weather

Dense Fog Advisory — live in concert!

This morning, until 9 am, there was a Dense Fog Advisory in effect — which, honestly, sounds like a bad super group from the 1970s. I woke up around six, looked out the window, and it was actually too thick to see much of anything. I half expected to see pirate ghosts at any moment. Of course, I went back to sleep for a little then, and the fog had mostly burned off by the time I actually went to work.

That’s about it, really: a briefly foggy — and then much too hot, for late September anyway — Monday.

The dark ages

If you’re wondering where I’ve been the past few days, why no Song of the day posts or daily write-ups, the quick answer is: we lost power.

If you haven’t been wondering, the answer’s the same, but you wound me. Truly, you wound me.

As you may have heard, the east coast of the U.S. recently experienced…well, let’s call it a semi-severe hurricane. It certainly wasn’t as severe as hyped, but all told it caused a fair amount of damage — I think estimates put it at the eighth most destructive recorded hurricane, but I don’t have those estimates in front of me — with several deaths and extensive property damage. Here in New York, we escaped relatively unscathed, with Irene reclassified as a tropical storm by the time in made landfall sometime on Sunday.

But also sometime on Sunday, around one in the morning, we lost electricity in the house, on the block, and pretty much across the island. Here on our little street, we’ve yet to get it back, some three days later.

My iPad conked out on me Sunday afternoon, and my office was closed because of all the problems with the trains and buses (which NYC had shut down on Saturday, in anticipation) the storm had wrought. So it wasn’t until today that I got my hands (not literally) on a working electrical outlet, so I could recharge what needed recharging. Namely, everything.

Which is good, because my last day in the office for a while is tomorrow. On Thursday morning, crack of dawn, I’m headed to Canada for a week at the Banff Centre in, appropriately enough, Banff. I’ll be meeting Heather while I’m there, attempting to write a three-day novel, and quite possibly riding a horse. The first of these sounds quite nice, but the other two are quite possibly the early stages of madness. We shall see.

And not to worry, while I’m gone, there will be some posts here. On Saturday, as the rain picked up outside, I spent some time post-dating stuff. That’s where the daily link posts have been coming from, and there will be songs of the day aplenty while I’m gone. Maybe even a Random Friday Guess 10. If time permits — and I’m not thrown dangerously from either the horse or the novel — I may even check in from time to time. I’ll certainly be checking in via my Twitter page. Now may be the moment you’ve been waiting for to join and follow me there. C’mon! I thought Twitter was dumb before I started, too!

Anyway, one more day of work, possibly several more days without power, and a long morning of traveling to Alberta on Thursday. Till then, it’s mostly reading and games of Monopoly — we played, my parents and sister and me, on Sunday; I won — by flashlight. It’s shaping up to be a weird week.

Good night, Irene

As I write this, the rain is starting to really bucket down, and the wind is picking up. I think New York has now officially met the hurricane called Irene.

It was a pretty quiet day, all told, spent mostly just waiting for the other shoe (a galosh, no doubt) to drop. To watch television news, you’d think the east coast of the United States was the only place left in the world; hurricane coverage has eclipsed everything else.

We’ve only lost power once so far, and then only briefly, and overall the weather’s not too been too bad. But this could go on and get worse throughout the night and into tomorrow. We’ll see. We’re not hunkered in the basement or anything, sandbags at the ready, if you’re worried.

It feels slightly weird packing for a trip to the Canadian Rockies amid all this, the earthquakes and hurricanes and what’s still very much summery weather here. And now I seem to have somehow been talked into a trail ride while I’m there in Banff…

I shall look upon this as a a mad adventure. I think that’s the only sensible approach.

Putter there

Today was our company outing to Randalls Island, just across the bridge from Manhattan, and it was actually a lot of fun. I got to work around 8:30, answered a few e-mails — fewer than I would have liked — and then I set my away message and headed downstairs to hop on the bus.

We arrived a little before ten and were left mostly to our own devices, with a driving range, batting cage, bean bag toss, and lots of other games available. There was also a short relay race — one leg a sack race, another a three-legged race, the third an egg-and-spoon race with lemons standing in for the eggs — and a dodgeball “tournament,” both of which I just watched. I played some miniature golf with my co-workers, enjoyed a decent lunch, and got to leave work early when we returned to the office around 3.

Meanwhile, much ado about Hurricane Irene, expected to hit us sometime tomorrow into Sunday. It’s unclear just how bad it’s going to get, but we should be safe, at worst losing power for a little while. We’re hoping even that doesn’t happen, though, and we’re far enough from the coast not to be in any of the evacuation areas. We’re also not dependent on public transportation over the weekend, so we won’t be impacted by NYC shutting that down until Monday, when everything should hopefully have returned to normal.

To think that in a week from now, I will be in the Canadian Rockies…

Thursday

A week from now, I will be in Canada, for the start of a week there. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous.

I’m slightly less nervous about our impending doom by hurricane this weekend, although I’m still kind of hoping the worst of it passes us by. Either way, it’s not supposed to get too bad until Saturday night.