kmkat and her kneedles

Two-fer Tuesday.

Coupla things.

As horrible and devastating as SuperSandy was/is, it is good to remember how much worse it could have been.

• No major buildings collapsed. Nurses had to carry sick babies down nine flights of stairs while pumping air into their tiny lungs, but the building -- and 99.999% of the others -- stayed up. Thank you, building codes and inspectors.
   
• The majority of people heeded the days of warnings and stocked up or evaculated as they were instructed. Thank you, television and radio and internet and organized government, also thank you, common sense.  (A certain NJ mayor is excluded from this thanks.)
   
• Millions of people are without power, but millions more are not. Thank you, ConEd and other utilites for shutting down pre-emptively and for building some redundency into your systems.
  
  
• Those in harm's way were being rescued, even at the height of the storm, by dedicated police and firefighters and EMTs and other emergency personnel. Thank you, all you heroes. And thank you to those folks 150 years ago who decided that such services were needed and organized and funded them. 

Think of it: a 100-year storm hits the most densely populated area of the country, affecting 50 million people, and the death toll is (as of an hour ago) under 50. That is kind of miraculous right there.

And now, some humor found at blackbird's blog. She lives somewhere near NYC, close enough that she commutes to Manhattan by train every day.

 

 

One more thing. Did anyone else see this photo of the sandbags in from of Goldman Sachs Wall Street headquarters and think, Huh, they are protecting their building with bags of money.

"We took Times Square today..."

"We took Times Square today, 15,000 people or something.  You know those news tickers they have out front of some of the buildings in Times Square?  A great big cheer went up from the crowd when one ran the headline, 'OccupyWall Street protesters take Times Square.' "

-- email from #1 Son, Saturday night

He's at it again.

#1 Son (called home late Saturday afternoon, giddy with excitement): Guess what I'm doing, Mom?

Me: The possibilities are endless. You took a swim in the Hudson?

#1: No, but you are close. We took the Brooklyn Bridge!*

He was not among the dozens arrested**, but his friend Claire was. He will cat-sit for her while she is in jail. Claire is such a med student -- emphasis on the student -- that she made herself a bunch of anatomy flash cards and stuffed them in her bra before the police took her so she could study if she ends up in jail for awhile.

*Apparently there were a number of protests on Friday and Saturday. He was among the group that gathered in Wall Street chanting Greed must go!*** or some such before occupying the Brooklyn-bound lanes of the Bridge.

** Unlike 2004, when he was among the 1,200 or so protesters arrested during the Republican National Convention in NYC (his group was protesting WHINSEC) and spent 40+ hours in Guantanamo on the Hudson. That time he called me on a borrowed cell phone from the middle of Broadway at 29th to say he had been arrested and was waiting to be taken away in a police bus. He was one of the last to be allowed leave the bus-garage-turned-into-a-holding-facility and saw the police spreading rugs and carpets over the oil- and grease-stained concrete floor before admitting the media to view the facility where the protesters had been housed. Because he witnessed that he became part of a class action suit against [city of New York? New York Police Department? I forget]. Somewhere I have a photo I found on the Web at the time, of the protesters lying in the middle of Broadway; #1 is lying at the front of the line.

*** In related news, I recently read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, part of which examines (and finds true) the premise that psychopathology may be a distinct competitive advantage to a captain of industry. Based on that I fear that greed ain't goin' away anytime soon.

The earthquake report from a taciturn, low-key Scandinavian.

I emailed #1 Son in NYC to see if he felt the earthquake. His reply:

Yeah, we were on the eighth floor of the pediatrics building, and it started swaying back and forth. We all thought of terrorist attacks or some structural problem in the building before we thought of earthquakes. We were in a session where medical students present cases to a friendly attending, and the attending we were with was this very practical (though also very smart) "I'm a mom" sort of pediatrician, and then we just went on with it. But my first year friend told me they were doing CPR training and all had to evacuate the building for no reason, so yeah, Sinai did do its panic routine.

And there you have it.

Souvenir yarn.

 The interior of Knitty City, LYS of Kay Gardiner.

   
Not only do they have lots of yummy yarn, they give great bag.

In my bag were the following delights:

 Two skeins of Koigu KPPPM in the imaginatively named 720, destined to become a Baktus for me. When I did a pattern search for Baktus, though, I found that there are a number of scarves that would be fun to make with this. Stay tuned.

 
One skein, 700 yards of Schaeffer Audrey laceweight, 50/50 merino/silk, in the rather more imaginatively named Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. This stuff is to die for and will become some sort of scarfy-shawly thing for me.

 
Two skeins of Alchemy Silk Purse in copper. Also to die for and also destined for some sort of scarfy thing for me.

 

 

So, yeah, we went to New York.

It was raining when we left Minneapolis.

But not in New York. On Friday we met up with Andrew when he got off work.

Andrew is eating pizza we brought him, left over from our own snack.
He actually looks vaguely like a doctor.

Mt. Sinai stands right across Fifth Avenue from Central Park. The green area behind the wall, Andrew told us, used to be called The Sandpit because that is essentially what it was. Earlier this year, or maybe last year, the city landscaped the area and re-sodded it and now it is a lovely place. 

Friday night, Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Rubin Museum, a museum of Himalayan art. Yeah, now there's a connection. No photos, not allowed. Concert was a little shy of 1.5 hours; he sang six songs and talked a lot. Jack is 79 years old and has 79 years worth of stories to tell. That's why he is called Ramblin' Jack. A little online research before the concert informed us that, although he is a folk/western/country singer, he is a surgeon's son from Brooklyn who ran away from home at 15 to join the rodeo.

On Saturday we saw where Andrew lives.

No photos of the interior or his apartment. Imagine a 15'x18' kitchen/living room/dining room with two tiny bedrooms and a bath on either side. Now imagine that there are always four 20-something males living there and that none of them has a minute to spare on domesticity because they are either studying or working about 26 hours a day. Not squalor but not neatnik heaven, either.

We trucked on down to Chinatown to do a little touristy sight-seeing with one stop along the way. Andrew wanted to show us something but wouldn't tell us what it was.

I may have mentioned my favorite movie here once or twice. This shop is in the Village about a block south of Washington Square.

I got myself a t-shirt, which I cannot show you because it is in the wash. But you can see it here.

While in Chinatown we got a little hungry and found a likely spot to refresh ourselves.

Happily, they also had English menus.

LIke his parents, Andrew is an adventurous eater and likes to order something he has never had before. On this occasion he ordered an appetizer of jellyfish and pigs' knuckles. The waiter, a tiny Chinese man, looked at him sternly and waggled his hands in a "No, no!" gesture. Jellyfish no good, he said. Andrew had fried won tons instead.

Saturday night we ate dinner in an Italian restaurant with six of Andrew's friends from medical school. I suffered a tragic case of camnesia so that event must remain unrecorded.

Sunday was the gospel brunch at Sylvia's Soul Food Restaurant, which you have already seen. We all took long naps after that adventure.

Monday was spent finding breakfast, packing, getting to the airport, and flying home via Washington, DC.

We toured the Capitol and the Washington Monument. From the plane.

 

So, yeah, that was the trip. Lots of fun, good to see the kid young man, good food, yada yada.

Oh, you want to see the yarn?

Okay.

Tomorrow.

Guess where we are going for a long weekend?

 

Going to visit #1 Son. Lucy The Wonder Dog will stay with #2 Son and Best Girlfriend. Flying into JFK Thursday afternoon on Mesaba Airlines (yes, you read that right), coming home Monday. Staying at a brand-new fancy-schmancy hotel a block from the Apollo Theatre (Smokey got a deal). Gonna see Ramblin' Jack Elliot at the Rubin Museum of Art on Friday night, gonna go to the Union Square Greenmarket on Saturday afternoon to look for the yarn that Clara Parkes talked about and showed us at Yarnover, gonna go out to dinner Saturday night with #1 Son and some of his friends from med school, and gonna kick back on Sunday. Might fit in a trip to MoMA or the Guggenheim somewhere in there. I've got a NYC transit app on my iPod and I'm ready to go. Except I haven't packed my suitcase yet.

Catch ya on the flip side!