Bright and Sunny

I was driving back into town on Sea Cliff Avenue when I saw these flowers in the bright sunshine.  I looked at them as I approached the house and thought "those flowers make me feel bright and sunny."  So I looked at them some more as I passed and kept going, and thought they brightened my day and maybe I should stop the car and take a photograph.  WAIT!  So the scene finally registered in my brain and I stopped the car.  Finally!  Duh!  So I hope these flowers brighten your day as well.

 

Absolute Madness!

I have been asked to give a talk at a high school in a nearby town, about Light Pollution.  This is a definition of the issue:  "Light pollution is the presence of unwanted, inappropriate, or excessive artificial lighting."  This affects me as an amateur astronomer because the excess light reflects up into the night sky, turning a black sky into a medium gray, and thus all the faint galaxies and nebulae are completely obscured by the veil of light.  In addition to astronomical light pollution it is also about the loss of the night itself.  As humans the night is wired into our DNA.  We need the night for so many reasons. I am slowly putting the talk together, and so I have been looking for examples on light pollution in my neighborhood.  This is absolutely the worst!  At 11 PM the house is completely dark, but the whole section of the neighborhood is illuminated like daylight!

Here is another view.  What is the purpose of wasting all this electricity and lighting up a section of a neighborhood?  I am so angry about the people who did this.  They are certainly taking away the night of their neighbors.  If you look to the far right in the center of the photo, you can see what the street should look like.  In some communities there are laws against "Light Trespass" which involves light that spills off one property to the property of others.  This has to be the worst case here in Sea Cliff.

 

Fun At The Beach

While we were sitting at the beach having coffee in the car, a huge dump truck drove by us and then backed out onto the beach at the end of the parking lot, and dumped a load of sand.  Hmmmmm...  It drove away, and the second it was gone another arrived!  Same thing happened when it left.  I couldn't imagine the idea of a huge line of trucks arriving from somewhere with so much sand.  And then Kathy noticed a truck at the other end of the parking lot backing up.  It turns out that there were only two trucks getting sand maybe 500 feet away, at the other end of the beach!

So we drove down to the far end of the beach and saw this bulldozer pushing sand from the beach into this huge pile, which the front end loader was scooping up.  The Loader would back up, turn left and drive over to a truck out of sight to the left.  It was able to fill each truck with about three scoops of its bucket.  It was astounding to watch this ballet, and to see how quickly huge amounts of sand were moved to the north end of the beach.  Obviously the sand on the beach at the north end is slowly moved south by the currents, perhaps just during the winter, and that's why it needs to be replaced.  A fun day at the beach, watching other people work!

So this is cool!  After I posted the blog with the first two photographs I decided to check Google Earth and see what the beach looks like and why they might be moving the sand from south to north.  Wow!  Look how thin the beach is on the upper part of the photo and how much sand there is on the south end!  Question answered.  Thank you Google Maps!

 

Oh That Cat!

I am beginning to think this should be called "Cat Week."  I found this photograph I did a while ago and thought I should post it today.  So we give the cats a treat every once in a while, of dry food which they love.  So this is a plastic container that holds the dry food.  When the container is empty, we sit it by the cellar door and take it downstairs to put more dry food in it.  We heard a noise in the kitchen and so I went in to see what caused it.  There was Sam with his head in the plastic container.  There was no food in it, but he obviously smelled the food and so he stuck his head inside.  When I saw this I had to laugh out loud, because it looks so silly.

 

Rundown

I was driving south on Glen Cove Avenue, which is the dividing line between Sea Cliff on one side and Glen Cove on the other.  It is a main road with all kinds of nice stores along it, like a CVS and Starbucks, and 7-11, and our favorite grocery store.  On this day what caught me was the light illuminating this building with two empty stores in it.  I used to buy wine in the liquor store, and I don't know why they moved away.  I really can't remember what the other store looked like when it was open.  But to see this building now that looks almost derelict was such a shock.  It must have been the light.  So I parked my car and did several different views.  This was the view that stopped me at first.

But in editing, I felt that the original view did not give enough of a sense of how derelict these stores looked.  I had shot this view, of course, because that's what I do - I try a number of different angles and then see which feels right, or which communicates better the sense of what I felt when I took the photograph.  So that's why I am including this photograph.  It doesn't seem as artistic but it does a better job of showing what I felt when I really looked that this building carefully, on this day.

 

Hysterical!

Is this cat hysterical or what!  Sam can be so beautiful and so cute, but for some reason, I never seem to photograph him anywhere near as much as I photograph Grace.  But I went in to the back room today and he was cleaning himself on the couch which is the same color that he his.  His paw is bent funny, and when I came in the room he looked at me like this, and so I had to take his photograph.  By the time I got my toy camera off my belt, there was time for one photograph, and then he looked away.  But I got it!  Please click on this photo, it is so funny when you see it in a larger size!

 

The Vessel

This is The Vessel, a visitor attraction built in Hudson Yards.  The elaborate honeycomb-like structure rises 16 stories and consists of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings for visitors to climb.  It opened to the public on March 2019. On February 2020 a 19-year old man jumped from the sixth floor of the structure and died. On December 2020 a 24-year old woman jumped from the top of the structure and also died. On January 2021 a 21-year old man jumped from the Vessel.  It was temporarily closed.  It reopened in May 2021, and all visitors had to be accompanied by at least one other person.  In July a 14-year old boy jumped to his death while with his family.  The Vessel has been closed indefinitely.  What a tragedy having to do with the power of suggestion that a really interesting structure suddenly becomes a vehicle for suicides.  Sorry for such a depressing post but the tragedy of all of this really affects me.