In Which We Sort of Travel and Other Stuff...

 Well, Christmas this year was certainly in keeping with the rest of 2020.....

Long story short, we had a rain and wind storm on Christmas Eve. A really, really nasty rain and wind storm. And, like in August with Hurricane Isaias, the power got knocked out. After it became very obvious on Christmas Day that we were NOT getting it back any time soon, my person made the decision that we were going to a hotel until it came back on. We spent four days powerless after Isaias and I really don't think any of us could deal.

Not a bad deal, though. The room was clean, and cute and, most importantly had amenities such as electricity and running water. Which may not sound like amenities, but in this case, they totally were.

I mean, really, we've had worse ideas. And it wasn't expensive and it was for the one night. 

We got a text about nine-forty the next morning (26th) saying the power was back, but we'd gotten texts like that twice before that had turned out to be not quite the case. So we called the house to see if the answering machine (ansaphone, as Crowley calls it) picked up. It doesn't work with the power out. When it picked up, we knew all was good. 

And speaking of Isaias....

This is one small part of why power was out as long as it was:

This tree was part of the stone wall between my person's house and the neighbor's. As you can see, it didn't get uprooted. It broke in half. Holy CRAP was that ever loud when it came down. By then the power had been out for a good couple of hours as it was.

Which was a good thing, because there went the lines

See those lines in the background? They're not supposed to be down there. 

This one uprooted. It's in the yard next door.

That tree on the left is the one my person thought was down when she got to the end of our street. She had to sit there about ten minutes because they were still chainsawing the one that fell. She said later that she was sure it was going be like Christmas in August - a tree in the house. It was an absolute mess, but we did end up standing outside a couple of days later at two in the morning watching a truck put lines up. That was cool. Unfortunately, the freezer wasn't cool anymore by that time. Everything thawed. 

2020, man......

Even the (actual) Christmas tree fought back this year. I think the idea was that Crowley would hand the lights to Jade, who would hand them to Aziraphale. 

That's - not what happened. 

Meanwhile, Celine was trying to talk Emmie into something fancy. 

Celine can be a bit - chaotic, shall we say. There was the time she decided to talk to some very drunken and/or high guy in her true form. Given that her true form is something like a bazillion wings and eyes all at once....

Aziraphale says she gets it from her mom. I don't know. He can be "Just Enough of a Bastard" sometimes....

Opal and Lily. Opal is Jade's younger sister. 

Jade is a model, BTW, and has done a number of photoshoots. 

You can see why.....

This is Benjamin. He's one of Maddy's friends. 

And a quick bonus shot of Aziraphale, Crowley and Opal.

In which - some autumn pics.

We drive by Fahnstock State Park all the time, but haven't really ever had time to stop there.

So we decided to make a point of driving over there today.

Hmmmm......

Looks like this is the way to the great views....

Okay, turned out it really wasn't. It was the way to the picnic shelter, which was reserved.

Maybe the other way?

Uh - make that the OTHER other way. This pic doesn't capture the sheer steepness of the trail. Yes, it is a trail, but I think rappelling gear would be essential.

 Here we go. Much more like it.

 This is the picnic area by the lake.

Not too bad.

 Autumn would not be a bad season, really....

If it went right back into spring, that is.

Okay, okay, we can have one month of winter. ONE. Uno. That's it. Winter does have a way of wearing out a welcome pretty quickly.

 Then we could have a whole lot more of this.

I did suggest it to the devas. Paisley said she'd talk to Aura about it, but not to get my hopes up. I think she might have been humoring me. Oh well....

Daisy in some new threads from Spampy Stuff.

Scaramouche....














I do have some pics from our drive over to Cold Spring yesterday, but I'll save them for another entry.

In which....Cold Spring and a few random photos.

The problem with being a travel doll in winter is that winter usually screws up your travel plans.

However, since Maddy was in dire need of a trim and shape, we headed down to Cold Spring today.

Main Street....

From the muni lot we parked in....

At 21F, it was really living up to the name. That is the Hudson River somewhere under all that ice.

We just missed getting an Amtrak train in the background of this shot. Talk about your bullet train.

I will spare you any "train song" jokes....

Cold.....

Super pretty.....

But super cold.....

Really should have remembered my coat....













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This is the walkway leading up to the theater entrance at the local mall. (Taken when we went to see The Desolation of Smaug. I thought it was a two-parter, not three. Oh well, just means more hobbit to look forward to!)

This pic really doesn't capture the scale. When you're in the middle of it, you really feel like you're in some weird dystopian future - or else in the City on Camazotz, walking toward the building where the Man With The Red Eyes awaits amid all those mainframe computers, ready to sentence you to reprogramming via IT....

A little better, but the camera doesn't do the overwhelming scale justice.












~*~

A rock star Hitty such as myself only drinks the finest Rock Star Tea.... :)

This was taken at New Grace Chinese in Kent, NY. Best Chinese place around here.

In which we drive to Tivoli, NY, try to photograph a seaplane and reboot the Rogue...

Maddy drove up to a place called Tivoli, NY (just outside Rhinebeck) today to visit a place called Beadzo.


It's a really small place, but nice.

The building the car in the distance is in front of is where the bead shop is. Maddy said she remembered it as having more specialty-type and larger beads, but it seems they've gone in a different direction and are far heavier on seed beads now. Which is good if you're into bead weaving, but Maddy says she doesn't have the patience for it. Nevertheless, she got some nice things.

I'm not sure what this is - the flowers look like a hibiscus but the leaves don't.














This building just looked cool. We didn't get a lot of pictures of what served as downtown because we were getting some odd looks with the camera.











~*~

As it turned out, the place opens at noon now and we got there at twenty after eleven, We stopped at a little cafe for an iced tea, but sitting in there was out of the question - there was a mosquito in there that just would not leave us alone. Rather than look like a moron swatting at it, Maddy decided to see what was on down the road.

Turned out the road ended - at the train tracks by the Hudson River.

That little itty-bitty dot up in the sky that probably looks like dust on your monitor is in fact a bright red seaplane. We thought we had at least one good picture of it, but as it turned out, we didn't...

We could just see the top part of a sailboat down this way, but couldn't really get a picture - and we didn't feel comfortable following the road, such as it was, any further down. Those are the Metro-North and Amtrack tracks, and no way were we even thinking of crossing them. There was a marked crossing, but it was where the road ended - and there were a bunch of signs warning about high-speed trains.

We thought it kind of odd that all the bushes on the side of the tracks were dying - it's not like there hasn't been enough rain.

Since we actually didn't see a train, I'll refrain from making any "train song" jokes. Although you know what caption I had in mind if we'd actually been lucky enough to photograph an oncoming train... ;-)

(Maddy - I don't know if I would have called that "lucky." Probably more like scary as heck...)

This one made me think of a line from the Phil Rickman book Curfew: "Under a deeply textured sky, Crybbe looked self-contained, venerable and almost dignified..."

Not that Tivoli is anything like Crybbe.

The clouds looked so strange. Almost more like autumn clouds than midsummer.













It was really quiet.














Almost eerily so....














If we hadn't seen a couple of cars parked on the other side of the crossing we probably wouldn't have hung around to get any pictures.

 But as pretty as some of these came out...













....I'm glad we did. Even if we didn't score the awesome seaplane pic we thought we did.
















~*~

Driving on the Taconic was no fun today. There were speed traps everywhere. Maddy finally set the cruise control for exactly 55 and let everyone pass us. However, we didn't get pulled over....

Then, on the way back, we noticed that the Rogue was getting awfully stuffy. It took a moment before we figured out the air conditioning was no longer on. Not only that, none of the climate controls were working - no fan, no heat, no rear defogger - nothing. Not good with another heat wave coming up. Maddy said she'd call the Nissan place when we got home. Anyway, we had to stop for the mail, and when Maddy restarted the car - presto! The air conditioner came on, the fan started working and so did everything else.

I guess "did you try rebooting it?" also applies to cars.....