OLP 2013 – 7 – Riptide

Yay Riptide! I like that photographer in front, too.

Here’s what the Riptide looks like in a shorter exposure:

I think that’ll do us for this year’s Our Lady of Peace festival. ‘Til next year!

OLP 2013

New Providence’s Our Lady of Peace Festival was this week, culminating in tonight’s festivities, all very exciting.

I’m trying to go through all the photos I took and weed out the REALLY bad ones… but I’m falling asleep on my keyboard. This’ll do for tonight, eh?

Dancing queens

I generally have a policy not to post pictures of children, especially not without their parents’ permission, but these kids dancing their hearts out to the “Rockin’ Jazz Band” at the Westfield Spring Fling were just too freaking cute, I’m sorry.

Nobody can resist the rhythms of “At the Hop.” Yeah man, let’s GO!

Katzenjammin’

The Princeton Katzenjammers, Princeton University’s first co-ed a cappella group, performed for the Greenwood Gardens open house on Sunday.

(Princeton is about an hour’s drive one way from here, which is a pretty respectable time commitment for a college student on a Sunday in late April, so— props to them for making it!)

 

Unsurprisingly, they were a talented group of singers, and they consequently attracted a fair crowd.

 

At the end, they put on a cheer for us. I didn’t entirely understand it, and apparently some of them didn’t either (false start!).

 

They got it in the end, though.

Philately

Zemun-Berlin
2.00K – Axis Post Card Rate
+1.50K Croation Legion Issue
Legionnaires Issue enhances 2.00K Axis rate post card. Required for months of July and August 1943 on domestic mail. 4th and last Croation postal card issued for the new 1/1/43 rate. August 3, 1943. [quoted from note accompanying card]

The Westfield Stamp Club held their annual stamp show today!

It was pretty intense.

Here are a few things I learned:

1. If you keep stamps in an album, don’t use hinges. They damage the stamps.
2. Even collectors are impressed by Confederate stamps, which apparently were only used and produced for five years.
3. “Covers” are basically envelopes that have been mailed, and many of them are sought after.
4. “First Day Covers” are envelopes (usually with a fancy picture [a "cachet"] to match their stamps) that have a fancy postmark indicating that they were mailed on the first day the stamp was issued.

What’s your experience with stamp collecting?

12-12-12

We’ve had “repeating-number dates” like this every thirteen months for the past twelve years, but today— 12/12/12— is the last one we’ll see in most of our lifetimes. Think about it! The next one will be January 1, 2101, which is quite a long way away.

Seize the day!

WE HAVE GLADSTONE TRAINS!!!

Finally— FINALLY— after much griping and lots of Adventures in Mass Transit™— NJ Transit finished cleaning up Hurricane Sandy’s mess on the Gladstone branch, and as of today, trains are stopping at the New Providence station once more!

This is a momentous occasion— the last scheduled train ran through here on October 28 (2012), so it’s been over a month since we had any rail traffic (not counting test trains).

Because I am a huge nerd, I got up early just to see THE ABSOLUTE FIRST passenger-carrying Gladstone train come through. Like I said— this is a momentous occasion, not to be missed!

You have NO IDEA how happy this makes me. I heart Gladstone trains.

For more information, check:

• the NJ Transit homepage,
• NJ Transit’s archive of press releases,
• NJ Transit’s Twitter feed,
• NJ Transit’s Facebook page, or
• NJ.com’s transit news.

(I can recommend these all as pretty decent sources that helped me get through this period of elusive information.)

Devastation

My family and I checked out the aftermath in Ocean Grove yesterday. Based on what I’ve seen in the news, this isn’t the worst of the damage, but it’s the “backyard” I’ve known all my life, and it kills me to see it like this.

I… I don’t have words.

It looks apocalyptic.

It’s clear that Ocean Grove flooded pretty far inland (it’s dry now, but things seem to have floated into odd places), and the boardwalk is trashed.

 

I think this stuff hits home the worst when you know what it was supposed to look like.

Remember the Ocean Grove fishing pier I showed you a couple days ago? It was washed into the ocean a few hours after I took that photo.

Ocean Grove fishing pier. Left: 10/29/12, 10:47AM; right: 10/31/12, 5:30PM

 

Ocean Grove fishing pier. Left: 3/4/12, 5:27PM; right: 10/31/12, 5:27PM

 

(And by the way, the most popular image circulating the ‘net of the fishing pier getting battered by a hurricane is from LAST YEAR.

Ocean Grove fishing pier, circa 2011. Not my photo. Not from Hurricane Sandy.

Here is a link to its appearance on a 2011 forum: http://stripersurf.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2357506. I saw that image BEFORE I went out to take my own photo (and in fact it was what propelled me to go out in a hurricane and say goodbye to the pier). The gate is open in that photo, and the gate was closed when I got there.)

Moving on:

 

The pavilion, where the Ocean Grove Summer Band and various other things happen in the summer, emerged surprisingly unscathed.

Pavilion. Left: 10/28/12, 11:28AM; right: 10/31/12, 5:39PM

 

The boardwalk is a mess, even in the good parts.

Ocean Grove boardwalk. Left: 10/29/12, 10:47AM; right: 10/31/12, 5:35PM

 

The preventative seawall of sand mostly got washed away and deposited onto Ocean Avenue.

Ocean Grove sandy sea wall, an attempt to stave off the hurricane. Left, 10/28/12, 12:11PM; right (all gone): 10/31/12, 5:28PM

The tents and most of the houses seem okay; the Auditorium has some roof damage. (I’ll show that in a day or two. Other people’s photos of the Great Auditorium’s damage are already available around the interweb.)

Flood damage is less visible, but a LOT of places flooded.

Here’s a paraphrased text conversation my mom had with a coworker this morning:

Mom: “Hi Coworker! I have no power and no phone. Do we have work today? How are you?”
Coworker: “Hi Josy’s Mom! Office is closed today. My place flooded. I lost everything.”

My family got off obscenely easy.

You can text REDCROSS to 90999 to send a $10 donation to Red Cross’s disaster relief efforts; Huffington Post has compiled a list of other ways to contribute, too.

We’re back! (Sort of.)

So how did you fare through this storm?!

All of the photos in this post were taken near/around my parents’ neighborhood in Ocean Township (Monmouth County, NJ), where I’m staying. Their development is more or less near the top of a hill, so flooding isn’t a huge problem in this immediate area. Trees, on the other hand…

We just got our electricity back. Thank goodness for underground wires! My family was lucky: we only went ~42 hours without power, and we have no major structural damage to the house.

I haven’t been to my own apartment in New Providence since Hurricane Sandy started. But because it has overhead wires, and because it was out of power for ~6 days after Snowtober, I can’t imagine it’ll regain power before next week. (There go all my frozen veggie burgers.)

When the electricity went, our phone line— Verizon Fios, fiber optic— ran out of battery after a few hours, and we were without phone, too.

“No problem,” we shrugged, “we still have cell phones.”

NOPE. Twenty-five percent of AT&T cell towers were down, and calls weren’t going through… but we eventually discovered that we could send texts. (So I showed my parents how to text.)

If you can read this, you have internet access, so you can see photos of what’s left of the shore towns. I’m just looking at these photos for the first time, and crying, “I just jogged down the Belmar boardwalk last week!” (The Belmar boardwalk is gone.)

Here’s what the Belmar boardwalk USED to look like:

All these names that keep popping up in the news are my hometown stomping grounds: Asbury Park, Long Branch, Belmar… it’s really weird to hear these town names on national channels. And they’re… destroyed?

I want to go look at the beach for myself, but (a) apparently several towns aren’t allowing people east of the NJTransit train tracks (which are about 1-2 miles inland in this area), and (b) a lot of traffic lights are still unpowered, which makes driving at all a little sketchy.

 

My family went to our local Wegman’s supermarket yesterday… where apparently EVERYONE in town was, too.

Wegman’s had generators and solar power, so they had electricity, supplies, and ice!

I was wondering about the scraps of metal strewn about the parking lot, but didn’t give much thought to them; my dad noted that there no longer seemed to be any cart corrals. OH. Apparently the cart corrals were shredded to bits.

 

You can probably find this all for yourself, but here are some links I’ve been looking at:

Photos

• All over the internet, really, but here’s something to get you started: Fox9 and Yahoo

 

Transportation

• Transportation Nation: overall summaries for all transportation status
• NJ Transit main page (commuter rail service)
• NJ Transit Hurricane Sandy aftermath information
• Amtrak Alerts and Notices (commuter rail service)
• Amtrak Service Restoration Plan
• MTA (NYC subways, Long Island Railroad [LIRR])
• Port Authority of NY and NJ (PATH, airports, ferries, tunnels and bridges in/out of NYC)

 

Electricity

• Google overall outage map
• JCP&L outage map (Central/South NJ)
• PSE&G outage map (Central/North NJ) (not currently working for me, but a general outage statement is available)
• Con Edison (NYC), and Con Edison (Orange and Rockland Counties)
• Sussex Rural Electric Cooperative (North NJ)

 

Let us know— how’d you make out?

We’re all photographers

Everyone loves a hurricane!

Well, no, that’s not true, but I’m definitely not the only New Jerseyan curious/ stupid enough to go take pictures on the beach in tropical storm conditions.

(This photo was taken this morning. I’m weathering out Hurricane Sandy three miles inland from the Jersey Shore. For New Providence storm information, check out Patch.com.)

Today, pretty much everything was closed (in anticipation of the hurricane), but it was barely raining yet. Stir-crazy already, my mom and I decided to go out and see what the beach looked like.

Just to, y’know, look around.

First, we tried to go to Ocean Grove, but we were met with patrol cars lining Ocean Avenue and chasing people away with their lights and megaphones.

Disappointed but optimistic, we scuttled over to Bradley Beach (the next town, about 200 feet south), which did NOT have cops out.

The Ocean Grove fishing pier was getting battered pretty badly, and it wasn’t even high tide.

Ed., 10/31/12: Apparently the building in the photo above was washed away just a few hours later. I went back and got photos.

The storm is still pretty far away, though.

I’m not sure how long my electricity and internet will hold out— and I ain’t goin’ out to take photos in the middle of a hurricane— so I may miss a day or two.