Today I walked the earth, like Caine in Kung Fu.

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Supposedly the Chambers Street station--which has looked like a hellscape (see the linked page) the whole time I've been riding the trains since the late 90s and long before that, to the point that I once used it as a stand-in for death and decay in a 1999 X-Files fic--is supposed to have much needed renovations started soon. The contract is ( Read more... )

Why is it in the high 80s-low 90s °F (high 20s-low 30s °C) at the beginning of May, especially since it was winter all April?

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Seventeen years after it closed after 9/11 destroyed it, Cortlandt Station on the No. 1 line will finish repairs and be reopened in October. If you're asking how it could possibly take that long to fix a ruined subway ( Read more... )

Civic passed its annual inspection, so that's one stressor off my back. I asked my mechanic about Nissans since they're a lot of what's coming up in my price range in used cars and Hyundai since it came up sometimes too, but he said to avoid Nissans, Hyundais, and Kias because of transmission issues, in fact, he had a look of horror when I was ( Read more... )

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway by Doug Most was an interesting read but I felt that its title really misrepresented its contents. A race? It took decades for each city to get its subway from its first public statement to its first shovel in the ground, and each city, especially ( Read more... )

I'm about halfway through Jim Dwyer's Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York City Subway and mostly enjoying it. Having been published in 1991, it's more the story of the big bad subway of the really bad times than what I've been riding since 1996. I had to share this bit:

The newspaper is the chador of the subway car, the perfect ( Read more... )

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amireal provided this link-- http://alert.mta.info/ --as a source of updates on the evolving commuting rail-and-roads situation in New York City. This is our current subway service, a little less than a week later. My area M train is working now but not on all the tracks it should be.

I'm conserving car trips because none of the gas stations in my area ( Read more... )

No idea when the power's coming back. Parts of the apartment still have some power, but my bedroom, bathroom, the outlet that feeds our fridge do not. We're worried that we may lose a lot of our food to spoilage if this keeps up. Aside from K's bathroom's light and J's bedroom light, none of the lights in our apartment work. We're using the ( Read more... )

I applied for and got a reduced-fare MetroCard for the disabled today, and the ID photo they took of me makes my face look five times wider and flat as a pancake aside from the jowly-ness. Even the skin texture looks weird. This may be the ugliest ID photo ever taken of me, so I'm never using this card to prove my identity for anythingI'm amazed ( Read more... )