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Sept 11
We had all sorts of plans for today until we realised the date, Sept 11th. We made the mistake last time of being in the city on that date and couldn't do much of what we wanted due to memorial services etc so we dropped all plans but meeting up with Randy in Brooklyn at the Pratt Institute.
Traffic was mostly not too bad, heavy but moving and the usual crazy once actually in NYC. Pete decided the best defence was to drive like a New Yorker, it got a bit scary at times lol
Pratt Institute is like a mini city in what used to be a pretty bad neighbourhood but like all things is changing as gentrification comes to town.
We entered Pratts grounds, went through the security check and parked where we were told to. Randy came down to meet us and took us up to his office. He's an English prof with a passion for reefing. He and his wife live in a house on the campus, she's an art historian/restorationist. He's been there for more than 20 years and has somehow convinced the powers that be to help fund a series of tanks in his office where he not only mentors his students but also oversees and edits the articles for the blog reefs.com.
He's an interesting and entertaining guy who wants us to look at writing some articles for his blog so we have to give that quite a bit of thought.
Randy took us to a local Mexican restaurant, cheap and cheerful type of place but very good food, enchiladas for me, soft tacos for Pete :-)
After lunch he gave us a bit of a tour of the campus which is almost like an outdoor sculpture gallery as many of the students here are doing architecture and design courses.
He led us to "the engine room" which I was not sure about but it actually turned out to be interesting. We got introduced to Conrad, the chief engineer. He's been there for nearly 60 years and takes care of the furnaces that supply heat to the whole campus. At one stage they had their own, firstly steam then oil, generators to supply all their own electricity. He was quite the character and we could both see Dad there for hours talking to Conrad and checking out how everything worked. He even fired up one of the old steam generators which still runs smoothly despite being installed back in the 1880's!
We bid the Pratt farewell and set forth to fight the traffic, it took us about three hours to get back to Fairfield. It wasn't too bad at the start but quickly degenerated to typical NY traffic.
We stopped in at the house to change and went to Norms shop. We spent a couple of hours fragging corals and made it look far more stocked up.
Home for a quick chicken curry cook up and bed, it was a long day.
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