Guess You Just Had To Be There

Duh!  Everyone has a rooftop, but we have one that is accessible and we didn’t even have a clue about it.  When we were moving in last November, we had asked if we had rooftop access and were told that we didn’t, so we just left it at that.  Then this evening at the suggestion of some friends, I walked above the 2nd floor of my building for the first time ever.  I was excited, but also a bit nervous.  What if the door was locked and an alarm would go off when you opened it?  What if?  When we made it to the fifth level of my building, not only was the door not locked, it was WIDE open with a sign that said “for tenant use and their guests.”  For the first time since moving to Sunnyside, I got to view our neighborhood with a fresh and new perspective: from the top of our roof.  I am so excited at this little discovery and feel like a whole new world in New York has been opened for me.

I am sitting in my apartment listening to the rain smack my A/C unit. This was something that I could not have foreseen.  I’ve never owned a window A/C unit before, and didn’t think about the noise it would make when rain hits the aluminum casing.   We actually had to sleep with our bedroom door closed one evening, the sound was so loud (the unit is in our living room window.) Though it is not currently a heavy rain.  When it rains here in New York, it is really just a little drizzle, but all of the locals seem to think it is a torrential downpour. The first truly rainy day that I experienced was last fall, and what made that day miserable was the chill that came with the cold rain.  Had the temperature been a little warmer, it would have been the perfect day to take nice long walks in the rain.  Imagine my surprise when I got home that evening and the weather forecaster said it had been pouring rain all day. Pouring rain!  I don’t think anything but the soles of my shoes got wet.  In Georgia, Florida, or even Texas when it rains, it truly pours. It is as if God turns on a giant faucet and just dumps water on those southern states. I suppose by the time it makes it’s way up here to New York, God starts running out of water. The thing that adds power to the rain here in New York is the wind.  When we moved, we had two umbrellas to our name.  One broke during a windy rain storm, the other I forgot on a bus one day.  Daniel was not too happy about the latter, since it was a nice wind-resistant umbrella.  We have since researched and purchased two wind-defying umbrellas, that can resist gust of wind up to 35 mph. This is especially important when walking around Manhattan. New York is not usually thought of as a windy city, but the buildings create these unbelievably strong wind tunnels that can knock poor unsuspecting pedestrians clear off their feet in shocking surprise and unfortunately destroy beautiful umbrellas.   It is sad to think of all the umbrellas that will lay sadly forgotten in the streets tomorrow, due to their lack of structural integrity…