Pandemic Diaries Week #22 & #23

16 August 2020

Apparently today is "Relaxation Day."  We're all supposed to relax.  

 

Given that coastal New Jersey is raining, with a 75 to 100% chance of rain until late afternoon, I'd say that's what most of us will be doing with our day.  Relaxing.  Although there are also household chores like laundry and vacuuming to be done.  But relaxing is so much more fun.

I think I might make it "Reading In Bed All Morning Day."  That sounds good to me.

 

We also have rip tide warnings all day long today.  Yikes!   Between that and the shark sightings along the coast (including bull sharks in a New Jersey river!), I think I may not do much swimming this summer!  Maybe dip my toes, wade in up to my ankles.  But sharks and rip tides?  Nuh uh, not me!

 

 

20 August 2020

There are big old trees lining the streets in this neighbor-hood.  All the leaves are brown (but no, today the skies aren't grey).  I kept looking at them, thinking what was wrong?  It's only August.

Then it dawned on me.  People don't realize that in tropical storms, if the storm has strong winds but not much rain, trees actually get wind burn.  

 

Yup, we've seen this in the Virgin Islands.  Just like we humans get wind burn, so do trees.  But the leaves obviously don't turn ruddy, they just dry up and turn brown.  And fall off.

So our street looks like it's autumn already.  Brown leaves on the trees, piles of dry brown leaves on the road, and building up into large bunches under cars.

 

At the same time, we still have plenty of small flowers and roses.  I guess they're small enough or low enough to not get windburn in a storm.  Or maybe the flowers were still little buds, so they survived just fine.  And are now blooming, in contrast to the brown leaves drifting down from above.

Very weird!

21 August 2020

We've had some sunny days, and I've enjoyed my walks on the beach.  Week-ends tend to be crowded, but weekdays are less so, with plenty of distance between groups.  Most people cluster around the lifeguard towers, which the lifeguards request so they can better watch all swimmers.  

 

So for those of us who walk the beach, this means there's plenty of space between lifeguards and their boats for walking, looking at shells, watching the sea birds.

 

One thing I noticed, with the late afternoon sun, is that the bubbles and sea foam that wash up on the shore can get little tiny rainbows as they dry out!  I thought maybe the rainbows were caused by something about the salt crystals refracting the rays of the sun, some such thing.  Turns out that it's actually from algae blooms, when the microscopic algae organisms cause the sea foam and then the rainbows.  Absolutely amazing!

Someone told me that in The Little Mermaid, the sea witch Ursula tells Ariel that when mermaids die, they turn into sea foam.  So maybe the rainbows are the mermaids' scales.

So of course I tried to catch the rainbows in my photos.  Not as easy as it sounds, but fun!

 

One of the apartment buildings or condos that is right by the beach had a beach chair rack for their owners or renters.  Really, it looked like a bike rack, but colorful beach chairs were folded up and in each slot, with bicycle cables and locks keeping them there for the chair owners.  

It was a colorful surprise - not as much fun as the bubble rainbows, but likely easier to paint.  So I took a series of photos, and will try to do a watercolor painting of this.

It was a crazy windy day, probably adding to the sea foam production and the lack of people on the beach.  And possibly why so many sea birds were huddled in the sand, resting up between flights where they had to fight to not be blown away by the heavy wind!

24 August 2020

I like looking at some of the large old houses in our area.  Atlantic City goes back to 1854, though I think the big old houses in our neighbor-hood date back to the early 1900s, maybe up through the 1930s or so.

One oddity is that several houses have lion statues out front on the side of the entrance stairs.  Now, I know, a lot of large houses go for imposing entries.  Lions flanking the stairs, sure, why not.

 

But these lions have glass eyeballs embedded in the cement.  Creepy staring human looking eyeballs, with round pupils rather than the vertical pupil of a real cat.  SO weird and creepy - it make the lions look like they're watching people walking by, ready to pounce and attack us.  Maybe have us for lunch.  Just not normal statue lions at all!!!

I like the subtle ornamentation on the older houses, though.  Repeat designs in concrete, individually painted as accents.  Or a series of stained glass windows.  Bay windows about.  Even some ginger-bread on the smaller houses.

It's just a very pretty neighborhood, mostly residential with a few eating places, a hair and nail salon, and a neighborhood convenience store.  Very quiet, even on weekends.

Parking, of course, is always an issue.  Especially on weekends, people come from the mainland and spend a day at the beach.  So if we go out, parking is not easy to find when we return.  

But hey, if that's our biggest problem, we really don't have much to complain about, right?

Pandemic Diaries Week #21

4 August 2020

We're in the midst of Tropical Storm Isaias right now.  Not that a tropical storm is that big a deal, not when we've done hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, and a not-far-away volcanic eruption in our travels and time living in the Caribbean.

But I just checked the weather report, and we have the following:  a high surf advisory; a rip tide advisory; a tropical storm warning; a flash flood watch; two tornado watches; a coastal flood advisory; and a tropical weather statement.  Whew!  All that for one little storm!

Granted, we had some heavy rain, and poor Puerto Rico was flooded earlier this week from Isaias.  And we've been feeling our entire apartment shaking in the wind all morning and continuing this afternoon, which is most disconcerting! 

But a tornado watch?  I don't know what we'd even do in the event of a tornado!  Maybe run down the stairs and stay at the very bottom landing, still inside but as close to the bottom of the house as we could get.  I really have no idea what would be safest, but I do know that the top floor is not it.

I did postpone my afternoon appointment today, over on the mainland.  It's all of two or three miles away, but it means a drive across a long and high bridge, and at the moment it feels like this wind could blow our little car into the bay.  Not something I want to experience, thank you.

Oh well, nothing to do but wait it out.  Just one more thing 2020 is throwing at us.

 

 

5 August 2020

 

I went out in the late afternoon, after Isaias had finished with us, or at least had stopped raining on us.  It was still wild and windy, and the ocean was really raging on the shore!  I kind of like the wildness of this kind of weather - not the actual storm, but the raging seas and the wind.

 

The waves had eroded the beach a bit closest to the water's edge, so that the gentle sloping beach dropped off suddenly into the waves.  Garbage cans had presumably been moved up beyond

the high water mark, and turned on their sides to prevent being blown around.

Very few people were on the beach, just some hardy souls who wanted to get fresh air and see what damage had been done.

So the photos are post storm, and you can see the wild waves.  Also the dark and stormy skies, which were slowly clearing as the storm moved north.

I found an amazing apartment house just around the corner on the next street, right above the boardwalk - The Riviera, a gorgeous Art Deco building dating back to 1929!  Loved the exterior, and I peeked into the lobby but given the virus, didn't go inside.  I looked online to see what the apartments look like, and one is for rent - beautiful wood floors, a fireplace, wood trim, white walls.  A few apartments even have a partial porch (which is really just the roof of one of the stepped levels).  One woman who was chatting with her friend as she washed the car told me the date of the building - the other friend said it was a very romantic building in which to live.  I can believe it, just an incredible work of art from that time!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

11 August 2020

 

We had some normal weather, and now we're having days of pea soup fog.  I mean, thick heavy can-barely-see-across-the-street fog.  London kind of fog.  Except it's about 80 F out there (25 C) - so it's hot fog. 

Weirdest weather ever!

 

Before I publish this blog post, I wanted to describe our apartment.  The big white house is the house we live in, which has several different apartments.  Our little place is the third floor, up right under the roof.  I suspect this is a former attic converted into an

apartment.

 

To get here, we walk up a flight of stairs from the sidewalk to the porch.  Odd, I know, but many houses here near the water a built this way to protect the homes from high tides and floods during storms.  Really, we're that close to the beach.

Then once on the porch, we unlock a door and go up a flight of stairs to the second level, unlock our front door, and go up another flight of stairs.  It isn't bad, but with hands full of grocery bags those door locks are not always

cooperative.

 

That last flight of stairs leads right into our entry vestibule, and all rooms lead off that except the kitchen.  We have two bedrooms, a full bathroom (complete with washer and dryer), a living room, and a large kitchen with the table in there.  Off the kitchen is a porch or large balcony, complete with chairs and tables for outdoor relaxing.  The back stairs lead down from our balcony, four flights of wooden stairs zigzagging down

the back of the house to the street level.  This is the way we take the trash and recycling down to the cans.  We could also come up this way, but with bags of groceries I personally would rather be inside the house and not on these exterior stairs.

 

All the rooms except the bathroom have a sloping wall that follows the line of the roof - that's how I can tell we were once the attic.  It gives the entire apartment the feeling of a cozy cottage, sort of like an auld Scottish cottage made of stone and wattle, whatever wattle is.  Or maybe something like a Hobbit home,

though we're missing the round door.

 

All in all it's very bright since we're up above the trees, and each room has a window on one of the flat walls, not the sloping walls.  And yes, Richard and I each have hit our heads a few times already.  

 

Walls are painted in blues, greys, or beige, mimicking the sand and sea just down the road.  The trim is all white, and there are subtle beachy hints in the decor - sea shell design on the aqua shower curtain, a box of shells on a window ledge.  Not the blatant fish and sail boat decor, but subtle, which I prefer.

 

We have a bit of an ocean view from the balcony, seen between roofs and houses.  Enough to see the ocean and the waves that were churned up by Isaias as he went by.

 

So we're happy, and we plan to be here through to the end of October.  No idea what we'll do next, where we might go.  It all depends on what else this year decides to throw at us.  Another storm, an alien invasion, yeah, who knows.

 

We just plan one day at a time. 

And sorry about the weird spacing - the blog site has changed the format as well as the functions, so it'll take me a bit of time before I get this to work out properly.