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.