Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Three more random topics:

2019-06-19T22:59:22Z

kaberett gave me "Haematite, trains, clouds."

I associate hematite with roadnotes, who had a necklace of hematite chips. She also had a similar-shaped necklace of myrrh; I have a necklace of amethyst beads of that shape, which I don't think I've worn in this century.

Trains certainly aren't something I don't know or care much about. I started taking the subway alone, daily, before my twelfth birthday, in order to get to school. Sometimes I stood between cars on the (#7) elevated trains (shown in this userpic), even when there was room inside the subway cars. People in their early teens don't have a good grasp of mortality, but I did stop leaning on the subway car doors after a few well-publicized incidents of doors opening while the train was in motion between stations. I have been to railroad museums on three different continents, including two or three in the United States (depending on whether the San Francisco Cable Car Museum, which I recommend, counts as a railroad museum). And this reminds me that I've been meaning to go ride on the Mattapan Trolley since before I actually moved to Massachusetts.

Clouds can be very pretty, and eye-catching even when they're not pretty. My favorite skies to look at lately are the bright blue skies of sunny days with a few white clouds shining against them. That somehow reminds me that one of the ways people on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.fandom would reply to really out-there assertions was "what color is the sky on your planet?" And one day I realized that if I was asked that, seriously, the answer would be "all of them." Mostly shades of blue or gray during the day, and gray or black at night, but the sky contains all the colors of the visible spectrum, in all sorts of shades and combinations. (That's not a new discovery, of course, but it's not something most people think about much.) Come to think of it, the cloudy sky at night is different color than it used to be, since there are fewer sodium-vapor lamps.

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Staten Island Railroad

2012-07-24T21:01:43Z

On Sunday I wandered out to Staten Island, in order to give cattitude a bit of time and space to himself. I had been curious about the Staten Island Railroad, a piece of the city transit system I'd never been on, which turns up under "subways" when I go to the MTA website for maps, information about schedule changes, and the like. It seemed like a not-too-strenuous outing, on a warm enough day that the ferry ride across the harbor was also appealing.

( details, transit-fan geeky )

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Train query: Amtrak from Schenectady

2011-08-21T00:00:43Z

There don't seem to be a lot of good trains from Schenectady to New York City on Sundays, though there are reasonable-for-us trains from New York to Schenectady on Saturdays. There aren't many Schenectady-New York trains on Sunday at all, and I can't call the Adirondack "good," in a context where I'm not going to or from Montreal and won't get to look at Lake Champlain.

Opinions and experience on getting to New York via either the Lake Shore Limited or the Maple Leaf trains would be welcome.

(The Amtrak website claims that I could take the Lake Shore Limited from Schenectady to New York via Albany-Rensselaer, but when we asked about trains from Albany to New York, that train didn't come up. I can think of several possible explanations, ranging from "they just won't sell you a ticket from Albany" to "the web page is messed up." ~~(The PDF schedule for that train is confusing.)~~ On closer examination, it appears that the NY-bound train stops in Albany only to discharge passengers, and the one from New York stops only to receive them.)

We've already considered leaving from Albany (which has more trains to New York City), but it's not practical.

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