northeast-flora-and-fauna

Though there are plants here, this picture deviants a little from the nature theme since it's of a mostly man-made object. This is a view of one of the many bridges at Duke Farms, and is presumably fairly old (though I'm pretty sure it's had some modern maintenance work done). If you take Railroad Lane to where it nearly meets Dukes Parkway West, this bridge gets you over Dukes Brook. This picture was taken during our summer drought, so normally the water would be higher and probably giving a look of a continuous waterflow with maybe a couple rocks poking above the surface. Despite the drought, the brook still had the water to keep the nearby plants looking green; I think the meadows had a burnt brown look at this time. August 23, 2022 at Duke Farms

Hurricane Ida ripped through my area on Wednesday, leaving lots of damage. My personal experience wasn't bad at all. Although it was raining when I got up Wednesday morning, it was mostly just cloudy during the afternoon. I even did a relatively quick run for groceries in the afternoon without getting wet. Late in the afternoon (maybe a little before 5pm) it started raining, and built to a heavy rain fairly quickly. My smartphone began giving me alerts that flash flooding was a danger, which it continued to do into the wee hours of the morning. This was more annoying than helpful; my apartment is on a hill that's probably 30 feet above street level, and AFAIK the street isn't prone to flooding. Still, I think I saw that NJ had one of the highest Hurricane Ida death counts, so these alerts probably are helpful reminders to at least some people near me. (There was one flash flooding tragedy on Rt 22 very close by.) More concerning was that I got one alert about a tornado. A...