Inaugurations

January, once every four years, involves a formality that we mark today.  Inaugurate has a strange derivation, you figure it out.  With this post, I’m in no way intending to divine futures.  Really it’s just sets of photos taken four years apart. 

Ice and lightship yacht Nantucket floated in the harbor in mid January 2009. Do you remember what else was literally in the harbor?

Weeks tugs stood by ready to move a barge underneath the airplane when Weeks 533 lifted the Airbus 320 from harbor waters that had cushioned its fall . . . twelve years ago. 

Next inauguration day, 2013, I watched fishermen drag clams from the bottom of Gravesend Bay.

Rebel, destined not to run much longer, pushed a barge across the Upper Bay with an incomplete WTC beyond.  Many more details had not yet sprouted on the Manhattan skyline.

Mid January 2017 . . . CMA CGM Nerval headed for the port with Thomas J. Brown off its starboard.  Here‘s what I wrote about this photo and others exactly four years ago.

Nerval still needed to make its way under the yet-to-be completed raising of the Bayonne Bridge, assisted by JRT Moran.  This view was quite different in mid January 2017.   As of today, this container ship in on the Mediterranean on a voyage between Turkey and Morocco.

All photos, WVD, taken in mid January at four-year intervals.  Nothing should be read into the choice of photos.  Sorry I have no photos from January 20, 2005, because back then I didn’t take as many photos, and four years before that, I was still using a film camera, took fewer photos in a year than now I do on certain days, and that skyline above was very different.

My inaugural event . . .  cleaning my desk, my office, and my kitchen.   If you’re looking for an activity, something might need cleaning. Laundry?   Yup, work after work.  All inaugurations call for clean ups.

And if you want to buy that lightship yacht above, here‘s the info.