Awake

Homecoming

Happy Thanksgiving, once again!  I had a very nice visit to Florida, but I must say it's nice to be safely home.

Florida is puzzling to me.  To be fair, I've spent most of my very limited time there on the gulf side, where my mother-in-law lives, rather than a more lively city like Miami.  Still, when I jog around on the white sidewalks, looking at one oblong ranch house after the next, followed by yet another hive-like, concrete condominium complex, I find it hard to imagine how this land appeared when Ponce de Leon made his journey around the peninsula, in search of the fountain of youth (or, more likely, gold).  Was it mostly marshy swamp and jungle?  So why did people think of this land as being so good for the health?  Even Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled to Florida with her husband in the 1890s, to try to improve his health (but no Little House on the Panhandle resulted...I think they couldn't stand the humid heat!)  

Most of the development around where we were visiting was built in the past thirty years, and it seems as though the developers said to themselves, "People love living in Florida, so we'll just rase everything, pave it with asphalt and concrete, add a few palm trees, and put in a bunch of ranch houses and condos and big box stores: ta da!"  What beauty remains comes from the sea and its wildlife, the hibiscus flowers, and the few areas of Everglades preserves, which look quite creepy: very swampy with dense foliage, hanging vines and alligators.

Well, there were stunning views from the airplane as we approached JFK:

I only ended up trying one photo while in Florida, but it was night, I was on a screened-in porch, and I struggled with my camera

Dramatic Skies

 

I've been glued to my computer for days now - apart from my excursion to buy apples and brussels sprouts on Sunday, I've been staring at the monitor day and night, trying to reap the benefits of a sudden burst of energy and inspiration.  Today I felt weary, and in the afternoon I decided to make a little excursion.  I went to the Museum of the City of New York for the first time to see Notorious and Notable: 20th Century Women of Style, an exhibit that, as described by the website, "highlights 80 prominent New York women who used their style, talent, or wealth to capture the attention of society and the media."   I was very excited to see this exhibit, since I have a soft spot for glamorous anything, but it was much smaller than I expected.  It included one dress or jewel from each woman, accompanied by a paragraph or two of explanation about both the woman and the garment or accessory.  With eighty women profiled, it was impossible for a tired person like me to absorb why many of them were either notable or notorious.  A lot of the booty on display belonged to socialites (e.g. Babe Paley), but there were also a few items worn by actresses and performers (Gypsy Rose Lee!).  Still, some of the dresses were beautiful, I had fun playing "guess the decade" (in which I had to guess when a dress was made before checking the label - I was completely fooled by two dresses from the 20s, I forget how modern those can look), and I began to wish that people still made things in silk gazar (this stiff, heavy silk that was used in a lot of 60s evening wear - think of Jackie Kennedy dresses).  But maybe people still do, and it's not the sort of thing that's sold where I can afford to shop!

Anyway, I walked alongside the Park on the way home, and was lured in by the sunset on the reservoir.  I took many pictures, alongside a whole lot of French tourists.  How quickly the sky changed in just a few minutes!

P.S. And HAPPY THANKSGIVING!  I am off to Florida tomorrow to spend the holiday with my mother-in-law, perhaps I'll take a nice snapshot or two and have something amusing to say when I get back

By St. Marks-in-the-Bouwerie, around 4:00

Some of the clouds looked like ferns...

I went to the Sunday farmer's market at Tompkins Square Park - I love how much more peaceful it is to go to the small markets during this busy season.  Got a nice bunch of brussels sprouts and two empire apples, for my oven!

Union Square, 4:50

 

To think there's another month still of getting darker... 

I still can't find my missing post about Anne Fogarty!  Very sad.  I will have to recreate it some day.  In the meantime, I stopped into Barnes and Noble, and I noticed that there are TWO floor-to-ceiling shelves titled: Teen Paranormal Romance.  Wow - who knew that this craze for vampiric love-stories would keep growing and expanding.  So odd... and I thought that the teen series of my day - e.g. the happy, good-looking crowd in Sweet Valley High was already quite a fantastic stretch of the imagination (though I can't claim to have read the series, partly for that reason!)... now it seems that people need an even more extreme escape?

 

November

It's very strange - it's only just now beginning to look like Fall in New York City - is it because of the unseasonably warm weather?

Also strange - I think I'm losing my mind.  I wrote a post last week that seems to have inexplicably vanished, and now I have to find it!

Virginia

Hello,

Sorry for the week of silence.  Last week I was feeling very uninspired, and wasn't managing to do anything particularly well.  In fact, I made little progress on any task I set out for myself, from writing to looking for more paid work to cleaning house.

Oh, well.  It's a new week, and this weekend my husband and I drove to Leesburg, Virginia to go to a wedding.  Our route there took us south through Pennsylvania - through Bethlehem, then Allentown, then Hershey, and then through Gettysburg and down into Virginia.  

I hadn't set foot in Pennsylvania for years - possibly since the early 90s.  No, that's not true - I went to Philadelphia a couple times for work, but those trips were Amtrak to taxi to meetings to taxi to Amtrak.  Besides, going to Philadelphia does not show you the Pennsylvania countryside, which I thought was beautiful - very pastoral, with gently rolling hills in all directions.  Northern Virginia was equally lovely.  The area we were in had many vineyards, and it was also very exciting to drive by all of the horse farms!  With their rolling pastures and wooden fences, they still look just like the Maryland horse farm that Elizabeth Taylor lives on in the 1956 movie Giant (which, by the way, is quite a soap opera).  

It made me think that the next time I'm craving a weekend away, I should consider driving south, not north, as I also noted that the prices for decent lodging are about half what they are in New England.  I wish I had taken more pictures, but I couldn't as I spent most of both days clutching the wheel.  These two were taken on Saturday at the Hillsborough Vineyards, where the wedding took place.

Now though I feel that I am ready for a big "detox," after driving for two days and eating nothing but heavy food... including my first meal ever at Cracker Barrel.  80% of the people eating there looked to me to be clinically overweight, and I knew how it happened when the waitress arrived with my pancakes (three, each as big as a salad plate, with an ice-cream scoop worth of butter on top).