The Linden refineries as seen from the New Jersey Turnpike. Was riding with Dave as we headed into the city to meet our wives for our second annual Christmas gift of gorge: a fancy dinner out in New York. Yeah, dinner for four at a place like Craftsteak (this year's choice) comes out to much more than we would spend on a boxed and wrapped gift, but the hours together and the experience of the food make it worth every penny.
As winter arrived in force this week, I drove up the road to Paterson to see the Great Falls in suspended animation. As I had hoped, snow and ice clung to the rocks as the still free-flowing sections of the Passaic River cascaded over the cliff. The bright afternoon sunshine prevented exposures that were too long (even with a neutral-density filter allowing for a few more hundredths of a second to be added on), but I managed to blur the falls enough to satisfy me, given the conditions.
It was a cold, frigid day, and so I toyed with the idea of taking a 20-minute ride east, back to Edgewater, where we used to live, to see if the Hudson River had any chunks of ice floating on it. Several years ago, when I could see the river from our apartment, sizeable icebergs littered the waterway between New Jersey and Manhattan. But thinking (correctly) that it hadn't been cold enough for enough days, I scrapped the idea. Had I taken the drive, however, I would've arrived on River Road within minutes of the US Airways jet's emergency landing.
I'm a sucker for nostalgia. After buying a box of recent-issue baseball cards on a trip to Target last week, I allowed myself to browse eBay and led myself into an impulse buy. For pretty much the same price it would have cost back in their respective years, I purchased boxes of Topps cards from 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990.
I didn't really need that many (540 cards per box), but I've amused myself quite often as I've slowly opened the packs to see the cardboard-mounted images of long-forgotten players. There have been rookie cards of current managers, cards of coaches and former players I never remembered during their active years and images of the hilarious styles of the late 80s -- uniforms, mustaches, hairdos and, with surprising frequency, large, nerd-worthy glasses.
Harry has a ritual every night, just as we do. When we head up to brush our teeth -- and nine days out of 10, he knows exactly when that is -- he bolts up the stairs and heads straight for the bathroom. Once there, he hops up onto the sink and begins meowing until we turn on the water for him. And he's not satisfied until we pour some water from the cup, letting him lap up the stream as a cap to his night. He's as regular with this stunt as we are, meaning we have to incorporate it into our morning routine as well as our evening one.
Spent 2 1/2 hours on trains getting to work tonight -- a trip that usually takes one hour, door-to-door. Switches on the tracks that move trains from one set of rails to another froze outside Secaucus, delaying us indefinitely somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. I managed to get a lot done -- I napped, I read The New Yorker, I tried to get a few photographs. None of them proved to be keepers, except for this one, settling though it may be.
College football ended last week and baseball doesn't pick up again for another month. My outdoor runs are sporadic at best right now because of temperatures that dip into the 20s, so any athletic thoughts I have right now involve college basketball.
Only 32 days until pitchers and catchers report...
Just before taking this picture, I eagerly looked at the long open road ahead of me. The flat Colorado plateau provided no places to hide -- no speed traps. I checked the mirror, and the route from whence we came was likewise devoid of witnesses.
And with that, I gunned the Sebring up to 100 mph, just for a moment. Truth be told, I panicked a moment when I looked in the rear-view mirror and thought I saw the flashing lights of a patrol car back in the distance. As I slowed, I realized that it was merely the sun glinting off a car. It also occurred to me that the car was so far behind us that there's no way a patrolman behind the wheel could accurately determine our speed (or at least have it hold up in traffic court).
But then the setting sun heightened the golden light and shadows on the landscape and I had to pull over for a brief rest. I walked out to the middle of the road for a few pictures, including this one, before we continued our trip across the lonely landscape toward the sun.
Shot this from the moving train between Clifton and Passaic. Was just playing around (and taking a picture of this poster) and got lucky with it. That's what happens with digital -- you can experiment and simply delete the throwaways, rather than wasting a frame of film and not knowing the result until you've paid for developing.
In 2006, Dutch designer Tord Boontje erected a light show in Union Square Park during the holidays. I took dozens of photos, because no two were the same. The circle created by the light would scatter whenever someone walked across it, as if the light were a solid object able to be knocked out of the way by the feet of New Yorkers passing through.
I'm going with this one as the photo of the day because, with Casey as the subject, it's a departure from what I've been posting. I don't think she'll mind. She did know I was taking the photo.
I've become a big fan of interior bar/restaurant photos, a snapshot of that moment at a public gathering place. When I see these kinds of photos taken by others, I want to be there to have a drink. When I take them myself, I enjoy looking at them later and remembering the warmth brought on by a pint and the friendship there on a cold winter night.
It occurred to me as I took this shot that this photo-a-day project will also provide visual entries in a diary of my daily life. If I don't feel like writing about what I did that day, the photograph should give me some idea. And so on this night, we rode out to Brooklyn to see Milk at Cobble Hill Cinemas, then met up with one of Casey's friends at Abilene at 9 p.m. Until another co-worker arrived, Kate was the only person at the gathering we knew, but we soon started chatting with others until, faster than we realized, it was time to bundle up and head back to the trains for our two-river trek back home.
With no particular idea in my head as to what I'd photograph today, I headed home from some afternoon errands and found the road took me up to Garret Mountain, a county park here in Passaic County not far from our house.
I love heading up there in the late afternoon as the sun sets. The view from the lookout at the top faces east, so you see I-80 and Paterson below you, northeastern New Jersey and New York City off in the distance. All is bathed in the soft, orange light of dusk.
I drive up to the "mountain" often. During the warmer months, I'll run the loop road -- a perfect two miles -- and I've found my way up there at this late time of day a couple of times since we moved to the area. The late-afternoon dusk is prime feeding time for the deer up there, and they tend to like this one particular clearing that motorists pass shortly after entering the park and following the one-way loop road. I knew they'd be there, but I didn't bother looking for them and first noticed the cars pulled over at the side of the road. There were a lot of them, and three or four cars sat there for a while watching them before moving on to the slow, quiet ends to our own afternoons.
My plan was to get some shots in Penn Station as I switched from the train to the subway on my way to work, but with some minutes to kill while switching trains in Secaucus, I pulled out the camera and turned it on the on/off ramp for the New Jersey Turnpike and the platform while I waited for the 5:25 to pull into the station.
I actually had a hard time choosing which of the nine photos to use as The One For Today, but I settled on this one because I couldn't tell it was a keeper on the LCD display after I took it. It wasn't until I got it on the computer and cropped out some dead space (and the vertical dividing line of a lamp post) on the left that I saw its potential. So I tagged it with the honor of Day 7.
As I walked to work last night and spotted the red-and-green top of the Empire State Building, it occurred to me that it was the first night I'd seen the city's tallest spire bathed in the colors of the season. And that's when I remembered why it was still red and green -- it was Twelfth Night. A few houses in our neighborhood have also kept their holiday lights on through today (I unplugged ours on Sunday), but next year, I think, I'll leave them lit through the sixth.
Having already decided to use an image of my train ticket for yesterday's photo, I saved my shot of the holiday-adorned ESB for Epiphany itself. That proved to be a fortuitous decision. The light rain gave the streets a reflective sheen, yet the skies were clear enough for a good look at the tower 18 blocks and a couple of avenues away.
Like many of my countrymen and women, I was back on the train today, returning to the office after a two-week break. My ride into New York (via Hoboken) was at 5 p.m., though, so I got to ease into it after a full day of running errands and tying up some things around the house. Except for the Christmas lights. Most of those remain on the arches and posts of the front porch and over the arch over the gate leading to the back patio. If the rain holds off tomorrow, I'll get to those. Maybe.
So it took just four days before I resorted to a picture of one of the cats for the day's image. That's what happens when I spend the day 1.) Reading the Sunday Times, 2.) Hitting Stop & Shop, Target and Whole Foods with the wife, and 3.) Taking down Christmas lights. I found little interest in taking any photos at the stores, but had I realized while filling up that the $1.39 per gallon I paid at Lukoil was the lowest since July 2003 (yes, I keep track), I would've documented that.
I would have loved to used any number of signs for a shoppe, grille or other such establishment that harkens to days of olde with the extraneous "E" in its name. But I found this shot of the waiting room at the Hoboken train terminal first and felt it fit the bill.
From the days of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad to today's New Jersey Transit and PATH commuters, the station at Hoboken has served bustling New Jerseyans on their way to and from New York and to the far reaches of the Garden State. With the original and ornate Penn Station now sunk in the swamps of Jersey, going through Hoboken makes for a much more aesthetically pleasing trip each afternoon.
When it stood until 1990, the Berlin Wall stood to disconnect one side of the city from the other. And now, the wall itself has been disconnected and scattered about the world. I first saw a section -- just one panel, or maybe two -- at the local Monmouth Mall in Eatontown, N.J., and spent a couple of bucks on a small chunk of it. It's in a tiny Ziploc bag somewhere, probably a box either in my parents' house or somewhere in ours.
New Yorkers love to exaggerate. "The World's Most Famous Arena." Have they asked the Romans if they've heard of it?
