Read New York Weekend, Part 1

On Sunday there was a street fair right outside our hotel on 8th Avenue (near Times Square).  I checked out the booths from our 4th floor window before we headed out.  Once we were on the street, I made a beeline for the roasted corn on the cob.  Delicious!  They just peel back the husk and you hold it by that while you nibble away the hot, yummy corn.

It was kind of a sad street fair.  Not enough variety for me.  Each block had the exact same booths and they weren't all that interesting.  But luckily I spied these little marble chotchkes before we gave up on the street fair.

These little guys were only a dollar each.  I think I picked up every single little animal on the table.  There were so many animals and so many kinds of marble.  I could have gone home with arm-loads of little owls.  They had big owls, too.  But this was the start of the day and hauling around several pounds of marble owls ALL DAY would have crippled me.

I ended up with a deep gray owl with piercing yellow eyes, a stripey squirrel with bright blue eyes, and a wonderful cock with a natural red vein in its marble right where its comb would be.  I love them all so much.  I haven't named any of them yet.  They're about an inch tall.

I posted 9 new architectural detail photos in my Flickr set called Architectural Animals.  I finally figured out that you can sort them by date uploaded, so they're the first ones in the set.  There's a squirrel, three(!) owls, some creepy guys, and other goodies.  With notes!

I didn't have a camera with me, so I pestered Andrew take all of those photos as we walked through the city, "Ooo!  Ooo!  Get that owl for me.  Please.  Pretty please!"  He's such a sweetheart.  He even snapped an animal or two without me asking.  But by the end of the day he'd had enough of stopping every-other-block, and out of nowhere I heard him say, "No no no!  Don't even ask."  And then I saw the most amazing dragons clutching at fence posts.

Maybe next time, dragons. :)

In addition to being my photo-slave, Andrew took a ton of his own photos.  His gallery of our trip has some awesome photos in it.  I think it's one of his most varied galleries yet.  There are all sorts of images ... glass and leaves,  manual focus experiments, compositional studies, and candids.  The argument could be made that I'm biased, but I think he's the kick-ass-est photographer around.