Trains! No planes or automobiles, though.

So today, for the first time, I took Amtrak:

The SUNYLA conference is this week, and since I'm both on the Council (ex officio? I don't remember; I'm just the web manager) and presenting, I'm here.

FIT is only a few blocks from Penn Station, and I got the dorm room set up as soon as I got in:

I'm guessing the dorms are meant to give the students a taste of what they can hope to be lucky enough to have in their first NYC apartment after they graduate?  There's a tiny little kitchen:

The closest grocery is a Whole Foods, which does not sell diet Coke.  They did have the Sarsparilla I like:

But more importantly, the trip netted me a garbage bag, which the room was lacking:

The conference committee put goodie bags on everyone's doorknob:

Mostly vendor stuff:

(The toothbrushes are from the dental insurance company the union uses.)

I met up with my brother and his wife for supper, and we ate at Lasagna Ristorante, at the corner of 20th & 8th.  Not surprisingly, their lasagna is quite good.  Afterwards, we took a walk over a couple blocks, and then up along the High Line.  Lots of interesting landscaping.

 I don't know what the smokestack? is for, but it was interesting.

We walked all the way up to the Intrepid at 43rd, and then back along 42nd Street to 7th Avenue so I could take the subway back down to FIT, and they could take it home.  (They're quite a ways up from where I'm staying.)

 

State Parks

When I was a kid, a lot of our trips were to state park in the region.  We stayed in the lodges a lot; I've always thought they were more fun than regular hotels in hindsight, because the lounges often had games and other people hanging out, and the food was generally good.  Plus you didn't have to drive anywhere from the lodge to get to what you came to see.

One of the constant themes in most of our trips was hiking; we walked a lot of trails, some of them dry, some of them in creeks.  If the trip wasn't to somewhere with hiking, it was probably a historical site.  We rarely went anywhere that was more than an eight-hour drive, but within that radius we did quite a few trips.

Some of locations:

• Cave-in-Rock - one of our occasional day-trips in the summer, the cave at Cave-in-Rock isn't as cave-y as some of the others; you can generally always see the way back out.  The cave has been used in movies a couple times; one of the more interesting non-natural features there is the historical graffiti.
• Wyandotte - located near Corydon (Indiana's first state capitol), the Wyandotte caves are more serious caves - underground, windy passages, stalagmites and stalactites, the whole works.  We also went to Corydon during that trip.
• The Hermitage - Andrew Jackson's residence in Tennessee; we went there at least twice.
• Clifty Falls - located in Indiana near Louisville; I believe this was also the trip when we went to the Churchill Downs museum.  Normally Clifty Falls is a trip to see amazing waterfalls along a creek; we happened to go while there was a pretty serious drought in effect.  So while we didn't get to see much in the way of waterfalls, we did at least get to see the neat rock formations that are normally underwater.
• Turkey Run - I think we went to Turkey Run a couple times.  They had an arcade in the basement of the lodge with nickel pinball machines.  The trails there ran concurrent to the creek.
• Spring Mill - the only place I've ever seen a muskrat, Spring Mill is near Bloomington.  In addition to the mill, we also went to the Gus Grissom memorial in the area.
• Brown County - Brown County is famous for its foliage and covered bridges.  I'm pretty sure we probably saw a covered bridge?  Most of what I remember about the trip was finding the reprint of a German-English primer in one of the gift shops.
• The Dunes - the Dunes are a national park, up by Chicago.  The water was cold when we went, and I think it was the only time I ever wore the sundress I made for 4H.
• Garden of the Gods - this ends up in the news fairly often because people fall off the cliffs there surprisingly often.  We never got that close to the edge.  Since most of northern Illinois and Indiana are glacier-smooshed flat, the views there are quite different from what you get in a lot of the rest of either state.
• Harmonie - being the state park we went to most often (to go swimming), I've been there quite a lot.  (The day after we got married, we went to our cousins' high school graduation party there.)  My deer spotting skills were honed there.  The concession stand at the pool had butter pecan ice cream and Goldrush bars.
• Angel Mounds - the site of a Native American settlement hundreds of years ago, Angel Mounds was farmed by relatives of my cousins' family during the 19th century before the significance of the mounds was known, and the state purchased the land for preservation.  It was a bit of a drive, and I associate butter cookies with the trip.  (The shortbread cookies shaped like flowers with holes in the middle... those ones.)

We've hit a few parks in New York since I moved up here, but they don't have the same kind of convenient accommodations (lodges) that most of the ones in Indiana had, and we're not really into camping.  I miss Indiana's lodges!

On Bookstores

Going into a bookstore can be profoundly frustrating for me.  I don't know how much of it is because I'm a librarian, but one of the largest sources of frustration is because the books are never where I expect them to be.  Bookstore classification and whatever logic underlies it just don't mesh with my internal ordering of books.

This leads to other problems.  I wanted a book on making sewing patterns.  I had read McCunn's excellent How to Make Sewing Patterns, and I was hoping for something to expand on that.  Sewing, whether you're looking at Library of Congress (LC) or Dewey Decimal Classification, is in the technology sections - the same area as cooking, engineering, and so forth.  For LC, this is the T's.  Well, at Barnes & Noble, sewing is in the vicinity of neither the cooking nor the other technology books.  No, sewing is over by... the paper crafts materials they also sell.  That makes sense from a marketing perspective (hey, you're into craft books, here's the craft supplies we sell), but if you're looking for a book on handwork that they don't sell the resources for, the logic breaks.

I suppose part of the problem I have in bookstores is that I don't go in to browse.  I go in to find specific books or subjects.  Modern brick & mortar bookstores aren't really good for that unless you're looking for something recently published (say, the Dresden Files) or something in perennial demand (a dictionary).  I want a copy of McCunn's How to Make Sewing Patterns, but going to the bookstore in the mall probably isn't going to work.  (I've tried.)  It's in print, but they don't stock it locally.  Heck, Barnes & Noble doesn't even sell it new on their website.  Amazon it is.

I've been using the library as a reader again more recently - for the Dresden Files, for example.  But books I check out that I really like I tend to buy, especially non-fiction titles.  The gardening book I love (the Self-Sufficient Gardener) I borrowed several times from the library, then bought. I started reading Halberstam's book on the Korean War, got into a time crunch, and ended up buying it later from Borders when they were going out of business.  But just because I found it in the library doesn't mean I can find it in the bookstore.

To some extent interlibrary loan spoils me.  If I find a book I want to read that some library owns somewhere, as long as they're willing to send it, I can probably read it.  Unfortunately, if I really like the book, finding a copy to buy can be more complicated.  S. E. Smith's book on the history of the U.S. Navy in World War II has been available used on Amazon for a while; I read it three times in junior high.  But it was always more expensive on Amazon than I wanted to spend.  I ended up getting it in Delhi when we stopped for lunch in a cafe/bookstore on a trip for work.  (I may have, ahem, gasped when I saw it on the shelf, halfway through lunch.)  I could have gotten it easily through ILL (you can see in that WorldCat link that almost a thousand libraries own it), but purchasing it was a bit more complicated.  (That cafe has amazing sandwiches, and if I could find an excuse to go to Delhi again, I'd really like another tomato/bazil/mozzarella panini, hold the tomato and basil.  Yes, basically a grilled cheese with mozzarella.  It was awesome.)

Another problem I have in bookstores also stems from working in interlibrary loan.  If I don't have a specific book in mind, a bookstore isn't necessarily going to help.  Say I want to read a book on the Korean War.  Is the bookstore going to have anything?  Is it going to be a historical book, or something else?  Something as engaging as Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August is for World War I?  What got me about Borders was that they had sections - history, military history, U.S. history, politics - that broadly overlapped and required extensive browsing to find things.  Genre fiction?  Not generally a problem.  Non-fiction?  Well...

I think this is why Amazon has been getting so much of my book business.  If I want to read a book about, say, Secretariat, I can pop it into WorldCat, see what comes up, and see if there's anything local.  My local public library is pretty good about getting books on racehorses.  And then if I like it, I can pop the title into Amazon and buy it.  (There's a book I read a while back about the American Eclipse that I've been thinking about getting.)  Going to the bookstore isn't really the most useful way to find a book on a specific topic if nothing on the topic has been published recently.

It's been a long time since I've bought a book I didn't know anything about just browsing in the bookstore that wasn't either deeply discounted or... well, deeply discounted.  The last time I recall doing so was Robin Hobb's first Assassin trilogy, back when I was in high school.  (I read them in one night.  It was, perhaps, a mistake, given that I had school the next day.)  Nowadays I tend prefer to borrow before I buy.  For a while I was buying bargain books because they were a subject I wanted a book on and they were cheap, but they didn't necessarily turn out to be helpful.  I'm trying to make my book purchases more efficient, more meaningful.  Borrow it, read it, and if I want it to read again or for reference, then buy it.  If I don't get around to reading it when I borrowed it from the library, I probably don't need to buy a copy.  I don't gamble on authors by purchase anymore.  (A good thing, too, since I tried getting into George R. R. Martin's series that everyone is so excited about, and it just didn't work out for me.)

At this point I go to the bookstore a) if I'm looking for a book for someone else; b) if there's a book I want and I know it's in the building (and that it won't be cheaper to buy online, because someone with an Amazon app on his phone will point it out to me if it is); or c) if I've got a gift card or they've got a really good sale going on that makes it work buying a book I wasn't planning to.

For something new to read?  I'm back to the public library.  So that's at least one bad college habit crossed off my list.

Clouds

Driving home yesterday, I saw cloud patterns I'd never seen before.  They were a couple miles ahead of me; it was raining intermittently, occasionally heavily.  (Sorry for the blur - my phone doesn't have stabilization for its pictures.)

As I got closer, this is what I could see:

It was kind of neat, because they looked like the women they used to carve onto the prows of ships.  Here's a little bit closer:

Basically, that was what the back-edge of the front looked like; this is what it looked like on the other side:

Bonus picture:  a Schoharie Creek fog snake, from back in September.

Schoharie Creek

I've been driving across Schoharie Creek to get to work for over six years now.  At first it was three times a week, mostly in the afternoon or evening, since I was working part time.  For three years now it's been five days a week.

Irene was not kind to Schoharie County.  Other places - Greene County in New York and much of Vermont - were hit harder, and neighborhoods along the river in Schenectady and Troy in New York saw flooding.  Relief and recovery efforts are underway; the small towns may take years to get back to normal.  The Gilboa dam is sound - for now - but it's in the back of everyone's mind.

I-88 bridge across Schoharie Creek was barricaded.  Traffic was diverted onto Route 7.

When Schoharie Creek came out, every bridge across it - from the Route 30 bridge in North Blenheim to the New York State Thruway and Route 5S bridges in Fort Hunter, where the Schoharie flows into the Mohawk River, were shut down.  I don't know that they were all underwater, but there was water across I-88.  That scenario I had been mapping in my head (How do I get home if the dam goes?) didn't even require the dam breaking - it just had to have record flood levels.  Luckily for me, I was on the home-side of the bridges when it happened.  I just couldn't go to work until the bridges reopened.  With the Mohawk also over its banks and many of its bridges closed, I'm not sure I could have even detoured north of the river to get there.

Schoharie Creek, about five years ago, was the inspiration for the elemental dragons I created for one of my Dungeons & Dragons settings.  Some mornings when you come down the hill on I-88, just past the 103 mile marker heading west, there's a snake of fog above the creek, tracing its route through the valley.  Unfortunately I'm driving when I see it, because I would love to get a picture of it.  Schoharie Creek has a mist dragon.

Excursions

We were busy Sunday - the farmer's market, the library, one grocery, dinner at a park, another grocery. I only took pictures of the park, though. The park, of course, being John Boyd Thacher State Park in the Helderberg Escarpment.

It doesn't look like much on the satellite view in Google Maps:

View Larger Map

But if you click over to terrain view, it's much more dramatic:

View Larger Map

(So the drop in places is over 450 feet.)

Looking towards downtown Albany, NY:

My cute little car:

"Violators will be prosecuted" - they neglect to mention "if they're still alive"

Last time I got a bunch of pictures of the escarpment by the overlook, but this time we went walking, and found: (Minelot Falls)

Over there is where I took the previous picture:

There's a little bridge across the creek, and this is what you see looking uphill:

This is downhill:


The state is talking about closing the park as part of the budget cuts.

Argh

Ok, so I live in New York, right? Not "The City," the rest of the state. And I should be used to it, since southern Indiana's weather is crazy, and I lived there almost twenty years, and I've been in New York almost ten, but...

71 today, 45 tomorrow? What is October thinking, dammit? Space heater or fan, make up your mind already.

Finger Lakes

So, we (me & the husband - all the pics here are by him, by the way) hit up the Finger Lakes in central New York for a couple days. Despite staying in Seneca Falls, we never actually toured any of the women's suffrage stuff. >.<We did, however, drive up to the south shore of Lake Ontario to go to Chimney Bluffs State Park the first evening we were there. It's a nice drive up 414, past a lot of farms - mostly dairy and grain, but we did pass an alpaca farm. The bluffs park is smaller than I had expected on the map, and most of the trails are just mown grass paths, so it took a bit to figure out how to get to where we took pictures.

Friday we went swimming at Seneca Lake State Park (in Geneva, NY). Well, sort of swimming. The water in the swimming area never gets more than about 3 feet deep. I did at least finally get to try out the swimsuit Mom got me (2 years ago >.<) . (It was great, by the way, except for having to deal with the normally male problem of air pockets in swim shorts.)

After cleaning the lake stuff off (I had to scrape lake weeds that had gotten in my suit off my boobs), we drove down to Ithaca, NY, for supper. We ended up eating at the Moosewood Restaurant. The food was pretty good (I had Greek lasagna), though the servers had an occasionally annoying habit of trying to grab any empty-looking dish/cup off your table. We also got to take pictures at one of the parks on the south end of Cayuga Lake.

We drove back Saturday (today), but first we stopped at Taughannock State Park, mostly because the description on the state parks website mentioned the waterfall. We got lots of pictures of the waterfall and the gorge - from the overlook, of the lower falls, from the bridge, of the cliffs, of a neat overhang. Husband also got a neat picture of a daddy long-legs on one of the signs at the park.

On the way home, we stopped at Wegmans in Syracuse, where I found bonito for the miso, and we got imported candy. >.> Now we're home, and I'm worn out. :P  I also have 8 rolls of film to get developed. >.<