To elaborate: went camping for the first time ever last weekend! It wasn't as buggy as I had expected (though it was buggy), though the concept of nature is scarier than I had thought previously. It was a short trip, but perhaps that's a good thing, since-- despite our attempted conscientiousness when it came to packing-- among the things we forgot to bring was SOAP and shampoo. Also, salt and pepper. So I made rather unseasoned potatoes (chopped up an onion to go with it though). Oh, campfire cooking.

I've also never been remotely afraid of bears, like ever, prior to last weekend so that was strange. It wasn't like we saw a bear or anything, but just being suddenly aware of the possibility that there were bears was a first for me. I had many many pseudo-philosophical thoughts of nature vs. human civilizations, and am appreciative now of things like soap, skyscrapers and concrete, stoves, and roofs. Though I do enjoy tent-sleeping, which I find extremely relaxing. I don't, however, like the dark. Such DARK dark. I'm accustomed to streetlights, and definitely would feel a million times safer walking around the seediest urban neighborhood at midnight than in some pitch-black woods somewhere. I mean... bears!  
In short- damn nature, you scary. 

So, today's the Mid-Autumn Festival, or Zhongquijie, and the Google homepage is totally normal. Where's the Mid-Autumn Festival logo, Google?
This is obviously so much worse than Morrissey saying that Chinese people are a 'subspecies'!
The gall, Google!

But yes, it's the Mid-Autumn Festival today! Mooncakes for everyone! Even kitties!

  

Let it be known that my original intention was NOT to feed these kitties, and that I actually started out trying to photograph myself holding a mooncake. Trying to take a picture without one of them pushing into the shot became impossible. They ambushed me and took large bites out of the thing before I could stop them since one of my hands was occupied by the camera, the other with the mooncake, leaving none left to shove these two away. Evil cats. Evil evil cats.

As of right now, I think the National Weather Service is still trying to determine whether or not the freak storm we received last night in Queens & Brooklyn was indeed a tornado. Tornado or not, it did do severe damage throughout Queens. It definitely did hit us hard in Flushing, and to my cousin in Maspeth. The storm hit us in Queens last night around 5:40PM or so (I got out of work at 5PM, and luckily got back home by 5:30PM) and ended by 6PM-- so it was extremely quick-- but the damages were extensive.

Right across the street from my house looks like:

It took down a ton of telephone and cable wires down with it. My entire neighborhood is out of cable, so for those of us (like me!) who have a cable modem, we don't have internet access either. No idea when it'll be repaired and restored; when I called Time Warner this morning, all I got was a generic recording stating that they are aware that there is an outage in our area, that they're working on it, and that at this time there's no estimate for when service will be restored. Thank goodness for internet access at work?  

I had a class last night at 6:40PM, and I had actually attempted to go. So after, like, 10 minutes past the storm, I took my bike and headed out.

Right down the block was:

The fallen tree completely blocked the road getting in/out of my block, so our street was pretty empty. The car it landed on will be needing quite a bit of roof repair, plus a windshield replacement, for sure.
On my walk to work today, I noticed another tree that fell into a house, on the opposite end of the street.

Within 10 minutes of biking, I knew that there was no way that class was still going on though. Firemen and policemen were all over the place on practically every block. Traffic was a mess, and everyone was confused because the winds blew the traffic lights sideways and no one knew which light corresponded with them:

Had to try to not get run over by a lot of confused, angry motorists-- this street was particularly hard to cross, and I had to dismount and walk my bike across.

A tree blocked off entire expressway route: 

More destruction around the neighborhood:

Lots of broken concrete everywhere.

When I got on to school, campus security was herding everyone out, saying that the campus had closed. There was an exodus of students (who, I guess, had their classes canceled during the middle of their lessons?), which resulted in a lot of teary/shocked students discovering of their ruined vehicles:
 

Luckily, we didn't suffer any damage to our property-- the house and car are fine. We were luckier than most. Out in Maspeth, Sean's car has a few dents from a tree falling on it (not the tree TRUNK, luckily), and Kat's house has a tree leaning against the front (windows)-- haven't seen it myself, but the pictures should be interesting. She reported having to spend quite a few hours last night working and sawing tree branches and clearing them away, and that the job's still not completely finished, a day later.

 Apparently, the way the tree is positioned, they really can't clear it without potentially doing damage to the house. She emailed this morning, saying: "My dad has been sitting outside looking at the tree right up against our window for like 3 hrs just trying to figure out the puzzle of how to get it down without breaking any windows..."

Hopefully things will be cleaned up/repaired soon for everybody. Internet, tv, phones and electricity for all!

Spent this weekend down in Princeton, with the bulk of time spent painting an octopus on Colin's bedroom wall. He had a bunch of old (but still perfectly usable) oil paints and brushes from his undergrad days that didn't get used nearly enough, so I grabbed those up.

I started with sketches on Saturday night around 7pm or so. He didn't want a pink octopus because pink is too "girly," but I kinda convinced him otherwise, since it needed to be a light color to contrast against the blue-ness of the wall ("What about orange?"). Decided on a RED-pink. RED-pink is okay. Was also asked to not make it "too cartoony" to prevent it from looking too much like "a kid's room". Demanding! Haha. Did a drawing based on another sketch of an octopus posted in this blog from a few months back, but it needed to look like an octopus "for a boy's room," so naturally it is weapon wielding.
 
Then I transferred the drawing onto the wall and painted until 2am (with dinner and brownie breaks in between-- lasagna and brownies completely prepared/cooked/baked by Colin). Started back up on Sunday for another 2 hours or so for some finishing touches, and voila.

Wish I had better pics, but:

Colin playing the ukulele... Needs a bit more practice.

Abandoned ukulele with octopus.
And some close-ups.

Still playing around with the Wacom & doing digital drawings in between work, school, and traveling around.

Went down to Baltimore with Colin to visit his dad over the Labor Day weekend, and we all went down to DC on the second day. It was my first time there, so it was interesting to see the Jefferson Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, Washington Memorial, etc actually up close. Here's Lincoln! He was smaller than I had thought.