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day after Frankenstorm
Tuesday, October 30 2012
The power outage continued, but the storm seemed to have died away to nothing fairly early last night. This morning it was still overcast and spitting just enough rain to be considered precipitation, but there was no wind. So I decided to let Nigel out of the upstairs bedroom (where he'd been incarcerated for the storm's duration; he's the only cat without enough sense to come in on his own). Eventually I drove into town, partly for errands, partly to see how the outside world was responding to the modest devastation. There was a surprising amount of tree debris on Dug Hill Road, though I didn't see anything seriously wrong with the powerline overhead. I was on the lookout to see if Central Hudson was on the case, repairing lines, but I didn't see a single bucket truck other than a Time Warner cable truck on Hurley Avenue. The first evidence of anyone having electricity was at the Hurley Mountain Inn, which didn't surprise me (I'd seen lights down in the Esopus Valley last night). Once in Kingston, I printed out recently-taken pictures of the brownhouse at CVS and then went to Hudson Coffee Traders to take advantage of their free WiFi and electricity (as well as a cup of coffee). After dicking around there for about an hour, I got an email from Gretchen saying that power had been restored back at our place. So I returned home.
Back at the house, I completed work on the brownhouse-themed "science fair project" for the next KMOCA show (a project I'd begun yesterday shortly before the power failed). Though I'd used a computer to print out a Microsoft Word document containing the project's text, I cut it all up into pieces using a paper cutter, and used rubber cement to affix the blocks of text to construction-paper backgrounds, which I then glued to a foam-board trifold. Oddly, I probably wouldn't have had the idea of doing a faux science fair project had I not seen this photo pasted on Facebook:
This evening, after drinking a fair amount of white wine from a box, I began work on yet another painting. It was based on a photograph I'd snapped back in June of Ramona, Gretchen, and Jessika at the abandoned hotel. At first I tried to use a photograph projector to sketch the image on a canvas, but when that failed, I used the classic technique of grid-transfer enlargement. Unusually for this painting, I also took interim photographs of my progress as I worked.
Meanwhile, it seemed likely that I would be getting a bit of a vacation from my work, which is headquartered near the corner of Houston and Broadway, well within an ongoing blackout region of Manhattan. The subway system was flooded and it's unlikely conditions will be returning to normal down there any time soon.
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