Thursday, November 17, 2005

Stormy weather

The power got knocked out for a few hours and came back on only a little while ago. Of all the nights for it to happen! I was finishing laundry in the hope of getting a good night's sleep, and also in the middle of an entry. I'm afraid this is all I can do tonight, because I need to get my clothes ready and get a few hours of sleep.

Wednesday was such an unusual November day for New York: we hit a high of 68 degrees in Central Park, according to what I saw on weather.com. And Rochester, not exactly the warmest of cities, hit a high of 70 degrees in the morning!

At my usual lunchtime walk around the south end of Central Park, I took a photo of a park local enjoying the unseasonable warmth. He (or she?) was far enough away that I couldn't scale down the picture much, not without making him too tiny, so it's not the sharpest.



It wasn't raining when I left work at 5, but on the train ride home, there were prominent flecks of rain on the windows as we pulled out of the Grand Central tunnels. It was extremely heavy rain, the remnants of the storms that just ravaged the Midwest, and enough to slow down the train. The express didn't reach its first stop of Chappaqua until some 15 to 20 minutes after the scheduled time.

Then I went to Target to pick up a few things. I would have gone to the local grocery store, but I needed a facial scrub they don't carry, and the Target in Mt. Kisco isn't too far anyway. That is, in dry conditions. Certain stretches of the Saw Mill Parkway are treacherous enough in good weather, and tonight there was a deep puddle where I fortunately managed to keep control of my car. Something told me to avoid the Saw Mill in favor of Route 117, which took a bit longer as I had to snake through Bedford and Katonah, but it was far safer.

I had been home a while when the power flickered momentarily and then went out sometime past 10 o'clock. My first priority in saving food from going to waste was to make use of the ice. I judged that a whiskey sour would do just fine, and help cool me down to boot. Even with the windows open and the outside temperature around 50 degrees, it was feeling very muggy. I reached for a bottle of Jameson's on a top shelf, but then I noticed a dusty pint bottle that I had forgotten about. Jim Beam Black! My father and I always did prefer it to regular Jack Daniels.

After fixing a double sour, I turned on the radio and found Delilah on some lite FM station, which evoked memories of my teenage summers when I enjoyed bicycling in the cool of late night. Then I started reading The Egyptian, an amazing book I've read several times before. It has enough depth that you could read it immediately again and not be bored. But I was worrying about when the power would come back on, if I'd be able to finish laundry and press a suit so that I could have clean clothes for work tomorrow.

All in all, what a night.

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