusty rebar.
There were indications that the Parks Department was trying to save some of the materials. I saw two collections of the stone wall pediments. The collection in the third photo actually looked ordered and cared for. It gives me a little hope that there's a plan to someday refurbish the walls with the original materials that date back to the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
In addition to serving as a breeding ground for mosquitos, the sound/video booth for the ampitheater is falling apart. The wooden roof is rotting and the narrow space behind the building is a communal garbage dump.
I'll end this on a happier note. The Richard Rogers Ampitheater is the site of the Saturday performances of the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival each August. Rogers grew up across the street from the park and the ampitheater was his gift to the city.
There's a bunch more photos that I'm going to throw onto Flickr after Thanksgiving. Guests arrive tomorrow evening and somebody has a lot of cooking and cleaning to do before they get here.
Sometimes I take so many photos that I don't know where to begin. During the marathon a couple of weeks ago I went up to the top of Mount Morris in to see how the old fire tower was holding up.
Not well. Not well at all. As you can see, much of the stone work is falling apart. The mortar has rotted out and the stones fallen to the ground. The benches have been removed, and there's a chain link fence dividing the north and south halves of the hill top.
The fence is bizarre because both sides are easily accessible from different sets of stairs. The fence doesn't prevent anyone from climbing the short set of steps it runs along, and those steps aren't in any worse shape than stairs elsewhere in the park. So it's a mystery why the Parks Department bothered with the fence.
The city has recently spent some money to renovate the park. For example, $121,127 was spent this year to improve a playground and put up the useless fence. Another $571,000 was spent improving stairways and paths. There is one improved path on the west side of the hill, but all the stairways still need repair as far as I can tell.
More photos to come to show the extent of the dilapidation.
Somewhere off Rt 31 between Pulaski and Columbia, Tennessee last month. One of the few moments on my drive from Huntsville to Nashville that it wasn't pouring rain. Pretty countryside. I'd like to go back sometime when it's not raining and I have more than six hours free time.
Back to work bright and early Monday morning.
After the doctor scolded me for "running" in the hallway (I was walking!), the nurse read me the riot act about the need to take it easy while she removed my stitches this morning. Now I have a series of oh-so-stylish butterfly bandages glued to my nose. Determined to follow doctor's orders I went to Jou-Jou, a nice little cafe on 168th street, for a cherry danish and cup of tea.
It was so pleasant this morning that I took my second breakfast on the bench outside. Lots and lots of fire trucks soon filled 168th. It wasn't clear to me if the building had been partially evacuated, but there were more than the usual amount of people, none patients, milling about on the sidewalk in front of the building. I didn't notice any smoke or hear any alarms. The firemen didn't appear to worked up about whatever was happening. In short, it was a pretty boring scene. I finished my danish, took a couple of pictures, and went home.
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