Ah, there’s nothing like a little Category 1 hurricane to make life interesting.  Apparently all of these New Yorkers are now bellyaching about how Irene didn’t give them enough of an ass whooping, but I had my fill.  And my fill was tame compared to what others on the East Coast had to deal with.  Not to mention that members of my family faced threats of tornadoes, power outages, fallen trees, etc.  Irene was no Katrina, but some of my fellow New Yorkers need a bit of an attitude check.

I figured since this has been billed as a historic event that I should probably blog about it.  Better to have a record than have to try and remember after the fact.

It’s now Noonish on Saturday in NYC and for the second time in my twelve years here, mass transit has completely shut down.  This happened once before because of a transit strike in 2005, but it’s the first time that impending weather has caused a shut down.  We’ve had two waves of rain here, one light shower and one heavier downpour.  I managed to get all of my plants in off the terrace before the heavier downpour, so now my “garden” sits behind me as I type this.  I have to keep the plants locked away in my home office because Buster and Dusty (my cats) like to investigate and chew on anything new that arrives into the apartment.  The last thing I need is an emergency vet run because of poisoned kitties.

In my blog post on March 25, I mentioned that I wanted to get “Pay Attention” tattooed on my right forearm as a reminder to myself to do just that: pay attention.  Well, today I followed through, and you can see the pic below.  The tattoo is about two hours old, so very fresh.

When I was in elementary school, we used to have to take those timed math fact tests in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  Do you remember those?  Cheap paper with dark green printing?  If you tried to erase a wrong answer, the paper ripped.  I don’t even think that the order was randomized from sheet to sheet.  I could be wrong about that part, but I remember those tests. Vividly.

In a summer when political conversations have been dominated by genital pics, seemingly hearing impaired Congressional leaders, and questionable leadership at the Presidential level, I finally got a positive charge this morning when the New York Times ran an article by David W. Chen about NYC City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s potential bid for mayor in 2013.  For me, it’s the first glimmer of political hope I’ve had in months.