Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

This makes sense, but seems weird nonetheless: starting May 7th, the New York City subways will be closed for cleaning from 1 to 5 a.m. every day.

There's an "essential connector" replacement service, for which would-be passengers have to show ID that they are working in essential jobs. The bus system will also be running overnight.

After mumbling about such things for a few weeks, I got down to Rose's Turn to hang out with roadnotes and baldanders last night. My sweet cattitude helpfully encouraged me, in an afternoon when I was feeling quite a bit of inertia.

I stopped beforehand for dinner--pasta at a neighborhood sort of place called Trattoria Spaghetto. A slightly odd experience: I ordered and ate my meal, then went to the bathroom. As I was walking away from my table, a busboy asked if I was done, and I said yes. When I got back, he had not only cleared my plate away, he'd set the table for the next customers. I went to find a waiter, and he was apologetic and asked if I wanted coffee or dessert. No, but I think I'm supposed to pay for my dinner. Oh, yes, he can print the bill. They did that, and I counted out enough for the bill plus a reasonable tip, and handed it to a different waiter: the sides of the restaurant were all open to the evening breeze, so I didn't want to leave the money just lying on the table. It wasn't until I was out on Bleecker Street that I thought about the fact that they'd almost certainly charged me for a slightly cheaper dinner. I didn't even consider going back and trying to sort it out.

Rose's Turn was fun: I talked about this and that (mostly Homer, I think) with roadnotes and baldanders, before things got crowded and noisy.reive and then coyotegoth showed up a bit later. coyotegoth surprised me by recognizing me by face; we hadn't met before. We sang along with various pop stuff, and the little bit of Broadway they did--it is a West Village piano bar--and talked about the plastic flag bunting the place is currently decorated in. Somewhere in there, I decided it would be a good idea to order a Cuba libre instead of sticking to ginger ale: as I half-realized at the time, expecting the Coke to balance the rum is pharmacologically dubious. It didn't help that the bartender mixed it very strong: I sipped it slowly, didn't finish it before I left, and still think I had more than my usual limit for alcohol.

I got home around 12:30, on the 1 train, which is now back to its normal route. They've updated the posters about riding in the first five cars if you're going to South Ferry [1]: what I think is Korean has been added to the language mix (with English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Chinese), there's a cute new graphic, and the MTA's new URL is on the bottom [2].

[1] I understand that they were in a hurry to get things back to normal, and I sympathize, but they've probably blown the only real chance to rebuild that station so it can take a full-length train.
[2] They seem to be the only people in the world to be using the .info domain.