delaware
Battleship New Jersey
The Battleship New Jersey is moored in Camden, on the Delaware river opposite Philadelphia. She served in the Pacific in World War 2, Korea and Vietnam. She has the unusual distinction of being decommissioned twice, first in 1969 (she was decommissioned in 1982) and again in 1992.
Now she is open to the public. Lois and I went on the guided tour and it was a fascinating tour (you are welcome to wonder around by yourself).
Some useless information: she weight 46000 tons, carries a crew of almost 2000, and is 270m long.
Mushrooms in Delaware
I took these pictures ages ago on my phone while going for a walk last August in Delaware. And then I forgot completely about them.
Anyway, this patch of monster mushrooms were growing on somebody’s front lawn, and all I can think of is how good they would taste lightly fried with olive oil and fresh garlic. That is of course assuming they don’t kill me in the process! I have no idea what mushrooms you can or cannot eat, so then only mushrooms that I eat come wrapped straight from the shelves of the supermarket.
I took these shots about 2 days before Hurricane Irene, so I hope the little folk living underneath them survived the storm!
After the storm
While we had a really windy night and over 12 inches of rain, we still got off very lightly, with no damage to the house, and one very brief power cut. I am looking at the footage on CNN, and there is still a lot of flooding in New York and Long Island, and lots of cleanup will no doubt be happening in the next few days. The wind is still howling, but we are clearly over the worst of the storm.
If you look at the picture above it does not look too bad, but look at the debris on the top right that was washed down the river in the night. The stream would have risen by at least 6 feet last night. You can compare with the “before” picture below.
More of the deer
These deer live in the woods right next to Marc and Paddy’s house. You often see them in the morning and evening eating the grass, and occasionally on the side of the road. I hope they are going to be ok.
Hours before the storm
JFK is closed, and over 2,000,000 people have been evacuated. While we are going to have stormy weather and lots of rain in Wilmington today, we should still be ok. Besides being overcast and humid, there is not much to report.
However the footage of the coast is much more severe; there is heavy rain, storm damage and flooding.
By the way, if you look carefully in the photo, you can see a deer feeding.