My First Successful Geek Adventure!

I recently described my blog to someone as pretty much a record of what I do with my weekends. So yeah. I'll start with the little bit that's not.


Work (As Much as I Can Tell You)

The frustrating thing about publishing is that I'm finally working with authors and getting these great stories, but I can't tell them here. At all, because I don't trust my blabberfingers to not type something that could give someone away. 

But I guess I can say that I have been working with more authors lately, which is usually fun and is definitely teaching me a lot. I'm helping my boss organize meetings at the big Academy of Management conference coming up and I've just about finished ushering the first wave of authors I've worked with from the beginning through the contract stage. I was also able to connect our editorial director with an author who had a full draft of a very interesting-sounding book--they'd gotten in touch with me through a colleague who'd done a review.

I'm far enough into my job that the mistakes I made at the beginning are coming back to haunt me, but they've all been sorted out so far--nothing insurmountable, though there have been a few tangles that I've needed some help to unravel. But I come out the other side knowing how not to tangle the next thing in the first place, always a plus. 

This has taken a little more time, though. I stayed late a couple nights last week, but that turned out to have benefits beyond getting me caught up. On Thursday, as I reached Union Square, a big group of some fifty musicians was setting up to play! They were the Columbia Summer Winds and they put on free concerts around the city during the summer. I was hungry and the wind was picking up, so I didn't stay long, but I did stay to hear "A Summer Breeze," which the program said was the Summer 2012 Outdoor Composition Contest winner. A very fun song - take a listen!


Friday

I had to get new shoes. I decided that three months was too long to live with only one pair of work-quality sandals...which were brown, and didn't exactly go with my tan pants (I think - Becky can correct me if I'm wrong). There's a Nordstrom Rack on Union Square, so I got me thither for some absolutely excruciating shopping. Fortunately, God smiled upon me and I managed to find a pair of shoes that were everything I needed and not too expensive (I'd begun to despair when I found one-color, two-material flip flops for over $100 in the sales section, but then I got lucky!). 

Yes, shoe shopping is a remarkable enough experience to put in my blog. I hate it, and having to do it twice so far this year is plenty, thank you very much.

I was particularly lonely and bored last week, so I wanted to find more things to do. I started by signing up for another volunteer activity with New York Cares, this time to play games with kids during an evening program. I didn't realize it was all the way back up in Inwood again (where I volunteered to pull weeds in the park), so quite a haul! I ate half my dinner at 4:30 and the other half when I finally got home a little after 9:30, and the program itself was only two hours.

Inwood is quite a beautiful area. Lots of brownstones and big hold houses of similar style that are probably apartments now. There are also a lot of brick apartment buildings with art deco accents, so not the ugly projects you see down in the Lower East Side. I got up to Inwood about fifteen minutes early, since I didn't know if the train would get me there on time, and walked around a bit. 

The kids' program was in a church basement. It was a bit awkward at first, as it usually is when you first walk into a room swarming with kids. Iron Man 3 was on in the back, though you could hardly hear it over the noise of boisterous kids making chess, mancala, Jenga, concentration, Connect-Four, and Twister as competitive as possible. 

I got sucked into a massive game of Uno in which all the guys were trying to modify the rules every time their turn came around while an older girl and I tried to keep things moving, if not maintain the peace. Still, it was a lot of fun. Towards the end a couple girls asked if they could learn how to play, and since the game had devolved into sulking and arguing about how you win, I scooped up the cards and relocated with them. I felt kind of bad--one girl played round after round, desperately wanting to win but never once cheating (unlike a couple of the boys, who had tried and, mostly, failed to do just that), and even though I tried to give her some games, I kept working myself into corners where I had to win. I felt really bad about it, especially when she started crying when her mom came and said that she had to stop so they could go home.

As the kids started to clear out, the organizers roped me into a game of spades, which I lost spectacularly once while trying to play it like hearts, and lost significantly less badly the next time. I'll definitely be going back for round two in two weeks!


Saturday

So a month ago I made my spectacular entrance into the New York City Geek Adventurers MeetUp by showing up, being friendly, and then dashing away at the last minute to vomit. Fortunately no one knew the last bit, but they did remember my dramatic exit. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The Geek Adventurers were having this month's hide-and-seek competition in Penn Station, so I signed up right away! However, the event started at 5 PM, which left me a lot of time.

I decided to go walk the High Line, something I've wanted to do since I moved here. I tried to get a few friends interested, but no dice. So I packed my usual lunch and set off, alone again, to explore. 

I started at my apartment and walked east the whole way across Manhattan--not that far, really. Strolling and slightly lost once or twice, I did it in under an hour. It's amazing how distinct the neighborhoods really are; you can almost see them changing: LES to Bowery and the Village to Greenwich. And oh, my, is that last one lovely! Bits of Greenwich reminded me of Boston with its cobbled streets, short old buildings, and painted brick. Some of the cafe-lined roads were so narrow and, consequently, car-free that the area felt almost idyllic-European. I happened upon the gorgeous Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. Obviously I had to halt my hunt for the High Line to take a peek. I'd love to go write there at some point--nice and quiet with great places to sit! I'd also love to live in the building. Fantasizing about what it would be like to live in buildings with funky architecture is a guilty pleasure of mine. 

At last I found the High Line--an old elevated train track once used to deliver food to New York City that has been converted into an overhead park. Kind of a shame--train seems like a great way to get into the city instead of clogging up roads with trucks! It's the kind of thing that you'd expect a kid to dream up and adults to dismiss, but it's real and it's beautiful. There are some parts where you can't see the city through the trees, bushes, and grasses (though you can, of course, always hear it). There are spots for food vendors and art sellers (I'm sure they're picky about who they let up there). Best of all, to me, were the places to sit and just enjoy the mix of green and city colors. There were a couple theater-style sitting areas where you could sit and watch the traffic pass below--and one of them had a very clever wheelchair ramp built in around the benches.

There were a few odd things, though. First of all, almost everyone there was either obviously a tourist or white. Mostly both. It was a bit disconcerting. I guess locals who need to get places know to avoid it--the High Line is a good place to stroll, which makes it an awful place to get anywhere fast. But still, it was a beautiful park, and I felt kind of bad that something so associated with New York but not obviously touristy was still so...distant. Second, the high line went through some incredibly expensive apartment blocks--new expensive, with fancy lofts with their own rooftop "back yards", gyms, and access to the High Line. It felt very elite, which made me as uncomfortable as the access to the High Line made me jealous.

I ended up on 30th Street, just a couple blocks shy of Penn Station. Unfortunately, I'd overestimated how much time the High Line would take me, so I had three hours to kill. I'd brought my book, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, my writing, and my phone, so I passed the time well enough between a quick call to the family and scratching unhappily at my story. 

Five o'clock finally rolled around and I could see the hide-and-seek crew gathering in front of Penn Station. I remembered a few people and a few people remembered me--and one informed me that they'd talked about me, wondering where I'd got off to. Mixed blessing I suppose: on the one hand, this is a group that cares about the people who show up; on the other hand, not one of my finer moments... 

To my delight, two of the people I'd hit off well with had started dating in the month between hide-and-seek games! There was quite a range of ages, though I was the second youngest after a 20-year-old student who'd be graduating college early. We geeked out about comics and science jokes, though she did eventually get too deep into funny physics for me to follow. Fortunately there was a physics-turned-philosophy major who got those jokes and they continued apace. There was an older set designer who worked on small movies (I'd thought theater until he handed out his card), another young editorial assistant to lives really close in SoHo (we traded info), and the MeetUp leader, who didn't look much older than me, turned out to be 37!

After establishing a strict "no running" rule, setting boundaries, and agreeing that if any of us caught security's attention, being arrested would not count as a win, we split up into two groups. Each group had Mardi Gras necklaces of the same color, to distinguish between the two. One team would go in and hide, and a few minutes later the next team would go look for them. Once you were found, you met back outside at "base". Anyone who hadn't been found at the end of fifteen minutes scored a point for their team. 

Hiders got creative while seekers made silly mistakes. Someone hid by standing in line at a pretzel stand, someone else in line at the information desk. One of the guys held a book over the lower part of their necklace--not that it helped. One slight gal hid behind two security golf carts (and got away with it!). Hardly any one scored, but it was fun just people watching and hunting, chatting while we looked for the other team or commiserated at having been found so quickly. 

After two rounds each in Penn Station proper, we decided to play a pair of lighting 10-minute rounds in the K-mart. I hid at the back of the store behind some racks, waited for to see someone on the other team go by, and ducked my way back toward the front of the store to dive into a rack of pajamas (I couldn't hide there right away since I knew everyone would check under the racks first). Sure enough, time ticked by and I wasn't found. I did have a bit of an awkward situation when there was someone looking at the clothes on the rack around me at exactly ten minutes, but they left soon enough and I was able to dart back out without anyone noticing. 

We were all tired by the last round. Some people didn't even bother to hide, opting to shop instead. My search conveniently led me down the Lego aisle. It took a while for everyone to trickle back from their hiding spots and places in line, but we quickly agreed to head to dinner together at the Skylight Diner. I'd smelled bacon while seeking in Penn Station, so I got a bacon cheeseburger. Yum! 

Over dinner I found out that the physics-turned-philosophy major was a student at the New School, which is right near Union Square, and he knew a bunch of great, inexpensive places to go in the area. The other editorial assistant and I pumped him for places we'd been looking for, like conversation bars with cheap but good drinks, places to dance without dealing with a bunch of drunk people, and--in my case--where to get a badly needed haircut.

After dinner, a few of us headed over to Midtown Comics, a place I'd wanted to go but always been a bit nervous about. I like graphic novels, but don't read many--did I have enough geek cred, or would they throw me out? Yeah, maybe I was one of the few people without a clever t-shirt, but I added quite a few titles to my to-read list, found Feynman for the science nerds I'd described it to, and they found From Hell (about Jack the Ripper) for this history/gothic horror nerd.

A walk in the perfect weather with physics-turned-philosophy down to 14th street capped off a great day. 

Sunday

Not too much out of the ordinary here. Francis Xavier soup kitchen as usual, and it was back to the trays...with a couple fun twists:

1) We were understaffed, and tray washing always gets the fewest people even though there are only some 200 trays that we need to keep washing to feed over 1000 meals. 

2) The dryer was broken, so we had to make one crate of towels last for two hours. 

Amazingly, those of us at the dish washing station still managed to have a few good chats, even if we had to interrupt them for five minutes here or there to alleviate pileups. Since I was drying this week, I wasn't quote soaked from the knee down like I was last week...just damp. It was hot and sweaty work for all the water involved, and I was glad that I had a nice lunch out to look forward to. 

Our group grew and shrunk--a few more people, but not everyone who had come last time was there this time. We went down to University Place to a great, inexpensive restaurant called Cafetasia. I got Thai iced tea (one of my favorite drinks), spring rolls, and a huge portion of green curry for about $10! Well fed and much later in the day than I expected, I wandered home, stopping in at East Village Books to ogle the drama collection.

This week's dinner: lasagna (eating dinner out twice means I still have some left) and then pesto pasta with chicken, broccoli, and red peppers. And carrots. Because I have carrots...

This week's desire: a hedgehog. A nice, small pet that doesn't require direct sunlight (I'm sorry, Edna!).

Porcelain Plants

Wow, these past two weeks have really gotten away from me! Feels like the Fourth of July was just this past weekend...

Instead, I headed up to Inwood, a small forest at the very top tip of Manhattan. An actual forest! With 200-year-old trees that nobody planted, bracken and undergrowth, and no grass. Who knew? I met up with six other people, four volunteers and one coordinator from New York Cares, and one person from the city park system, and we set off to wreak havoc on the local invasive porcelain plant population. 

Porcelain plant grows on a vine and it takes over everything, like kudzu. The picture is kind of what it looked like, except all the leaves were green and the radial parts of the leaves had wider connections to the central portion. The park service person described them as looking a bit like grape leaves. The vines reached everywhere and wrapped around branches and stems of other plants. Usually we could just pull off a while vine with a gentle tug, but sometimes we had to reach and untangle the vine and the native vegetation so that we didn't disturb anything we actually wanted to leave growing (alas, one of the protected species was the poison ivy that I found myself standing in several times after clearing a big patch of vine, but my luck seems to have held). Sometimes it was a fun little tug-of-war when the bigger plants were firmly rooted somewhere we couldn't get to. That's when the clippers came out, so we could clear enough space to get to the literal root of the problem.

Man was it hot! Our fearless leaders did their best to keep us working in the shade and reminded us to take frequent water breaks. I was wishing I'd brought two Nalgenes (not that I could have...I only brought one to the apartment), but I had enough water to get me through the day. 

The two guys kept to themselves, breaking off to dig up a "mother root" (our term), but the gals kept moving up the path, clearing vines where we could and clipping them close to the root were we couldn't. One of the volunteers was a "city girl" born and raised, and her running commentary was amusing. It made me appreciate the green even more, though, hearing her excitement over a butterfly or the difference between a wasp and a bumblebee, her interest in what all the plants were even if, much like my brain, the names seemed to evaporate in the heat. I also met a new US citizen, a former Kiwi who had just celebrated her one-year anniversary of earning her citizenship. The three of us and the park coordinator all had some good talks. I think I'd like to go back, just for the company. 

Getting home was a bit of an adventure. I'd had to wear jeans, closed shoes, and socks to work in the woods. I'd gotten all hot and sweaty and I kept finding random burrs stuck to my shirt, shoelaces, and the seams of my jeans. Between the heat, the work, and the usual end-of-week fatigue, I actually dozed on the subway ride until I got down below the 20s. That's when it got interesting. The F line takes forever on the weekends, so I decided that instead of waiting for the train (I'd already waited 15 minutes), I'd just walk across Manhattan. I was already on 3rd street, after all. 

Commence melting. I guzzled the last of my water. I stuck to the shade. I stood on the curbs to get a bit of a breeze from passing cars. The worst of it was that I knew the previous day had been so much worse--hotter, muggier, just gross. Awful. As soon as I got home I jumped in the shower without turning the hot faucet at all, but after fifteen minutes of trying to lower my core temperature, I was still hot when I got out. Fortunately, my AC unit does not have a temperature sensor, so it never actually shuts off even when I've set it for 85, as I do during the day. I bumped it down to 75, pulled my camp chair right in front of the unit, and cooled off properly.

Sunday was Saint Francis Xavier's again. This week there was a big party of Brazilian exchange students volunteering as a group. I tried to talk to them a bit, but this was, of course, the first week I got put on food serving duty, and there really wasn't time to talk. I was one of the first people to get a tray. The person to my right put a dessert in one compartment--usually a thin piece of sheet cake with a squirt of whipped cream on top. The whipped cream was funny, since none of the students seemed to know how to use a squirt can. The volunteer and I were a bit perplexed about how to explain how it worked, and once we did, I got to see the students explaining it to each other as they traded duties.

Once the desserted tray was handed to me, I'd put a scoop of salad in another compartment and pass it on to my left. The huge tub of salad, in a 30-some gallon storage container, was almost too high to reach into, but I managed. The problem came when we started running out of salad. The kitchen hadn't expected this, and started scrambling for alternatives. First we had a different kind of salad, with darker, less finely chopped leaves. Then there was a pasta salad. Then kasha salad, then cold bean salad, then finally just a bit more regular salad, and then that was it. 

But my work wasn't done. Once the regular meals had been served, we started packing up take-away meals. Again, the students seemed to struggle a bit with the styrofoam containers, though this time I wasn't sure if it was unfamiliarity or the rush. I had to put the containers into plastic bags--not fun. The bags stuck to each other and stuck closed, and while I had seen people fluffing out bags in the past, no one had done that today. Still, we got it done.

Once again, it was hot--the air conditioner was broken!  When I finally pulled off my plastic apron at the end of the shift, the front as well as the back of my t-shirt was damp with sweat. Since the regular lunch crew was off today--two of them were getting married!--I went to Panera's for lunch, just to get myself something filling that would let me stay in the air conditioning for a while. Again, I had worn pants for volunteering--though so many of the Brazilians got away with shorts that I wished I'd taken the chance!

Yesterday...well, yesterday was NOT a disaster. I will not exaggerate. But it wasn't always pleasant. My expected mountain of emails was more like a knoll, I had some grumpy not-so-potential reviewers, two rights issues on books that had already gone into production, questions about contracts, people working for organizations that weren't yet listed in our database (I had to look up the organizations online and create their pages from scratch...and ask how to do it, since I couldn't figure it out, for once), missing reviews/reviewers, emails that had once worked but were getting bounced back, reports of missing pieces from books in production, I accidentally deleted my review to-do list (I do have a couple backup ways to get the information, but they're more time consuming), and to cap it all off, one author somehow managed to get an advance copy that was printed upside down! Fortunately when I went through all the copies we had at the office, all of them were correctly oriented, so it looks like it was just a strange singularity. 

But today can only be better, right? Right. 

And on that note, as it's almost time to go, I have no time to read through this for spelling and grammar. Have pity, but let me know if there are any obvious, annoying mistakes I should fix. Thanks. 

In the Kitchen

If only I'd ventured into Hell's Kitchen again, just to complete the triad. Ah well...


My Kitchen

This week's cooking adventure: veggie lasagna!

I've pretty much gone vegetarian...except for the random cravings for bacon or pepperoni or Boston Market chicken (which is odd, since I don't pass one on the way to work--I pass a KFC). I still eat dairy of course, but it's almost impossible to buy meat in small enough quantities for me to cook for myself with the limited resources I have. I'll build up to a double-day of cooking, then I'll make myself two weeks of food. 

But until then...

I got mom's good old lasagna recipe. Only four ingredients! I don't think I really appreciated that until I had to buy all the ingredients myself. 

Of course, plain lasagna is delicious but doesn't have too much health value going for it, so I grabbed some color: carrots, broccoli, and black beans. I also got sauce with mushrooms in it--not many, but my regular store doesn't seem to have fresh mushrooms (I haven't bothered looking for canned). They also didn't have cottage cheese in cost-effective quantities, so I went ricotta; and, much to my delight, wheat and regular noddles were the same price, so I went healthy. I also stocked up on extra cheese and forewent the milk, since I've been having horrible luck with it lately.

I realized that I had twice as many noodles as I needed and that the broccoli may not last as long as the carrots, so I figure I'll make another lasagna with slightly different veggies next week. Maybe I'll even do meat! 

I don't have a grater (it's the first time I've needed it, and I have no idea where I'd put one if I had it), so I used the potato peeler to shred a fat carrot. It all came together easily enough, and fortunately one of my apartment mates had tinfoil, so I took a bit--and later folded it, so I can use it next week. 

Once it was in the oven, it was time for dinner. I threw my leftover shredded carrots, crumbled broccoli, and the last of the embellished Cuban beans and rice from last week into a saucepan, filled a can with water to get the last 2 ounces or so of tomato sauce out, and added that to the pan to make a veggie-tomato soup. Everything looked good...until I tried to turn on the stove. 

Yep, apparently the lovely oven-stove combo in my apartment will not allow you to turn on the stove while the oven is on. Easy fix, if exasperating--I just turned the oven off, turned the stove on, and turned the oven back on. 

So I had my soup, and while I waited for the lasagna to finish, I used some broccoli to scrape the little bit of leftover ricotta out of the container. Yum! Maybe I'll grab a loaf of bread at the Union Square farmer's market tomorrow to sop up the sauce. 


The Soup Kitchen

For the past two weeks-- Wait, scratch that. I keep forgetting Fourth of July was in the middle. 

So for two weeks out of the past three, I've gone over the Saint Francis Xavier Church on 15th and 6th to help out with their Sunday soup kitchen. 

I heard about this through New York Cares, a volunteer organization I joined. Fortunately, it is very popular. Unfortunately, that means that most of the volunteer projects fill up very quickly. I wanted to get involved right away, and since the St. Francis Xavier soup kitchen is one of the largest in New York City, there was room for me to hop on board just three days out. 

It's a darn impressive place. The only other soup kitchens I've been to have been small and cramped. People were hustled to eat up and get out to make room for the people behind them. St. Francis has a Hogwarts-huge hall that kind of reminds me of a train station--wide  and tall with narrow metal pillars that have been painted light colors. There's air conditioning, and thank goodness, since we're required to wear full-length pants and closed shoes in case we work in the kitchen. 

I haven't worked with people too much yet. Both weeks I was put on tray duty--first sorting the eating trays (with compartments, like the ones you'd get at a high school cafeteria) from the carrying trays (just a plain try like at my college cafeteria) and stacking them, then this week rinsing the big trays, which don't get very messy. 

The first week was a bit slow. I talked to quite a few people while we wrapped plastic silverware in paper napkins, but the conversation didn't come as easily once it was just me and one other person doing the trays. I did get to talk to one volunteer who'd been there for years, and he asked if I'd like to go out to lunch with some of the others at the end. I couldn't--I met up with Joy--but I waited for this past weekend. 

It's a long day. I just come for the afternoon shift, which lasts from 11:45 to 3:15 or so, but there's also apparently a morning shift for food prep. It's pretty impressive, what I've seen of food made on an industrial scale. This past week there was salad. Five huge plastic storage bins full of lettuce and tomatoes and carrots and whatnot were set on a table for volunteers who mixed it all up with their (washed and gloved, of course) hands. There was just too much lettuce to do it any other way! 

But doing anything repetitive can get a bit dull. Time didn't exactly fly by when I was stacking trays, but tray washing this week was a bit more of an adventure. Remember the long pants? Well, mine were soaked from the knee down by the end. I talked through two and a half whole hours with the volunteer across from me, mostly about books and movies, while we washed trays, rinsed them, and handed them on to the dryers. I ended the day in defense of fanfiction, though it's a tough sell when the only thing your audience knows about fanfiction is that Fifty Shades of Gray was originally in that category. It didn't help that the person I was talking to preferred books about philosophy and ethics--"fiction" is kind of a key part of the word. 

It was so great to talk, and I've met some interesting people. This guy was waiting tables and volunteering while he looked for work. Another was volunteering during the summer between college semesters. One was an older teacher from Columbia University, three were from NYU, one was in high school studying Japanese and hoping to travel abroad, one came on and off whenever she had time around other volunteer opportunities. 

My gloves did next to nothing for me, since they don't come up past your wrists. By the end of the volunteering hours, they were as wet inside as outside, which made it impossible to take them off the proper medical way that mom showed me. 

After that, it was out to lunch with four long-time volunteers. They were a great group, though we kind of realized after the fact how much younger than all of them I was. But they go out to lunch after volunteering every week, and it's a habit I'd like to see if I can get in on. We walked up to the Old Town Bar, one of the oldest restaurants in New York City, renowned (at least in this group) for its massive marble urinals. The guys scoped out the restroom and made sure I got a look...and they weren't kidding! These urinals were the size of refrigerators!

I had lemonade, a delicious grilled cheese with quality cheese, lots of mushrooms, dill pickles, and a generous side of coleslaw. There was plenty I didn't know about, of course--group newbie, after all--but I had plenty to say on the topic of Star Trek, running, and enough to chip in about the ethics of volunteering (Aundy trained me well). Everyone seemed to agree that St. Francis wasn't quite enough. They all had more hands-on, person-to-person volunteering they did as well, to balance the frequent impersonality of a massive soup kitchen. 

To cap it all off, when I reached for my money, the group said they'd be paying for me, since it was my first time out with them! Very nice. I hope I get to hang out with them some more, and I'm already signed up to volunteer again this week. I just hope I get a break from the trays this time...