Snow Day

Great excitement - it finally snowed.

I like snow so much I got up in the night to see if it had started...

Early in the morning a person is walking a dog.

Then I had to walk Buster  - who was much more cheerful than this picture looks.

Not too many people out on 9th Avenue at 8am.

But a work crew were shoveling already.

A man on a bicycle crossing 8th Avenue - rather risky, I imagine.

Back indoors I look west.

Then I decide to go up onto the roof to take super-duper pictures of the entire city.... except it is snowing on the entire city and there isn't a thing to see...Oh well....

Local

The Empire State Building is on 5th Avenue and about 32nd Street.

Obviously it is the best known landmark in the city - I wonder what it was before that? I wonder what the most important landmark in Paris was before the Eiffel Tower? In London before Big Ben?

Anyway, we see the ESB in its many moods out of our sitting room window - here mysterious and swathed in cloud.

Here, last Sunday, looking oddly like a rocket ship emerging from very low clouds. Seen between the SVA theater and our building.

Here seen from a speeding taxi by Madison Square Park on Tuesday evening.

And another of the same... The red zeppelin like thing (upper right) is probably a reflection in the taxi window - or else it is a real zeppelin I hadn't noticed.

Most of the time I'm plodding round Chelsea with my faithful hound, Buster. This is the rectory of St.Peter's Church which is currently in a pretty dire state  - as is St. Peter's itself. A really wonderful article in the New York Times just before Christmas http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/nyregion/church-with-ties-to-famed-christmas-poem-is-in-need-of-repair.html

It's the church where Clement Moore worshiped and utterly Church of England inside - down to the pews, the hymn books..... and the mold. The rectory is probably worth a million billion dollars  - or would be if it was for sale on the open market. Let's hope they merely restore it.

Some nice billowy clouds on 20th Street yesterday

and on 9th Avenue.

A mural at the gas station on 8th avenue

and my treat of the week when I went to Tea  & Sympathy with Frances on Wednesday (which was bitterly cold) and we had an utterly English and delicious lunch...

Work

To my great delight, the other day I walked outside to discover

a work crew replacing the totally bashed in concrete surround of one of the three tree pits in front of our building - the tree pits I grow flowers in in the summer. This is thrilling in a very small way. 

At Chelsea Market, at Dickson's the real butcher, you can watch how meat is carved from animal carcasses. Just look at the amount of fat on the one on the left.  Not for the squeamish perhaps - but then the squeamish probably shouldn't be eating meat...just a thought!

And on to the High Line where absurd amounts of construction are going on. Here we gaze into the depths of what will be a foundation - a good 50ft below ground level.

Here we look over the backs of the trains that go in and out of Penn Station - The Empire State Building in the distance.

Lots and lots of men at work

and more men with hard hats hard at work.

I'm happy to say that I don't really work much, though one day a week I get up early and go out to look after my granddaughters.

I head home in the late afternoon...