After the Storm

Thanks for all the good wishes. The worst part of Hurricane Sandy seems to have blown over New York, leaving lower parts flooded and without electricity, and the whole city without public transportation. Lee and Lola and I, who spent almost all of yesterday in bed, survived the storm without too many inconveniences in our Upper West Side apartment. The scariest time for me was in mid afternoon when I walked Lola, who will only use the dog run in the park of the Museum of Natural History nearby as her toilet. I didn't want to take her to the park, with the danger of large tree limbs falling, so walked her for over half an hour down rainy, windy side streets, with her jumping at every gust of wind, every garbage can lid that scraped the sidewalks, every crack of a tree branch, me going "pee pee pee" to her like an idiot, as if that had ever done any good. Finally, with the wind getting worse, I said to hell with it and let her drag me into the park, which didn't look too bad at that time, and where she did her stuff at once.

 

Last night things got so bad that an upstairs neighbor, out to walk his dog, was told to go home by a cop as pieces of scaffolding from a building a few doors down started flying, one of them cracking the windshield of a parked car. I thought I'd wait till 3 or 4 in the morning to walk the dog, they'd said the wind might start dying down by then, but we all overslept, I woke up at 7 and then had to wake Lola. She hadn't been outside for 16 hours, and wasn't even in a hurry to go out then, but she's always had an amazing bladder.

 

The scene in the park this morning was devastating, with huge fallen tree limbs on the paths as well as a few trees themselves, especially one wonderful large old one snapped right in half. It used to house a family of raccoons, and I can only imagine what happened to them in the night.

 

My own best wishes to all of you who were touched by the storm (which as I write is, I fear, whacking the hell out of our house in Bucks County—I don't want to imagine what that will look like when we return) and I hope none of you sustained damage.

 

I took the pics above with my trusty iphone during my walk with Lola in our nearby park an hour ago.