Rear Window

Ben and I have the week off (yay!), but our plans of an epic Philly staycation have been hampered by the fact that both of us are sick (boo!). We've spent the last four days cooped up at home, eating soup and feeling generally cruddy, but the one somewhat cool thing to come out of it is that we have front row seats to the demolition of the old building behind our building.

That building has been abandoned for as long as we have lived here, and they are knocking it down to build a 40-story luxury condo/hotel complex - we aren't thrilled about the rapid gentrification, but it has been interesting to watch the demolition process. The white thing is spraying everything with water to keep the dust down, while the yellow claw thing just smashes at the building and pulls it apart. I would have thought the process would be more sophisticated than that, and probably there's some science to the order in which they smash the various parts of the building, but from our vantage point it really does look basically like a toddler destroying a house they built out of blocks.

What is this?

It just appeared on our block, and has been there for a week now.

Any ideas?

New Neighbors

We live next door to the University of the Arts, so there's often weird stuff going on outside our window. Usually it's just bizarre music and the occasional hollering (not to mention all the sad kids in skinny jeans with assorted facial piercings who loiter outside), so Ben and I didn't really pay much attention when we started hearing whooping and clapping at 15 minute intervals awhile ago. But the other day while we were on a walk, we rounded the corner behind our building and ran smack into this:

Apparently as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts, there is now a temporary trapeze school in our backyard. It's actually really cool, we can sit on our balcony and watch them go at it:

Getting hooked up...

...grabbing the bar...

...woooo!

I will be sad when they leave and we no longer have a free (albeit rather tame) circus every night.