Off to points beyond.
Amongst others a shoot involving more cleaning up of fallen branches.
Spoke to Dorota last night, expecting her to have already landed out at the Suburban/Non-International Middling City Airport. She was still sitting out in the Far Rockaways, strapped in with somewhere to go.
The sound of chainsaws wafts about this fine morning and I'm watching a man out yonder with a much much bigger chainsaw than I have. It is gas powered, it is probably the Husqueverna of my dreams. Not that Yours Truly could even foist the thing more than a few inches off the ground.
Time to find the tree-related do-gooders.
Really, to reiterate, had You bought me a burro for my b-day I could be renting the little rascal out to help pay the utility bills, yes, but to also offer people the option of greater ease of branch-dragging-at a reasonable price.

Reasonably-priced Love.

+
This just in.
A small slew of email awaiting me post-mudpit/devastation image making.
One from PB telling when he'll be gigging in Chicago.
One from Literal Harold stating that he heard from some colleagues at some gaming convention in SF that the Navy Seal junket (that I desperately wanted to attend to blow shit up in the desert around Las Vegas) involved loads of shooting but only a demo of a bazooka, nobody was allowed to shoulder it.
One from Jana who sent along her review of that so-called wine bar we kind of junketed to in the Middling City's University Heights zone and how YT wished to display my pugilistic tendencies and go over to the ersatz wine bar all duded-out in sports crap and whack the crap out of a punching bag suspended, oddly, over some bottles.

I've been with Blogger since just about their day numero uno and have endured all the speedbumps along our blogging ways. I've been such a loyalist that they even sent me a Blogger hoodie years ago Just because.
So the other day, of course, as I minded my own business, they offered up a chance to switch, as all the world is, to having ties with Google. GMail, Google, GLove are taking over the world. Simple enough, a couple of keystrokes and then voi-freakin-là all goes kapoof and also voi-freakin-là the old template is like so not working (and I do miss the cartooned flames and such) and the archive, my blogging history, was nowhere to be seen. I slept on it.
And all is better this fine gray Middling City day.
A new look for epinw.
Yesterday cleared brush with Kennedy for hours, chainsawing the afternoon away - merrily. Extra watched from a distance.
We finished and had made quite a nice beaver dam in front of the property. Now here comes the surreal, otherworldly part. Twenty minutes later some trucks appeared and scooped up all the broken and shorn bits.
And, as far as I know, the MC still awaits FEMA judgement. Are we a national disaster. Or not. Any meager drive about and into the suburbs reveals what any reasonable person might toss up as a big, wrenching Yes.
A few days ago, in a grocery store, YT was in line, waiting impatiently and reading trash. A woman sort of shouted to the woman parallel with her behind me in same line OHH, you can tell who has the power and who does not, you're buying ICE CREAM and I'm buying ICE.

(N)ice, new looking Love.

topote: Here are images of Godzilla, of a soldier in Basra. What is more ferocious.
Somehow, when writing deadlines have been eyebrow deep, there have been horrific Middling City natural debacles that mean nothing can happen but writing. This to date has happened three times. Driving bans, nearly every place closed, a pervading sense of not doom as one from this region might imagine, but a resolve to get through this with aplomb - once again. And for Yours Truly it means open-ended time to write as much else has stopped.
This landscape resembles what a place looks like after a hurricane. There was a hurricane named Bob one summer in Maine when I was the arts lady at a camp for girls from the inner-city and rural places nearby. Not realizing the severity of what this actually meant, I headed out into the hurricane in my small car and somehow all the large flying parts of trees missed me. Then about an hour and a few miles later I turned back for camp, abandoning my night off and then we collectively had to abandon the camp for a closed-for-summer public school where YT attempted to jumpstart the generator for the school in a little shack with my jumper cables and the thing would not start. I did not know that the battery was missing all water. Later, someone figured this fun fact out.
So the landscape outdoors looks like a hurricane whipped through as the trees are shorn in odd ways and now branches are piled up on lawns and next to streets like snow is post-blizzard. It is sad.
Some trees might continue to live after their bad prunejobs but many more branches will fall and trees will have to be stumped.
Whilst writing last night I visited the site of Lisa Jarnot, who is an X and still a good friend of Bruce's. She is formerly of an exurb of the MC and now lives in an exurb of the Shiney Apple and works hard on a book about Robert Duncan (one of the most unforgettable readings ever seen by YT), writing good poetry, teaching, and starring in the movie being screened at Hallwalls soon - The Time We Killed.
Bruce says he's not sure he could watch it sans bursting out into laughticuffs and he means this in the best way possible as Lisa is a star.
So on her site there is mention of her 100 Hats Project so I wrote to her about it to tell her I'd like to sponsor a hat. People sponsor a hat, she says she makes about one per month, and it's meant to rep people killed during the Iraq War. When you sponsor the hat you're asked to send a jpeg to her and she lists the way the hat looks with the image and name of sponsor.
I sent her an image I found of an Iraqi man holding his dead three-year old after some arbitrary shooting about by soldiers from both the good and bad sides. Actually, as I wrote that I pondered What is the good side, what is the bad side.
Lisa has a comment on her site that she started this project to show the physicality of the war and this is very much like the ongoing project of boots that are tagged with a dead soldier's name. This turned up one day in Union Square.
Time to write. Write and wrong, good and bad. But mostly oso good.

Greenest Love, in the sense of Nature.