Rainy Myrtle...

Sandy Aftermath...

So Sandy has been and more or less gone and now New York (and all the other states that's she's been through) are left to tidy up after her.

Watching the news it looks absolutely horrific in some areas - all last night there were new reports of flooding, the subways were under 11 feet of water, the tunnels out of Manhattan had even more, Battery Park was under a couple of feet of water and half of Manhattan have been without power for nearly 24 hours now.

There were worse cases too, the entire New Jersey boardwalk has gone, it's been engulfed in sand, as have many of the houses on that part of the coast, the majority of Atlantic City was under water and part of the boardwalk there had floated away. 

In an area called Breezy Point - a lovely seaside town out near Long Island - was not only flooded but suffered a tragic fire that resulted in 80-100 houses burning down. That's an entire neighbourhood who have lost everything.

There are still millions and millions of people without any power, and it looks like there won't be any power for the next few days for those people. A lot of the power went out in lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn after a power station exploded! I was looking outside at one point and saw some blue flashes in the sky, I had assumed it was lightning but now I know it was flashes from the power station.

Every single news channel has been covering the Sandy story for the last couple of days - it's supposedly the worst, or most expensive natural disaster in American history.

Watching the news and hearing all the stories has made Abi and I realise just how lucky we were last night not to have been effected by any of the disastrous events. We're dry and safe, we still have power and gas and internet, all the buildings around us are untouched and luckily there was very minor damage along Myrtle Avenue.

I went for a walk this morning to the supermarket and only saw a few traces of Sandy...

 Despite not having any serious signs of Sandy in our area last night or this morning, it has been a very intense couple of days. We've had the news on a lot throughout the last 48 hours and hearing all the reports come in about mandatory evacuations, subways shutting down, all other mass transit stopping, curfews, bridges and tunnels closing etc. It was all very dramatic and quite draining.

I feel a bit silly saying that watching the news was draining, when I know there are people out there who have suffered emensly from the storms, some people have even lost family members to Sandy. I can't begin to imagine how those people must be feeling, the people who have had their possessions ruined or the people who no longer have a house to call home. It's just awful.

Hopefully New York and the rest of the East Coast can pick itself up, dust itself off and get back to normal (or better) very soon. From what I've seen of New York over these past three and a bit years, I have a feeling it'll just shrug Sandy off, get back to work and be joking about the whole thing in a few weeks.

I hope so anyway.

Barry McGee Revisited...

That big Barry McGee mural by BAM is now finished...

 It's blummin' HUGE!

Mossy Fish...

I saw these weird fish made out of moss today...

 I don't know how they were made, it looked like sheets of moss stuck up on the fence...?

Maybe they're sheets of that stuff you can buy for model railway sets and scalextric or something - either way it's another unique piece of New York street art.

Here She Comes...

Hurricane Sandy is slowly making her way our way!

New York has been on hurricane watch for the last couple of days and today it was announced that New York and New Jersey will be feeling the effect of Hurricane Sandy.

The storm is being dubbed 'Frankenstorm', mainly because of it hitting around Halloween but also because it's a mixture of two powerful storms, meeting over New York - we're going to get hurricane scale winds, torrential rain and floods apparently.

All the schools are shut tomorrow, the subways are shutting down in 1 hour, the buses two hours after that, all other public transport will have stopped by 9pm tonight. 

350 thousand people have already been evacuated from Zone A, the areas most vulnerable to flooding. Unlike last year with Irene, the evacuations are mandatory this time, but some people are remembering they hype from last year and the little damage Irene did, and deciding to ride it out. 

It sounds like the storm will start to hit tonight, then gradually get worse through-out the day tomorrow and then get really nasty on Sunday night. They still don't know what it's going to be like on Tuesday, but the storm will keep moving through the week and reach Canada by Friday.

To make it worse, there's a full moon tonight, or tomorrow, so the high tides are higher, then there's a 6-11 feet tidal serge happening and then they're predicting that the waves could get up to 20 feet ON TOP of the serge!?!?!

Perhaps the best thing to come out of all this is that work's closed tomorrow (and maybe Tuesday), so we'll be working from home for the first part of the week. It was all looking very dramatic when I went in to get my laptop this afternoon - Union Square had been taken over by all the electrical service vehicles...

 I think their usual depot is down in lower Manhattan, which is in Zone A, so to avoid getting stuck in the floods they all parked up on Union Square.

I popped into Barnes and Noble to get a better view...

This was just half of them!

I went to get some provisions this afternoon from Brooklyn Fare. Last time all the shops ran out of water, so I was expecting to see some empty shelves, but what I wasn't expecting to see was the crazy number of people shopping!

The queue at Brooklyn Fare is never longer than 15 people, it never really snakes out very far, but today the queue must have had 100 or more people in it and it snaked round the entire shop, almost out the door - people were having to do their shopping from the within the queue, picking up things they wanted as they passed them!

It was madness.

Funnily enough there didn't seem to be much of a shortage of water this time, but they were clean out of rotisserie chickens and running very low on cheese crackers.

So now Abi and I are all stocked up, we've got food to last the next couple of days, candles and matches at the ready and our laptops charged just incase. Hopefully the internet won't cut out and I can keep you updated.

Part of me thinks that the whole thing will blow over in the same way Irene did and not really do any damage or be anything like as bad as they predicted. Then again, all the figures they're giving this time round seem to be almost double those from Irene... so it could get nasty.

It's a good job we can both swim!

Gourdy Gourd...

 There are some mighty fine pumpkins in Union Square at the moment.

Autumn's Here...

 The trees on Myrtle Avenue have turned all fiery and beautiful. I wonder how many trees will still have their leaves after Hurricane Sandy hits this weekend...

New Toys...

Abi's new bike arrived the other day, but she seemed to be more interesting in playing with the box it came in instead...

Italian Bread and Comic Booklets...

Subway Shoot...

Maybe the C Train at 14th Street has some significance to their relationship...?

Luckily they didn't get on the train when it arrived, but the bride did have to walk up a lot of steps in that dress.

Rainbow Highline...

We went for a lovely little walk along the Highline today. The plants are all looking very Autumnal and the colours were really beautiful...

 I think all the leaves have turned a bit sooner than they did last year, it seems to have happened all of a sudden. This is definitely one of my very very favourite times of the year in New York. I love it.

As You Do...

Casually unicycling up Myrtle Avenue with some shopping...?

Yellow on Yellow...

El Adios Grocery...

Amongst all the graffiti in Bushwick was this El Adios Grocery and Deli...

At first glance, it just looks like a normal bodega, with an ATM and some bunting, but then I realised the whole thing is painted!

It's just a garage door, everything else is painted onto the concrete wall...

It's really clever. I'd seen it a few months ago on a blog but completely forgot about it and hadn't realised it was in Bushwick, so it was a great surprise to stumble upon it this morning.

Bushwick's 5 Pointz...

This morning I went to go and find the area that's been called Bushwick's version of 5 Pointz.

Just off the Jefferson stop on the L train is a pretty industrial area of Bushwick, with lots of old disused factories that have now been used by graffiti artists.

There are a couple of blocks worth of buildings that are solidly covered in different pieces, and then various bits dotted around on walls on the streets near by. Some of the artists have pieces up on the walls of 5 Pointz and some of them are completely different...

  These bears were by far my favourite out of all the pieces.

It'll be interesting to go back in a month of two and see if any new pieces have gone up. 

Gone t' Bog...

After driving all the way out to the New Jersey countryside to find a cranberry bog, who'd've thought we'd end up finding one right in the middle of Manhattan?!

Today there was a special Ocean Spray promotion happening outside the Rockefeller Center...

 They had constructed a mini cranberry bog, with cranberry farmers wading around in it answering questions... there were telly people doing News Spots from in the bog, and had people doing interviews and stuff...

 There was all sorts of different harvesting machinery dotted around too, all with little signs telling you about the harvesting process...

 It was great to see the whole thing, and such a coincidence that it was happening so soon after our little adventure at the weekend. I'd still love to see a real life working bog - in the wild, but seeing one at the Rockefeller Center will do nicely for now!