My eyes are still red from the onions I chopped for this week's ramen salad last night. They must get more potent with age--I've had those onions since the week I moved in and only just used them up. Well, all but one. One onion had managed to grow enough, even in the fridge, that it resembled a large green-bodied hermit crab like this one:
[SJ hermit crab pic]
Anyway, I've been remiss in updating my "weekends in New York" blog, partly because last weekend was not entirely spent in New York and partly because last weekend was just too fun to interrupt with blogging.
I started out meeting up with my Mom and sisters in Friday (Dad was in Indiana with his mom, visiting extended family). They were waiting for me outside the Flatiron when I got off around 12:45 (the first time I've really appreciated Summer Fridays). We got lunch at an Asian restaurant on University, checked out Forbidden Planet and the Strand bookstore over on Broadway. I picked up Neil Gaiman's latest book, The Ocean At the End of the Lane (so excited!)--Mom graciously allowed me to keep it to read it first--and a book I'd seen someone at Columbia UP reading, Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle. Mom wasn't feeling too great, so we decided to pack it in earlier than originally planned and poked in a couple shops, like Fishs Eddy (why no apostrophe? WHY?!!), on the way back to the car.
Key to the City
Oh, the car. I'd looked forward to riding home for the weekend with my mom and sisters--so much more fun than hiking all the way across the city to catch the bus! But when we got to the garage...the car keys were nowhere to be found.
It was a bizarre situation. Apparently Mom had handed her keys to a guy in a white button-up t-shirt and dark pants, like the out fit the guy who ran the place was wearing. He took them. They left. But the guy who was running the garage didn't have them. They weren't in the car, under the car, in any of the nearby cars, in the garage guy's pockets or his booth, in the lost-and-found at the garage opposite or in the Dunkin' Donuts next door...they were just MIA. And unfortunately they hadn't brought a backup.
It was a bit more complicated than that, but I won't bore you with the details other than to say that Becky came up with some very creative crimes that could be committed in this exact situation. I'm glad she's on our side!
So we called AAA and waited for them to send over a locksmith. We entertained ourselves well enough in the meantime--Kate and I did dramatic readings from Shakespeare's Star Wars and took a walk around a few blocks, and we sat and talked and caught up. Kate had just gotten back from an amazing experience at acting camp and Becky's been busy, too, so there was a lot to talk about.
The locksmith's van was pretty cool--he had a whole little key cutting shop in the back of the van. While he worked, Becky and I wrote up a description of the keys to leave with the guy who worked in the garage. We didn't have much hope that they'd show up, but just in case...
I went back on Tuesday to see if
Back in Jersey Land
Finally we got on the road. Getting out of the city took some doing but we did get home eventually. Kate fell asleep in the car and I crashed pretty quickly once I was home--we were all tired from a big day and a busy week!
Saturday wasn't too busy. I bombed through Kate's copy of Watchmen, she showed off her room with all its new posters and pictures, we watched the Sherlock season three teaser, I swapped out books I'd read for ones I wanted to read, did laundry, and cuddled with all three cats, and gave the dog a few rub downs. Basically I was lazy and covered in pet fur and quite content.
Kate had to leave early Sunday morning for regular camp, one she's been going to for several years, so mom dropped me off at the bus even earlier. But that was more than okay because...
Aundy was in NYC!
Yay! My college roommate was up visiting from D.C., staying with Tracey in Brooklyn, so we decided to have a mini Muhlenberg meetup. I was excited to explore some of Brooklyn--I haven't been out there much yet, not to walk around the neighborhoods like I have up and down Manhattan. As usual, especially on weekends when I can't even rely on MTA to tell me what subways are running, I got there early and walked up and down the streets and side streets a bit before finding the restaurant.
Aundy and Tracey found a fantastic place for brunch, Apartment 138. It sounded familiar, though I still don't know where I might have heard of it before. Everything was delicious, from my first proper mimosa (no mistaking it for orange juice gone bad, this time) to a stack of melt-in-your-mouth French toast with literal almond butter--almonds in the butter!--and maple syrup. I cleaned my plate.
We then proceeded to wander the neighborhood. We walked around near Prospect Park, sat down by the water and just talked about books and social justice and job hunting and everything. When it got too hot and we got thirsty, we relocated to a combination bike/coffee shop for delicious watermelon-mint-hibiscus iced tea and adult-life-so-far horror stories. Next it was time for a book stop, so we popped in to Terrace Books, a cute little bookstore, and spent a good bit of time browsing. Bliss! But I somehow managed to escape without picking up another book.
Next we went in search of pickle backs. I don't remember how it came up over lunch, but I've been seeing signs outside of bars for "pickle backs," and decided that since I love pickles and used to do "shots" of pickle juice for fun, I would have to try it. Aundy and Tracey were on board, so we went in search of a bar...only to find we'd wandered quite far into residential area, so we had to walk a bit to find one. On the way we got side tracked by an adorable cat that we all had to stop and pet and wish we could take home.
For those of you who don't know (like I didn't), a pickle back is a shot of whisky followed quickly by a shot of dill pickle juice. The bar tender and a few other early birds seemed tickled that we just wanted the one drink. I almost got a spicy shot, but when the bar tender brought out a bottle of hot sauce and a squirt bottle of pickle juice, I backed down; I like spicy pickles, but that looked dangerous.
With a quick toast, we threw back two little glasses each, one after the other. I liked it well enough, but mostly it just ratcheted up my craving for dill pickles--three blocks isn't much to carry most groceries, but a glass half-gallon of pickles wouldn't be fun to carry that far.
We stopped in Dice, a fast, delicious, and affordable Thai restaurant that I highly recommend, for dinner. Aundy and I had both planned to take home leftovers only to to clear our plates yet again.
Unfortunately, with work the next morning, it was time to call it a night. Getting back was a bit of an adventure. I'd known that the subway line I took out to Brooklyn wouldn't go directly back, but apparently another guy didn't. Turned out he was going to the Lower East Side, too, so we kind of fell in together, though I wasn't quite sure how to feel about that. On the one hand, I do like meeting people and making friends, but on the other, he was being quite colorfully vocal about his annoyance with MTA and, when he heard I'd only been in the city for four months, started telling me how dangerous buses in general are and my local bus in particular is, and how the Lower East Side wasn't a good place to black out. To which, in my head, I replied with a resounding, "duh." It's a major city, I wouldn't be surprised if he'd heard about a fight on a bus; and I wouldn't consider any place a good place to black out!
Finally we made it to Union Square and he was so impatient to get home that, to my relief, he hopped on the 14A bus even though it wasn't taking him directly home. He tried to go in for a goodbye hug. I wasn't buying it, so I kind of awkwardly patted his back, and then as soon as he was on the bus, I glanced at the guy next to me, who'd overheard some of the other guy's complaints about the buses, and we both burst out laughing. Hard to believe that guy had said he'd been in New York for two years!
Busy, Busy Work Week
This was one of the busiest weeks I've had so far. While helping Charlotte get ready to go to the Academy of Management conference down in Florida, I had a lot of other little things going on, pieces I'd dropped two months ago before I even knew I was supposed to worry about them that I now have to straighten out. I think that's the worst part of this learning curve--I'm almost over it, except that I'm now having to redo the things I didn't get right weeks ago, even though I'm doing them correctly now. Ah well, in less than a month I should have smoothed out the leftover bumps from my first few months and have smooth sailing. and by then we should have at least one new Editorial Assistant, which will be awesome!
This Weekend
Pretty quiet--not as exciting as the Geek Adventure weekend, mostly because I was so busy that I didn't think about what to do until it was already the weekend.
Friday evening was the next game night with the kids up in Inwood. I found out that those kids have been there, in one windowless basement room, all day. No wonder they're so rowdy!
I spent most of the time playing Chutes and Ladders with a couple of boys who conveniently forgot how to count and wanted to argue that, since you can climb up slides in real life, you should be able to do it in the game. But we made it through three games before they lost interest. I got a slice of pizza this time--and it was really good pizza--before settling in to play Uno with some of the girls. To my embarrassment, playing with the over-competitive, rule-disregarding boys had made me a bit more forceful than I needed to be with these girls, who were at least having fun with the game n progress even if they did still want to be the winner.
I walked back to the subway and rode down to 34th Street with another New York Cares volunteer--who was yet another scientist-turned-philosophy student! Makes me wonder what it is about scientists...though my guess that he had been a physics student first, like the two physics-to-philosophy converts I know of, was a bit off. He was originally a chemistry major.
Saturday Downtown
At the last minute, I signed up for a Meet Up group that was going to the Skyscraper Museum, a little one-floor museum that's as downtown as you can get on Manhattan. There were only two other people, and of course I went through the museum slowest, but they very kindly waited for me while I poured over the details of the Woolworth building and absorbed the fact that the World Trade Center site isn't halfway done--there are supposed to be several more, if shorter, buildings nearby! I remember seeing the picture of what it would look like a long time ago, but I had forgotten about it in all the intervening years.
We then took a short walk, grabbed some pizza, and strolled around Battery Park City, a gleaming new and eerily (relatively) quiet section of New York filled in with dirt from the foundations of the original Twin Towers. It felt like one of those concept cities, or maybe like Disneyworld (but less crowded). As with the High Line, the diversity was down a notch or two. It just felt weird, though one of my Meet Up companions said she liked coming down there when she needed a bit of quiet. Guess I'll keep that in mind.
We visited the Irish Hunger Memorial, which I'd never even heard about. It was beautiful, an elevated grassy knoll with frosted glass quotes about famine and hunger around the bottom. You walked in through a tunnel and ended up in a stone house, then strolled up a path through the grass and flowers, all of which meant something or other. Scattered through the grass were large stones with the names of Irish towns engraved on them. It was very pretty, though I couldn't help being a bit perplexed about what it was doing there. Battery Park City would have been completed in the 1980s, I think, so who made the decision to commemorate that particular event in that particular area? Seems like the Irish famine would be better memorialized in Boston. Of course, you could never fit such a large monument in historical Boston. The landfilled area certainly gave the architect space to create something beautiful.
Walking Home, Thinking of Wheels
After we split up, I decided to walk back down to the tip of Manhattan and up through the city. Down at Battery Park (disappointingly closed for prettification), where I encountered the worst crowd of milling tourists I've seen in New York so far, I found an information booth and decided to take a chance. I've been (casually) looking for interesting and fun things to do in New York with someone in a wheelchair and someone not, and while I didn't have much hope that a general tourist booth would have suggestions, I thought I'd give it a try.
I approached the man at the booth, qualified my question in advance as one that might be a bit too specialized for him to answer, and asked about wheelchair-accessible things to do in New York City. He laughed in my face and said that everything in New York was wheelchair accessible, which just made me laugh in his face. Yeah, right! I'm not surprised that my older, on-its-way-to-gentrification neighborhood is as bad as it is--lots of single steps, if not several, at almost every doorway--but even the more touristy areas aren't as good as you'd think. There are a few granite curbs near Madison Square, for example, with no asphalt slope to at least fill in the gap between the street and the sidewalk. Even the Skyscraper museum, which had a nice ramp, elevators, and a single story, wasn't actually accessible because a lot of the photos and descriptions in tiny print were hung at "eye level". That's not only ableist, it's ageist! No kid who hadn't hit their growth spurt would be able to appreciate the whole museum without a squint and a crick in their neck.
Anyway, I walked back up through Wall Street, China Town, the Bowery, and SoHo with that on my mind. There weren't too many places I'd be inclined to take someone--mostly shops--but still, wheels were on my mind. Unfortunately they wouldn't have gotten far out of it.
This Week's Meal
I finished up with a trip to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for Grandma's ramen salad again. It's been cool enough that cooking might not be the ordeal it was a few weeks ago, but I still didn't want to do it. I got cabbage instead of lettuce, hoping that might have a bit more nutritional value (I have no idea), and the last of my broccoli went into the salad with my usual carrots. Once again it's good but very oniony. I like it a lot, but I definitely notice an improvement when I brush my teeth before bed.
On the Side
You know from my last post that I'm reading William Golding's "Talbot Trilogy" (William Golding is best known for Lord of the Flies. Call me a coward and a sap, but I prefer my nasty societal commentary to feature adults.) I finished up Rites of Passage last night and moved on to Close Quarters. There is definitely a noticeable step down from the elevated writing style of Rites of Passage, so I guess that wasn't just in my head the last time I read them.
I also amused myself by looking up some sailors' phrases and Latin that I hadn't understood. How the term "badger bag" came to be related to the equator crossing shenanigans I do not know. I was also amused to discover that some of the Italian and Latin terms used in the book's only sex scenes...were dancing terms! Knowing that made a scene already so hilariously laden with euphemism as to be practically incomprehensible even funnier!
Last night, as I mentioned on Twitter, I sat down with my headphones on to listen to Cabin Pressure while I put darts in the waistlines of my work pants. If you haven't heard Cabin Pressure, you need to fix that. It's a hilarious radio show about a one-plane private airline (an "air dot," the owner calls it). I thought, since I'd already heard season 2 twice, that I'd be okay and wouldn't laugh too much. However, this was not the case, and I can only imagine what Max must have thought of my seemingly unprompted giggles and stifled snorts.
And that brings us right up to today. I'd apologize for the extra long post, but I'm under no delusion that anyone who didn't want to read the whole thing would have done so.
Until next time...
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