a dark night in New York

Megan writes better than Lileks:

I made it up to my fifteenth floor apartment without incident (I've had good training -- the elevator in my building in Chicago was so slow that I lived, for all intents and purposes, in a sixth floor walkup). With my mother and a surprise houseguest who was stranded when his car got stuck in a midtown garage, we prepared the apartment for night -- opened the windows, found the batteries, made spaghetti sauce for dinner. Thank God for gas stoves. I will never, ever have an electric if I can avoid it. We ate up on the roof with a number of our neighbors. It was really quite festive, partly because everyone was relieved that it wasn't a terrorist attack, and partly because it's that kind of building, and partly because there wasn't everything else to do and -- it being the Upper West Side -- everyone had quite a lot of rapidly uncooling white wine to drink. We all got tipsy and watched, for the first and last time in our lives, the stars as visible from Manhattan Island.