The Poddyland News

I haven’t posted anything for a few days because I was away in New York City with my girlfriend.

We had the time of our lives there, practically perfect weather with blue skies and temperatures around 80F, apart from Saturday from late afternoon for about 4 hours when the remnants of Tropical Storm Hanna blew through, with torrential rain and causing flooding.  But that soon stopped, and by Sunday morning the skies were clear blue again.

I think that we will turn the trip into a joint effort lens, with plenty of advice on visiting New York, as well as photos, and our unique viewpoints on various places and attractions.  I’m not sure if anyone has done a joint lens before, so it might be another first.

We stayed in Manhattan just 1 block from Times Square.  You could see part of the ABC “Good Morning America” banner from the room.  We did bus tours of Downtown and Uptown, did a boat trip around the Statue Of Liberty, went up the Empire State Building, walked around Central Park several times, even had a Rickshaw ride through the park and back to the hotel.  

Walked around so many streets, saw so many amazing sights, including Ground Zero, which was very emotional.  It’s the first place where I have seen a museum and church put out boxes of tissues for the visitors.  Neither of us could talk inside the WTC Tribute Museum for fear of choking up.

We did a night bus tour of the city on Friday, winding back at the Theater District as the shows were ending.  There was a crowd waiting outside where Grease had just ended, Taylor Hicks (American Idol winner) was starring, and we got photos, plus I got to shake his hand.

We had to ride the open top tour bus back for an hour on Saturday in the torrential rain, either that or wait an hour for another one with space downstairs or take a taxi, but you know sometimes you have to take the crazy option.   Well the heavens opened, but luckily it wasn’t too windy.  As the ride went on we got wetter and wetter, the drips and puddles on our freebie ponchos found more places to leak into, and every time the bus stopped and started a 3 inch deep river sloshed backwards and forwards over our feet.   We just sat miserably along with 4 other people at the front of the bus, and then there were 4 more and the tour guide further back.  Every time the guide said “look left at this” or “look right to see that” we just burst out laughing, since if we attempted to lift our heads up the water would soak us, or blow off our hoods, and then to try and pull them back up the poncho would fly up over our heads and need to be pulled down again.   We were just laughing hysterically the whole time.

Well we have plenty more material which we are going to save for the lens, as well as over 600 photos and 3 hours of video to go through…  So keep your eyes open for when we get the lens under way…

Meanwhile back to Squidoo……..

I got paid yesterday – woohoo    The largest payout yet, the best amount per tier ever I think.  So that was nice.  Google has picked up on several of my lenses, in particular My Pet Peeves.  Today the lens rank updates saw all but 3 of my top 40 lenses drop in ranking for some reason, so I need to get busy and work on some updates.  It was hard to do in New York with a horribly slow wired connection in the hotel room, but now I’m back and determined that September is going to be a good month.

My lens status as of today is as below:

LENS STATUS
Top 100: 0
Top 2,000: 8
Top 10,000: 6
Lenses: 66

MY TOP 5 LENSES

My top 5 lenses are mostly unchanged since 4th September, however despite Google having picked up on My Pet Peeves and giving it the best traffic ever, it’s ranking has dropped to 6th place. I expect it to pick up in a few days however, but as long as the lenses stay in the Top 2,000 I’m happy.

Poddys Lensography
My Claim To Fame
The Daily Joke – April 2008
Bournemouth
The Daily Joke Lensography

Tags: abc, Broadway, Central Park, Empire State Building, Good Morning America, Grease, Ground Zero, Manhattan, new york, rankings, rickshaw, Statue Of Liberty, Taylor Hicks, Times Square, WTC Tribute

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Squidoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.