My Adventurous President's/Presidents' Day Weekend:



I kicked off the weekend and the celebration of the American presidency on Friday night by attending a free improv comedy show with Dustin and Ashley, and then staying up way too late watching 2001: A Space Odyssey with Dustin. Great excitement ensued: we attempted to make popcorn and somehow failed. Smoke billowed disturbingly from the microwave, and the buttery corn was blackened almost beyond recognition:
Dustin, weeping in his bathroom, had a much harder time accepting our popcorn loss than I did:



At precisely noon-ish on Sunday, I embarked on a long walk to Central Park to admire the Gates (a temporary large-scale work of modern art). On my way there, I encountered this flea market. I was intrigued, but then I discovered how expensive flea markets can be. I think I'll stick to the Salvation Army.

It was a really good flea market, though.
As I approached Central Park, I found the Time & Life Building on 50 St. and the "Avenue of the Americas" (which is really just a pretentious moniker for "Sixth Avenue"). I had to take a picture because this is the workplace of Joel Stein. I tried to go up and see him once, about twenty months ago, but they wouldn't let me in.
Here is Bryant Park, which is behind the huge New York Public Library building.

And look! In the upper left corner of this picture, way high up, you can see the brilliant orange Gates of Central Park!
... oops. Those weren't the Gates. That was a Fifth Avenue building under construction. What was I thinking? My mistake! These are the Gates in Central Park:
The Gates are very strange looking (a fitting adjective would be "construction-site-esque"), but I had a good time walking around under them. The sky was clear and there was a slight breeze — in other words, the weather was perfect:
I like this man's choice of attire:
I climbed up on a tall rock to take this picture. The whole park was like this — gates everywhere — and I have to say, I liked it.
The artists whose brainstorm it was to cover Central Park in billowing orange fabric say that they chose February to take advantage of the bare trees. Remember my complaints about how tenacious NYC leaves are? They don't fall until it's almost time to grow again. Sometimes I wonder why they even go through the trouble.
As I walked back towards the southern boundary of the Park, I saw that the Gates were spectacularly backlit:



On Monday, Dustin and I headed uptown intending to see the northern, less-traveled part of Central Park. It was much colder than we'd expected, though, and we had to stop in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue (best public bathrooms in the city!) to take advantage of the hot-air blowers there. At long last we arrived at 59 St., and saw that the tall buildings around us disappeared into the fog. It was really very cool:
Miles of Gates still snaked through the park, of course, but the freshly white ground altered the view considerably. Look how much the park scenery changed in just one snowy night!
Ripstop nylon was ev-e-ry-where:
This picture and the next one are from Dustin.
Here I am in the bottom corner of this picture, either contemplating the artist's message or watching people wearing neon orange hunting hats in the distance (there were more of those than you'd expect):
The eastern border of Central Park is one of Fifth Avenue's sidewalks, and it looked so very beautiful with the white snow and starkly black trees:
We only made it to 76 St. (Central Park goes up until 110 St.), and, because we were cold, gladly hopped onto the 6 train en route to Astor Place.

I looked really creepy taking this picture, because there were people sitting on both sides of our reflection (you can sort of see one of them reading her newspaper) and they probably thought I was surreptitiously trying to photograph them.
Upon reaching Astor Place, I saw the CUBE and was stricken with the desire to spin it. Dustin obliged, and we sprinted across the street.
Unfortunately, we couldn't get it to move. This was kind of embarrassing, because the cube is located in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the city. Ah, well. This is Dustin, valiantly trying to hold up the cube's tilting weight.
A couple hours later, Washington Square Park was beautifully lit. This picture is blurry because I forgot how slow my camera's shutter speed needs to be to take such excellent night photos.
And finally: this is a puddle of melted snow (i.e., water) right underneath the Washington Square Arch. It was situated in such a way to show a most excellent reflection.