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2005-07-16 - 1:42 a.m. Misplaced Tuesday the traffic backup was so bad one block from my apartment that I had to drive uptown and take the entrance ramp to the FDR alongside where I always see my homeless woman, Karen, to whom I gave the Christmas package...very strange...there she was as usual hunkered down with her stuff on the left side of the street under the FDR underpass, but on the other side of the street was a movie crew setting up for a day of filming. This is something you see quite a lot of in New York - it's happened several times on my own block. There are catering tables set up with plenty of food for the cast and crew, and trucks with sound equipment and lighting. As I drove by I wondered if they'd offer the homeless lady any of their abundant spread of food. I also wondered if they'd call some city agency and demand she'd be removed from their film site. I don't know what happened, but I've been past there twice since then, and the homeless lady is gone. In the small town where I work in the Ramapo mountains, there has been a surge in development, and the pockets of woodlands have been sheared down and these giant behemoths of elegant $2,000,000 + homes have been erected. Signs have now been posted by the developers..."Deer Crossing"...how sensitive of them!...all through the town. All the signs mean is "Deer Leaving!" The deer have nowhere to go. Several of us in the office have seen an increased amount of deer running across the lawns in the Industrial Park where we work. Today on the way to the bank to make a company deposit I saw a dead deer on a front lawn to my right; in the heat, it had quickly bloated, flies all over its belly. Yup, move to the country to be among nature: eliminate nature! Laura, a senior accountant who works at our company, says there is an ordinance where she lives in South Jersey, oh, I guess an hour and a half drive from the Ramapo mountains, that you cannot level an entire swath of forest just for housing developement. This is a good thing. Last night I watched the fireflies in the garden, and thought: Remember how you could not resist, when you were a little girl, patiently waiting to catch a firefly in your hands? For a half hour I watched them floating through the air in the twilight, and then I thought, DO IT! I scrambled out the back window of my dead slumlord's apartment, and watched the tiny lights, and caught one lightening bug in my hand. It only lit up again when it flew off. One can only muse on the zen of this! For about 20 minutes, though, I was definately misplaced as a woman/child.