Building management is doing necessary renovation work on the apartment building I live in. The edifice is almost 100 years old and well, it needs the old nip and tuck to remain standing. This particular procedure has been rather laborious. It has been ongoing since the day I moved in, well over a year ago. Six days a week, 10 hours a day, with only a rest on Sunday, the jackhammers are active. I've become accustomed to the noise, the dust and the presence of workers on a scaffold right outside my window. In fact, when I got up this morning, wearing nothing but a tank top and underwear, I spied this welcoming image (above) squarely in my dining room windows. This is really starting to cramp my-walking-around-the-house-naked style.

This is such a New York thing. Can you ever imagine a building without some sort of scaffolding encrusted around it? Because of the age of the buildings that populate this fair city, the work is neverending. Seems they finish one bank of buildings and move to the next, eventually rotating back. I appreciate the need for it. I cherish the antiquities of the building I live in and I'm grateful my co-op board cares (although let it be noted that the board's care requires an 18% increase in maintenance fees inflicted on poor slobs like me annually).

There's always been scaffolding around this building from the day I first saw it. I hope I'm still living here when it comes down. I probably won't recognize the joint.