Working the Astorian Dream

This week I've been busily setting up my home office. I even got a new desk from IKEA because the old desk from IKEA wasn't really conducive to actually working. When we moved in a year ago, we chose a sort of 18th century inspired desk because it was from IKEA but not "of IKEA" in appearance. It had cute curving legs, and most importantly it was tiny--pretty much holding a computer and nothing else. It was ideal for having a computer in the living room, without feeling like the living room was a home office, since all we really used it for was checking email and watching episodes of Law & Order. However, times they are a-changing and we had no choice but to purchase something a little more utilitarian. Enter: the plainest desk in the entire IKEA work station department.

This is my new home office. Although I'll be moving the sunflower painting (the work of a wonderful Texas artist who happens to be my mother) to another wall and putting a bulletin board there. With the arrival of this desk, it brings the birch count (or in the case of the IKEA furniture: particle board with a birch veneer) to pretty much everything in the apartment except the coffee table.

Incidentally, my new coworker Dinah was instrumental in the building of the new desk.

So far, I'm enjoying the freedom of working from home. I've started up p90x or running in the hour I used to spend commuting (really only a half hour on the train, but I used to get to work a half hour early to beat the rush on the train and to have a moment of zen before other people arrived). I'm also enjoying the fact that I can buy groceries during the week on lunch breaks so as to avoid that particular chore on Sunday afternoons when everyone else goes. It's also nice to be able to make a hot lunch that doesn't come from a microwave. Omelet for lunch? Don't mind if I do. Another plus, is that I finally get to belong to one of the "cool" offices that has a ping pong table in it for those lighter moments when I need a break.

My formidable ping pong adversary.

Overall, I'm enjoying the new job and the new office space. I'm even making it through my usual Monday-after-Spring-Forward without my usual grouchiness (for the most part).

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

Since moving to New York in 2008, I've worked at the same company in the same building in the Flatiron District. I've enjoyed the relatively short commute (some days more than others) and still love the neighborhood. From it's delicious lunch places to its colorful people, it's a fine place to make a living. However, in two weeks I'll be starting a new job, one that will cause me to work from home. This means I'll spending more time in my home office in Astoria (good for the blog!) and more time with my new co-worker, Dinah (good for my evolution into crazy lady who talks to her cat!). However, there are a lot of things I'll miss about my current work neighborhood, and so this week I brought a camera on my commute to capture them.

One of the first things I see every day! I'll miss paying $104 each month for a metro card.

I was trying to photograph that white building. Every month or so they change that to a different building sized movie poster. They were in the process of doing so here, having just painted over the previous one. The funniest thing about this is that I was walking with a friend who is a huge Giants fan and two blocks later we ran into Victor Cruz and my friend asked our other friend (the hair in the foreground of this photo) to take a picture of them together on his blackberry. She failed at getting it to work, but Victor was a nice enough football player to wait why she took a photo on her iphone that didn't come out super well because it was directly into the sun. It wasn't until after we were sitting down to lunch and the Giants fan was bemoaning the failure to take a proper picture that I remember I was carrying a camera.

Here is the same building after work that night. The reason I like it so much is you get to watch their progress and try to guess what movie it is. At this point, based on the tagline (that you can't really read here, but it says: Feel the Wrath), I can tell you with reasonable certainty that it will become this.

I'll miss working around the corner from the birthplace of our 26th president Theodore Roosevelt. Goodbye, Teddy's childhood home, I would have visited more than your museum shop if you weren't open at such inopportune times!

ABC Carpets and Home has the coolest window displays. Unfortunately, they are really difficult to photograph. This was the best of a series of five I took, and it doesn't look like much. I couldn't take any more without feeling super lame photographing window treatments during sidewalk rush hour.

Goodbye, Beecher's Handmade Cheese! I know it seemed like I only ever freeloaded your fresh cheese curd samples, but I swear I did frequent your coffee happy hour in the mornings and your cocktail happy hour in the evenings. After a few of the aforementioned cocktails, I even shelled out $30 for a cheese plate once. It was really good, but probably not worth $30.

I almost got hit by a bicyclist going the wrong way up the street while taking this. There are some things I won't really miss.

And then there are the things I'll miss which I couldn't photograph for fear of retribution. There's the adorable Burmese Mountain dog I see every morning like clockwork. I've watched him grow from a tiny puppy to an equally cute giant of a dog. I didn't want to photograph him though because I worried his walker would think I was sketchy. I'll also miss the walks for lotto tickets or coffee or lunches with some good friends in the office (who probably wouldn't let me photograph them because they'd know it would go straight to my blog).

Of course, I'm being over-dramatic because I'll actually be back in the office many times in the future, but either way, it's always nice to take a moment to appreciate the subtleties that make up each day.

The year I DID see Book of Mormon

Yesterday, the stars aligned, and I was finally able to see the much ballyhooed Book of Mormon. I credit the victory to logical statistics over time and also the fact that it was 19 degrees yesterday. Although I was actually surprised that the lottery enterers numbers hadn't really dwindled and that there were already a large number of people standing in the standing room line (people usually wait there for something like 8 hours for the privilege of paying $20 to stand for the duration of the show). However luck prevailed, and they called my name for the second to last pair of tickets that were front row center.

I'm not really posting this as a review of the show because the show certainly doesn't need any more publicity to keep selling tickets. But just in case my readers are more swayed by my commentary than the New York Times, it was the funniest musical I've seen (followed closely by Avenue Q, fittingly as both shows share a composer). I will say that I'm kind of surprised that the show is as mainstream as it is because it definitely has some humor that toes the line of bad taste. Then again, it's probably not any worse than South Park in terms of offensiveness, and that show has also never really suffered for viewers.

We would have had a better camera, but frankly we didn't really think we would win tickets. Note how frozen I look.

In addition to being hilarious, the cast was all excellent. I can see why both Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad were nominated for Tonys. Josh Gad is particularly funny and apparently a correspondant on the Daily Show. I haven't been watching the Daily Show much ever since I discovered Law & Order was streaming on Netflix, but I recognized him from the episode of Party Down where they cater the College Young Republicans meeting. He's the treasurer who gets a war torn flag as a gift for Arnold Shwarteneger. Which is really neither here nor there except that Party Down is also really great, and I hear they're making a movie.

The lotto dude always opens the lotto by saying "Hasa diga, everybody!" and then reminding people that the lucky winners will find out what that means (I've been to the lottery enough times to know every one of his jokes). Having seen the show, I now know as promised and can only say: well played, lotto dude.

I'm posting the photo below because it seemed to oddly tie into the theme of this post as this group looks very much the costuming of the dancing Mormons.

Practicing MJ's dance moves in the small side chamber of St. Marks Church

This was from a strange performance I did with the rest of the Thriller dancers (from the Halloween parade) at a church for a memorial service. If that sounds odd, that someone would want zombies dancing at a memorial, I thought so initially too. However, after hearing from her loved ones' remembrances and seeing a video of her learning the dance for her birthday a few years ago, it actually seemed really fitting. We're sorry she never got the chance to dance in the parade with us. It was nice to see everyone out of their flesh wounds though--we cleaned up very nice to look like a proper choir (we were in the program as the "Joyful Sounds Choir" because we were intended to be a surprise flash mob). All told it was a very surreal and moving experience (the latter not frequently associated with MJ), and I was glad to be a part of it.

Hope everyone is having a good Martin Luther King Day! I'm spending mine warm and indoors while Dinah sits vigil by her empty food bowl and occasionally sends me death stares. I don't think she realizes that keeping her at a healthy weight is actually harder on me than it is on her. I will say I feel a little guilty enjoying this yogurt in front of her.

Karaoke and failure (surprisingly unrelated)

Since that last post, I'm worried I've begun something of a Book of Mormon lottery addiction. On Friday, because the evening performance is an hour later than on normal weekdays and thus I can make it to the lottery without leaving work early--I headed over there yet again. After another unfortunate failure (which actually ended up fine because the backup plan was to see The Artist, which was really enjoyable--definitely recommended), we headed back over there for the Saturday matinee lottery. Another loss. Interestingly, my fascination with the lottery seems to be contagious (although I can't really take credit for that, as who wouldn't want to win front row center tickets valued at close to $500 and unavailable at those prices for 6 months for $32 and a half hour of time?) because while waiting for the Saturday lottery, I ran into a friend and previous lotto compatriot with her family also happy to join the lotto hoards. They didn't win either, which is a shame because her family came all the way from Canada and thus chasing this particular dragon will be a lot harder for them.

I'm not really concerned that it's a serious addiction, although I do plan to keep going back once a week where possible. (I likely would have tried for the evening show today if my boyfriend hadn't pointed out that laundry should probably take precedence). It will really only be an intervention-requiring issue when (not if) I actually win tickets and still can't stop the quiet twitch when 5:00 on Friday rolls around and I'm not heading to 49th and Broadway before happy hour. Until then, I'm counting on luck too prevail--which is a shame because it has only recently come to my attention that I might not be especially lucky. For some reason, I've always sort of thought I was, but racking my brain, the only clear memories I have of winning anything (well, anything that was completely luck) is a cookie at someone's birthday party at a roller rink when I was 7 and $50 from my school's prom committee at our after-prom extravaganza. For lack of luck, I will just have to make do with dogged perseverance. This isn't about the show anymore, this is about winning.

But anyway, unrelated to my total failure at achieving Book of Mormon tickets through the lottery--other than the fact that this is the reason I didn't try for the evening lottery on Saturday night--I celebrated my birthday this weekend with some wonderful friends. My birthday is technically tomorrow, but I figured people don't generally party it up on Monday nights. We got some Indian food and then headed to Korea Town for some karaoke. I'd never been to this particular karaoke bar, but I would go back just for the videos. They left us in the room with a complicated remote and few instructions as choosing songs was largely self-explanatory. About halfway through our time though, my friend found you could switch the back-up videos to odd little dumbshows that had no relation to the songs. There was one of a girl running in a wedding dress while her, presumed boyfriend falls off his bicycle and seemingly succumbs to his injuries, causing the girl in the wedding dress to jump off a bridge leaving only her shoes behind. The weird thing is, while I was able to piece this together as the prevailing narrative, these scenes were shown in indiscriminate order. There was another one of chubby children playing with a bear cub and another of people making out, interspersed with shots of different people (I think) doing karate. My personal favorite story (which, if I remember correctly, was set to Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline") involved a college student moving to some school in rural China that only had three students and winning them over with soccer. He also falls in love with their winsome teacher when they both reach for a nail on the classroom floor at the same time. It's worthy of Nicolas Sparks.

This post needed a photo. Specifically of Dinah.

You may wonder why I am recording all of this, in a post which at this point is quite clearly just a random smattering of recent events with no attempt at structure or relevance. The only reason is for posterity. Yep, playing the birthday card.

I'll be honest, this is mostly about my cat

A friend sent me this a while ago, and today I felt like posting it. After all, I finally figured how to post videos a few weeks ago.

I think it's a fairly accurate representation of what my life is like. The creator (http://www.simonscat.com/) has a number of videos that similarly capture the inexpressible joy of cat ownership: http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat. Okay, now that's it's uploaded incorrectly, I realize I don't have the power to get a video in the correct format on this computer. I'm leaving it there anyway as a testament to my attempt, until I can get it fixed. Until then, just follow the links above.

In Dinah news, she continues to delight with her feline quirkiness. Her favorite thing to do is to chew up headphones that haven't properly been stored in a drawer. She has been known to attempt to open a sliding drawer to get at headphones she knows are inside. She is nothing if not single-minded in hunting down and destroying them. Ear buds will be completely chewed up to the point that their tiny innards are splayed in a totally unusable mix of wires. Larger ear phones will mostly just get a thorough licking. I don't know why she does this, but it seems to also extend to ear plugs which we can no longer keep in the house.

I took her to the vet this week for her yearly check-up. The vet was someone filling in, who was much more of a salesman than her previous vet. He immediately detected a potential tumor while feeling my cat's, admittedly rather larger than it should be, belly (she's in the process of losing 2 pounds--but she doesn't like to talk about it). He asked to do an x-ray to double check. I'll admit, my first reaction was to want to ask "wait...how much?" But then, even though I was somewhat mistrustful of this new guy, I didn't want to be the jerk that let my cat's tumor go undiagnosed because I'm cheap. So one $95 x-ray later and we were able to see that what he'd thought was "maybe a tumor" was actually just a kibble baby. I guess because he thought we should get our money's worth the doctor was insistent about pointing out all the non-tumor-things on the x-ray. "See...that's some food...and that's also food. That right there is some fecal matter. This larger area down here is more food." Ah yes, money well spent.

This is basically her life. That, and apparently, eating her entire day's allotment of kibble right before I come home to take her to the vet.

Memorial Day merriment

Happy Memorial Day, readers of Living the Astorian Dream! I hope you're all enjoying this three-day weekend business as much as I am. As of the last three days, New York seems to have suddenly woken up and realized it's summer. The weather jumped from a week of rain and 60 to a weekend of non-stop 80+ degrees. There are some obvious downsides to this, for those of us who don't want to pay for air conditioning until we absolutely have to. The dirt and grime of the city, which I can mostly quietly coexist with the rest of the year, is much harder to ignore in the summer when it all just seems to stick to you. Also, it's much harder to get myself to go running in the morning knowing that 6 am is the only time I can go to the track without melting. I managed this feat yesterday morning and felt like a champ, but was amazed to discover how many people were already at the track when I got there. Astoria has some very dedicated fitness seekers, and I have to accept that I will never wake up before the guy who does endless lunges around the quarter mile track.

This weekend I'd considered, as I always do, going out of town. And, like I always do, came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth the money or the headache. Well, I guess it isn't so much "coming to that conclusion" as it is forgetting to plan anything and ending up here, but I still always maintain it's worth it. Luckily, this year it seems that everyone I know was in town also. And they all had excellent plans for how to spend three glorious work-free days. I tried to take pictures of my weekend, as I always do, and was moderately more successful than usual.

The beach at Coney Island does not have swimming temperatures until August. This does not apply to small children, of course, who feel neither heat nor cold.

I feel like I should have been jumping in a carefree, day-at-the-beach manner here. Know that I was channeling my inner tampon commercial on the inside though.

One of the reasons I don't carry my camera and take pictures more often is that I inevitably can't walk past things without deciding that they would make an artistic composition if only I zoomed in enough.

Dinner in Astoria with friends. Mojave on Ditmars recommended both for their lovely garden as well as their delicious queso fundido. Also, Mojave is home to the "Punisher Challenge." If you drink a shot of their habanero-infused tequila and then don't drink or eat anything for 5 minutes afterwards, you get the shot for free. It doesn't really make sense to me either.

Another hazard of taking my camera places. I was sitting with a beer in a wicker chair and eating far too much hummus at my friend's BBQ (her Israeli roommate works for what is clearly the best kosher hummus and baba ganoush provider on the East Coast), and I started growing overly content with life and felt the need to capture the moment with what I was convinced were artsy photos of my friend's backyard. Another of my never-fail photo composition techniques is to just photograph whatever is directly above me.

Dinah wanted to be stored away with my winter and spring clothes. Summer sun dresses make far less cushy sleeping arrangements in the laundry basket than heavy sweaters.

The view from a friend's Memorial Day BBQ. It's times like these I remember I'm supposed to be coveting roof access.

All weekends should have three days.

A cat around town

Back in college, my friends bought a puppet from a dollar store in Conway, Arkansas. This tiger, who we named K-Tiger as related to a dorm feud (the story behind which is a bit too long to go into here), subsequently appeared at most of our parties sophomore year. We dressed her up in construction paper t-shirts with uniquely anatomical designs on them and posed her in the usual array of college party pics. This may sound slightly strange, but it is really just the natural result of liberal arts students living in small town Arkansas (in a dry county, no less!).

After college, K-Tiger moved with one of my friends to Oklahoma where she (both tiger and friend) have been residing for the last few years. I'd all but forgotten the puppet (who is famous enough to have gotten her own facebook profile with close to 30 friends), until my friend started posting pictures of her seeing the sites of Tulsa. As all my friends from college are now living in far-flung places and don't get to see each other as often as we'd like, she suggested we mail K-Tiger around to visit new cities (and perhaps even foreign shores). A sort of Sisterhood for the Traveling Dollar Store Tiger Puppet, if you will.

I was the first to receive K-Tiger in the mail a month or so ago and was happy to see her again. She seemed to have aged since last I saw her. There is a touch of dirt under her chin; her fur has lost some of its luster, and she has a slight tear behind one paw. The hard-living seems to have gotten to her since her wild, college partying days. She seems to show all the wear and tear, while I, Dorian Gray like, maintain the youthful glow that still gets me carded at the wine shop on my block.

Since I devoted some time to this project, I thought I would share with my blog readers some of K-Tiger's adventures in the Big Apple.


K-Tiger and I enjoyed a nice visit to the Met (actually, we just popped into the Met gift shop and then popped out to take this picture, but who's counting?). I would have gotten a better picture that didn't feature that random guy so prominently, but I was getting slightly wary of the strange looks I was getting from tourists.


This was supposed to be a shot of K-Tiger climbing the Empire State Building a la King Kong, but due to some miscommunication with my photographer, the waning daylight, and the fact that I did my p90x arms and shoulders workout that morning and couldn't stretch my arm high enough--this is the best I could do.


K-Tiger chilling at the Plaza. We tried to go to nearby Central Park but she found it a sad excuse for experiencing actual nature.


Just a couple of cats, out on the town. Er, well, in my living room. Naturally, these two got along famously.

That about wraps up K-Tiger's big city adventures. I was actually quite thankful to have her warming my hand, as it's been pretty cold here these last couple of weeks. Sadly, K-Tiger will soon be leaving me to go to her next destination: Sheffield, England. I will be personally escorting her in a few weeks, not because I don't trust Fed-Ex, but because I deserve the vacation and I want to visit my friend. I hope none of you will think the less of me for spending my week cavorting with a puppet.

Talented pumpkin artists and the deadbeats who love them

As you know (or may have gathered from previous blog posts), I am an avid entrant of Internet contests. Naturally, I prefer contests where a degree of skill is involved, be it writing short essays about meatballs or crafting Valentines haikus devoted to car-sharing or condensing whole stories into 25 words. I don't win said contests, but I find them an enjoyable diversion during the workday. (This is not to say that I'm too good for sweepstakes; I lose those too. However, I'd only recommend them if you have a separate email address set up just for siphoning off junk mail). Anyway, the latest contest to grace my inbox was sponsored by the car-sharing service I'm a member of: Zipcar (incidentally the same people who rejected my loving haikus of contests past). But putting aside past defeats, I saw that Zipcar had asked its members to carve a pumpkin into a "Zipcar inspired" masterpiece for Halloween this year.

This seemingly simple task was only problematic because I lack any real gourd-carving skills. My artistic talent is really limited to an excellent eye for collaging (if I do say so) and the ability to draw cartoon people that all look the same regardless of intended gender. Luckily, I have an ace in the hole: a boyfriend who went to art school and is generally enabling of my single-minded obsession with winning $200 in driving credit. My contributions to the project were the following: accidentally puchasing a pumpkin with the thickest skin of any squash I've ever laid knife to, refusing to let him use stencils or too many ideas from google because "we have to be creative, if we want to WIN," and taking numerous pictures of my cat with her head in the pumpkin (something she did of her own volition). Pictures follow, of course:

Isn't that cute? Well, perhaps you had to be there.

Once we removed Dinah, we formulated a plan:The plan. It's a car with the Zipcar logo on it in front of the skyline. Hopefully, that's obvious at this point.

Behold the hands of an artist at work:
At this point, I was mostly just watching what turned out to be a patently unfunny episode of The Office, and occasionally offering helpful advice like "try not to cut yourself."

Without further ado, our (er, his) creation:
You might notice that this picture was taken in a well lit room, with clearly no candle in the pumpkin. This is because we couldn't cut away enough of the skin for you to really even see light through it. I tell you, this pumpkin was a beast.

All other Zipcar annual pumpkin carving contest entrants better watch out!

And finally, for those wondering (which I'm sure was all of you) about my honorable, if unmentioned, entry in the Valentines haiku contest (the prize for which was only a paltry $100 in driving credit), here it is:

Sharing is caring-
"I'll share a ride with you, Love,"
Whispers my Zipcar.

I take pride in how creepy and anthropomorphic I was able to make that in only 17 syllables.

When life takes your furniture, re-do your entire living room

I've lived in my current apartment, an Astorian oasis really, for a good nine months now. It's a great location, if a little loud at times, and easily my favorite of the three apartments I've had in Astoria (and four apartments I've had since moving to the city--there was a dark four months when I moved to Brooklyn). The greatest feature of the apartment is a large (and huge by New York standards) living room. The entire space was white and there wasn't any art on the walls, so when I first moved in, I briefly considered painting. The hugeness of the room quickly made me file that in the "to be done much later" category.

When one of my roommates moved out in March, she informed me that a girl who used to live in that apartment actually owned most of the furniture. The girl had been living in India for a year with her boyfriend and would come back and claim the furniture at some point in the future. At this point in time, the room was furnished mostly with decrepit book cases that fell apart when you tried to move them, an entertainment unit the previous roommate had pulled off the street (which looked rather like an entertainment unit that used to live on the street), a frighteningly uncomfortable futon that neither folded down or completely folded back up, a dirty yellow rug (although really that might have been my fault--I can seldom get fully ahead of the cat hair), and a decent coffee table with a weird groove in the wood that crumbs and dirt were always falling into, making keeping it clean nearly impossible. Basically, it was the kind of furniture I personally would bid good riddance were I ever to go to India for any length of time. But to each her own.

When the day finally came when she reclaimed her possessions, my current roommates and I realized we would actually have to replace them with something. We had a clean slate to work with, and it was time to make the apartment our own. This blog post is a chronicle of our budget furnishing process.

Here's the before picture. Apologies for the blurriness and the mess (this photo was taken while I was in the process of moving in). Also, for those readers who have been complaining about a lack of Dinah pictures being blogged lately--you will find she is in pretty much any photo I take while in my apartment. She's a star, that one.

The first thing to go was the back-breaking futon, which left Dinah slightly nonplussed.
She was also none too pleased with the loss of the yellow rug, which she had not yet completely finished covering with her hair. (I realized in my attempt to be artsy, I blurred Dinah a little. But I think I successfully captured her ennui.)

Luckily, by googling "cheap couches" I found this place: http://www.homereserve.com/ which will fed-ex your couch (to be assembled in about 2 hours) in a matter of days. The couch is pretty comfortable, and once Dinah destroys the upholstery, it's very easy to replace. Dinah was relieved.

The rest of the furnishings we acquired at Ikea (the budget furnisher's mother ship). Did you know you can get a coffee table for only $9.99? Of course, it weighs about 2 pounds, and we suspect it is made of balsa wood...but so far it has had no trouble holding up the Ikea lamp we put on it, so I guess it serves its purpose. Right after all the furniture had been taken, we got the bright idea to paint the room while it was empty. Of course, by the time we actually got around to painting, we'd already filled it with furniture again. Oh well, at least we did it. We chose the color "greenbriar beige" which is a lot more fun than it sounds. It adds a lot of warmth to the room without overpowering it. Here's the finished product or "after" picture:

As you can see, I still need to get a little art on the walls. I actually bought a Klimt poster (specifically this one: http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Forest-of-Beech-Trees-c-1903-Posters_i3623132_.htm), but have yet to find a frame I consider cheap enough. At some point I might have to admit defeat and get a custom frame job. Until then, consider the above the "finished" product. I'm pleased with it.

Why I depend on the kindness of google

Last night, I was walking back from the gym just as a light, not-quite-enough-to-justify-an-umbrella mist was starting. It had been an unsuccessful gym mission during which I walked all the way to the gym, discovered my class was canceled, used a couple of the machines, and walked most of the way home before noticing that I was somehow wearing two completely different shoes. Different colors, and, once I noticed, completely different amounts of arch support. So yeah...it was one of those days.

When I was almost back to my apartment, a woman stopped me on the street and asked if I lived in the neighborhood. Now having lived in New York a couple of years now, I know there are only four reasons strangers on the street try to talk to you: 1) they want to give you something (fliers, newspapers, coupons, tickets to what will inevitably be the least funny comedy show with two drink minimum of your life); 2) they want you to give them something (spare change, your voter registration information, credit card numbers); 3) they want directions, or 4) they're insane. This woman turned out to be in the third category (and perhaps a little in the fourth).

She told me she'd just moved from Manhattan to Astoria. I assumed she was looking for directions to a specific restaurant or perhaps a grocery or drug store. Her specific request was for a branch of the ASPCA. Now I happened to have adopted my cat from the ASPCA, so I was able to tell her that the closest branch is in Manhattan in the 90s. She pursued it a little longer, asking if I was sure. I told her there was a Humane Society a little closer and she momentarily perked up, until I mentioned that too was in Manhattan. She said she'd already checked the internet and that's what it said there too. However, rather than accepting the internet as law (as I generally do), she decided the next logical step was to wander the streets looking for one while asking strangers for their assistance. I told her I was sorry I couldn't help, and she took off in the direction of Broadway, presumably to comb it for very specific nonprofit animal control organizations.

The move to Astoria can be a tricky one for some Manhattanites, it seems. The part that really concerns me about this encounter is that she picked me, with the mismatched shoes, out of all the people on the street to ask. I'm thinking I need to invest in lint rollers before going to the gym in a black tank top again. (For those readers who haven't met my cat, she's mostly white...and a shedder).

Sunny day at Storm King

So I'm not coming through with my Astoria photo collage this week because I spent the weekend out of the city. This was far better than my Memorial Day weekend last year when I developed a horrific cold, lost my voice, and was alone (save Dinah, of course) in my apartment for three days because my roommates had both skipped town. Leaving town for a three day weekend is always preferable to sitting alone, sending pathetic emails to people for human interaction, and watching The Other Boleyn Girl on my roommate's netflix. This particular leaving town was especially nice, and really doesn't deserve simply being compared to my crappy holiday weekends of yore. Because I went here:
Ah yes, the bliss of leaving the city. The above picture is from Storm King Art Center, an enormous outdoor museum featuring large scale sculptures. It was a hot but lovely day for an art walk. Here's another picture featuring some strangers (a picture I took not for the attractiveness of the strangers, but to get a sense of scale):
Alas, the photos take too long to upload, so this will be the last one. It's of one of my favorites of the sculptures I saw. You'll note I'm not including the names of the artists (I think Calder did some?) because I don't know them. And really shouldn't art transcend the artist?

You may also notice that I'm not including any pictures of me at Storm King (you'll just have to trust that I was there). This is because I looked sweaty and gross that day. And really, if I wanted to make this blog a forum for unflattering photos of me I would just link to my facebook highlighting pretty much any photo of me taken during my college junior year, or as I like to call it: the year of the open mouth smile.

Hope you all had a happy Memorial Day weekend, dear readers!

Autumn in New York...in May

A bizarre cold snap has hit New York this spring. Two weeks ago it was in the upper 80s, and this week it's dipping back into the 40s. On the downside, this means my new summer haircut (which after an overzealous Italian hairdresser was done with it, can best be described as a "bob"), that was acquired mere hours before the mysterious cold snap, is now impractical. Especially because of its unfortunate quality of looking silly under hats. On the plus side, I can now blame the temperature of my apartment for the death of my fuchsia plant--a slow demise that previously could only be attributed to my either over or under-watering it. Or maybe it's because I'm not supplying it enough "strong, indirect sunlight." I'm really not even sure what that means.

My cat, Dinah, who will likely be a regular feature of this blog (because she's cute and more interesting than talking about the weather), also prefers the cold weather. Being stuck at home all day, she experiences the bulk of the heat in my un-air-conditioned apartment in the summer. In the height of summer, this results in extreme cat wilt. She lays around, preferably on surfaces of clean laundry in dark colors that will best highlight her massive shedding, and moves as little as possible until fall. This year, she's had to deal with a new hot weather horror because I now have a ceiling fan in my room, which for some reason she finds incredibly threatening. Here's a photo of what Dinah would look like if she were typing this post:
In unrelated news, the film Something Borrowed is currently being filmed on the street where I work. The movie stars Ginnifer Godwin, Kate Hudson and (the reason most of the girls in the office have been taking a lot more coffee breaks to walk by the movie set) John Krasinski. I haven't personally seen him, but I can say that his trailer is the only one with an awning. Yep. Big news.

I think this post was done for when I started resorting to cute pictures of my cat...