St Patrick's Traffic Jam

I had the vague idea of avoiding the St Patrick's day parade, mainly because of it's rowdy and green-beer-vomit reputation. Other than a few bellowing (and one bird-calling) youths in outrageous hats, nothing much happened. It took me half-an-hour to cross the street intersection, but nothing much happened. I got hungry and thirsty and footsore, but nothing much happened.

Here you can see a part of the parade, with a sea of Irish butts, or supporters of Irish butts.
This appears to be the Rockefeller Center skating rink, although I could be mistaken.
You can try watching the ground for ice, watching your back for 3 types of traffic, watching for pickpockets, watching your left and right for 3 types of traffic and watching the area ahead of you for anything action-worthy, and you might be a little more forgiving of my not knowing what the heck I took a picture of.

After confirming that the Broadway Theatre I was looking for was where it was supposed to be, and a lot of mapping out potential places to eat at (am I Singaporean or what?), I finally decide to buy dinner back from Ess-A-bagel. They sandwich a lot of things in between bagels. I chose:
Hot Corned Beef on Whole Wheat, Smoked Fillet of Trout with cream cheese and lettuce, on Whole Wheat. Woof!

Here's a cross-section:
Well-fed, to avoid embarrassing stomach rumbling while watching Company.

Unmolested

Yes! Especially for those who fear for the safety of a lone (but large-ish) Singaporean wandering the streets of New York, I'm still alive and unmugged! Whoo Hoo!

I started by circumnavigating the block where my wee pod (hotel room) is located, then expanded my rounds to a lunch and Broadway theatre recce. I found the Great White Way which is actually now the Great Messy Smokey Rainbow Way.

It's hard to get pics without telling anyone with a functioning eyeball that you're a tourist, so there are no real pics of Broadway, but:

• Great - yes, it's large and sprawling, and there are lots of lovely shows to be seen, most of which I can't see, because of time, and money (lack of).
• Messy - Slush, sludge and inevitable big city litter. The massive snow drop half melted, and created huge unjumpable half-frozen puddles that look deceptively shallow. There are lots of cold, wet feet in New York this night.
• Smokey - not from ciggys, but from the ridiculous number of new immigrants operating New York hot dog stands. Most of them fire up the grill so much that the meat oil from the legions of grilled hot dogs create a dramatic fog that wraps around your eyeballs and olfactory senses, and leaves you wide open for a wet foot.
• Rainbow - too many neon lights, and jumbo LCD screens.
  

Company, the revamped Sondheim musical, was great. Hot and cramped, but great.

First impressions of New York - it's a little bit like a very cold Singapore. Well, the weather is the obvious thing, but like Singapore, the part of New York I'm in has a few restaurants/cafes/bistros/sandwich bars on every street.

Plan for tomorrow: Breakfast, then to Chinatown for cheapo bathroom slippers or something. Or some cheap food. Or something.

My New York experience begins now

On the morning of my scheduled flight to New York:

• more snow comes pouring down into Ohio, and there's 2 inches of snow on the ground
• when I arrive at Cleveland Hopkins, there are SEAS of people, all queuing up [oops]
• Fortunately, I spot the self check-in counter [Yay!]
• I flash my still-wet boarding pass and wait at my plane's designated gate. They change the gate at the last minute. The jostling and hobbling road-race for the closest seats to the gate begins 50 feet away.
• The usual de-icing begins. I have spent 1 hour being stuck in a cramped seat with a low ceiling, and we still managed to do a decent imitation of a rock on the runway.
• Smooth flight [Surprise!]
• Smooth landing [Yay!]
• Surprise! There are no free gates at LaGuardia, and we have to do our rock imitation again.
• And again. An hour passes. What was supposed to be a 1 hour flight has turned into a 3 hour leg and back cramp.
• We get a gate!!! Aand, there's an airport vehicle stuck in the snow. And we wait.
• The vehicle stumbles off, and we wait. [humph!]
• The airport runway gate leeches to the flying sardine can, and we all huff our way off the plane, right into a bunch of sour-looking passengers hoping to get on the petulant aircraft. I hear kids behind me piping up with "Thank you for flying Continental Express and by the way, you've missed your connecting flights."
• As I pound my lonely way to the Ground Transportation area, I call to summon my reserved SuperShuttle ride to the hotel. And I wait.
• Hispanic gentlemen show up and cart away passengers.
• Eventually, my hispanic guy shows up, and ushers me into the van. I am immediately accosted by some guy's knee and have to scrunch all the way to the end of the Van-sofa in yet another cramped position.
• We careen our way [no kidding!] to my hotel, and I find that I absolutely have to step into a deep icy pothole in front of the hotel.
  

But! All is not lost! I have a room, and it's clean! and bathrooms are available!
This here's the view from the doorway - the turqoise thing is me bed.
And the view of the phone and 'desk' And the in-the-wall LCD TV. Note the "Which Toilets Are Free" indicators above the door.
And, lastly, the sink, and the closet.
This will be my nightly existence, where I lay my weary head and stinking feet, hiding from mythical New York hoodlums who prowl the streets in search of juicy, fresh, naive prey.

Upgrader of Seats ..

.. I am not. I am extremely unsuccessful in my paltry (exPectorate) and pitiful attempts to upgrade my puny Sardine class NorthWurst airline seat to a Busyness class seat. Apparently:

• I need 6000 more airmiles
• There are no more business class seats available (really meh?)
• I have the same chances of landing an upgrade as I had of winning the USD 316 Million Dollar Ohio lottery

So, I had to settle for:

• A pic of two early bird Canada Geese staking out their Springtime nesting area
• A pic of an extremely fat Squirrel (yes I know I promised, but he was so close by) taking shelter from the sudden snow storm, behind a tree. Wind was blowing the snow from right to left . Unfortunately, the snow was too fine for the camera to pick up.
  If I were a Native American, I might have said that this was a PHAT squirrel (Pretty Hairy And Tasty)... [ahem]
• Attempting to track an desperate but errant parcel that DHL fouled up. I made the mistake of going to the singapore site for customer service. I called the 1-800 number there, foolishly thinking it was a US number. [Ring] [Click] "Hello Baby! I'm sorry, all our girls are .." [HANG UP HANG UP]
  
• Doodling on 'my' whiteboard, leaving this blog's web URL for my co-workers in Cleveland, suddenly bereft of my dazzling personality and Pepper's scintillating chatter. The peanut/poop/Dutch clog-like thingy is my best whiteboard interpretation of Singapore.
  The silly Chinese Name translation is a joke, based on the fun Pepper and I had, translating our Cleveland Colleagues' names phonetically, into Mandarin.
  For instance, our supervisor is "Jiao Na Sen, aka Summoner of coastal trees".
  Another colleague is "Jie Ni Fu, aka Outstanding Intimate Woman", who could also be known as "Evergreen Rainbow of Increasing Clamor". You get the idea...

So, goodbye Ohio! I shall miss you and your crazy weather! (where else can you experience a 50 degree fahrenheit change in temperature in 24 hours?)

Scenes of the Day

Two types of morning views...

This one on here was taken when it was warm and dry.This one one was when it was cooling down, and starting to rain snow, or snow rain.



On an extremely clear day Almost like the default Windows XP background.. and all three from my apartment's balcony..

And here's more from this morning - two days of really warm weather (60F/17C), with melting snow, then last night, we had a big thunderstorm and then SNOW again this morning! Poor earthworms were so confused.
A carnage of earthworm corpses, all drowned, frozen, squashed, dismembered.

Parts of Caution Lake were defrosted, and re-starting to freeze over. The mallard couple are still hoping for spring:
Not to mention them two geese near the far end..

Farewell lunch for Pepper and me! We finally get to try the place that was snowed under before!
Here's the inside view

where I ate
YUM!

Boo Whoo Hoo!!!

Boo Hoo!

Winter's over.
Spring's almost here.
It's almost time to leave Ohio. Goodbye Helpful Tech Commies! Thanks for the West Side Market excursion!
Thank you for lunch at the Great Lakes Brewing Co.!



Whoo Hoo!
No more smelling of charred hydrocarbons.
No more stinky feet.
No more tuneless yodelling.
No more smelling of rancid cuts of pork.
No more damp kitchen floors.
No more worrying about my wok.
Hello New York!

Scenes from Today

Here's some interesting stuff I saw today, on my now-daily lunchtime circumnavigation of the office premises.

What looks like a snowed-in bunch of Flintstones-era cars is actually some performance art by the office's snow-plough guy.

Big, loud honkers - the resident flock of Canada Geese. I also managed to get a video, in addition to Goose Poo on the soles of my shoes.


It's cold today. A few days ago, it was quite sunny: The first three days of this week, the cold front is back, and along with sub-zero celcius temps, some snow.

During lunch today, my smelly roomie (see the previous blog entry) unveiled his crappy smelling lunch and elicited some spirited responses from us all. Thankfully, everyone voted to evict him from the table, because of the stink. Preserved Bamboo shoot normally doesn't smell that bad. I think maybe he used the brine from the can. Otherwise, it could be a chemical reaction with bamboo shoot and tomato.

Bad news is, there are some more leftovers. :-(