Two weekends in NYC

I'm learning how to just "be" thanks to friends in the neighborhood who are really good at it. Just "being" means going to a cafe and just sitting around talking... for hours at a time. I generally get antsy after about twenty minutes but I set a personal record this last weekend. We normally go to Oscar on Sullivan Street, which is convenient, comfortable and has the nicest staff. The food is pretty good but the sidewalk tables are the big draw.

We also were treated to brunch on S. rooftop where we fried under the spring sun and drank champagne and ate bread and cheese and lovely omelettes (how on earth does one spell that?). Good fun and another exercise in just being (and being hot, to boot).

After being for some time, we got off our butts and checked out the renovated Washington Square Park. It was marginally nicer, though it got mixed reviews from the group.

Okay okay

Yes, it's been a while. That's because I was just having too much fun. I'm throwing in pictures of the fun, from a weekend in Maine to two weekends in NYC. The time in Maine was really nice, good weather and a fun time with P. & J. and T. and of course the parents. Who were learning their new computer. From scratch. I heartily applaud their concentration, patience and equanimity as they struggled to master the universe of Windows. Having a Mac helped but it wasn't easy. I didn't make it easy for them, either, starting them out on email with Gmail. Yikes. But I think they're getting it.

Other highlights included watching a humming bird, rescuing a bird who hit the window (P. kindly gave it a moment to clear its little bird-brain of its concussion, verify that its little neck or legs weren't broken and well, watch the video to see the outcome. More highlights included ice-cream at Round Top and wonderful vacation food (hamburgers, hotdogs) at the great Larson's Lunchbox in Damariscotta.

Mom made a lobster feast, of course, but I didn't have any and T. ate all the Dinosaur Chicken Finger things. Oh well. Good diet. Plus I ran a few miles (that's "ran" not walked, thank you very much).

I love how Obama keeps watch over the Thompson family kitchen.

Ann in the Morning

So here's yesterday's picture from the morning, before I passed my neighbor Ann but after I had almost made my new neighbor cry (mentioning pets; he had to leave his dog behind when he moved). Ann takes care of my cats when I'm away. She's a pip. She has more energy than most people I know -- and that's after being run over by a minivan a few months ago.

Can't wait to get to Maine tomorrow. I know we're doing the lobster thing on Saturday (nobody ever remembers I don't like lobster but that's okay. I like it ... enough.) If I'm lucky we'll go kayaking with Pete and I must walk the land to figure out where I'm going to actually build my treehouse house.

More on Paris... pics uploaded

Someone asked me yesterday if I'm a "visual" person or a "word" person. I couldn't answer. But I found while starting this post that I was at a loss for words until I stuck a picture in.

That was one mean waitress. I ate the best steak entrecote of my life while she ignored me the entire time and when I left it was the first time I was sad in Paris. Dining alone isn't that fun.

Now I'm back in NYC eating cold edamame on a beautiful Sunday, delaying the weeks of laundry I need to deal with.

My new goal is to post a picture a day, one taken while walking to work through SoHo and Tribeca. Here's one from last week. Keith Hernandez weirdly painted on some scaffolding.

One more picture from France (Versailles)... and many more here.

Paris

Paris this time around was wonderful. Traveling alone is the way to go: no pressure. It was a true vacation: woke up late, had coffee on the terrace of my dear friends P. and S. apartment, wandered all over at my own pace.

Had some good meals, ate and drank and talked with good friend and amazing woman (and now Parisian) E. for the last (late) night out, took a train to the mind-altering Chateau Versailles (wow, just, wow), caught a Calder/Kandinsky exhibit at Beaubourg, explored a new neighborhood (Bastille and north), bought tons of cool things (nothing terribly expensive), can say I've been to Dublin (the airport), flirted with one guy (I need the practice!), did not find mon amour and that's okay. Saw Victor Hugo's old place, drank too much wine and felt misérable until the sun came out and the sky turned a true French blue and the clouds were impossibly white and puffy and I thought, wow, I could totally live here.

Notes: There's as much bad fashion in Paris as in New York. Possibly more, given the Parisian : tourist ratio. Also, the French produce more over-the-top cuckamonga advertising than even America.



The French inexplicably drink instant coffee.

The French can be incredibly generous and good-humored.

May Day is to be avoided, unless you have something to celebrate or protest. Shops closed, museums closed. My favorite day. I spent it just walking with no agenda whatsoever. Thought about Sacre Coeur but... too far. Wound up having a phenomenal lunch north and west of the Louvre somewhere (salmon carpaccio and green salad). Discovered my new favorite designer-I-can't-afford: Anne Fontaine. In a funny coincidence, I just found her SoHo store today by accident.

Five years ago I bought my favorite earrings (green resin circles on pewter) in a tiny storefront in Paris somewhere near my all-time favorite department store, BHV. It's no longer there (the little store), not surprisingly. On my walking day (logged about six miles) this time I passed another tiny jewelry store in the Marais district and something caught my eye in the window and when I walked in I discovered it was the same store -- Tam Tam -- in a different place, still owned by the same woman). Sweet.

My French is infinitely better than I thought. One just has to pronounce properly, thoughtfully and con brio. It helps to sound a little desperate and exasperated.

Best area for last-minute gifts: Rue de Rivoli east of St. Paul metro stop on south side.

That's all for now. If you more details, you'll have to offer me a nice glass of Côtes du Rhône. Check back.. Flickring photos soon. A bientot.

Random Reportings

Finally, Friday. Though it just means that more work looms on the horizon: moving the 300+ books my mother painstakingly dusted and moved and organized, since the new sofa is unlikely to be squeezed past the near end of it. DANG.

Painting the bathroom again in that lovely shade of sunny yellow that makes me look like I'm 37% better-looking to myself than I really am (don't want to think too much about that.)

The only music I can listen to while doing all this stuff is the Beatles and James Taylor's funkier stuff ("Honey, Don't Leave L.A.")

I didn't even mention the coolest thing, from a couple weeks ago. Was lucky enough to attend the Food & Wine magazine's 2009 Best New Chefs event at the great City Winery space. Star sightings: from Top Chef, that cute Italian guy and the bald guy who won and his gal-pal on the show. Plus Harold Dieterle from Season One and Ethan Suplee, the ... slow guy from "My Name is Earl." The food was ... there aren't words. You can read more at the Food & Wine page or New York magazine.

My life in bullet points

Oh shut up. Just be glad it's not another freaking PowerPoint, right? Okay. Going backward... tough day with Tribeca Film Festival and total, massive online rejection of any ticket-buying joy.

Current guilty-pleasure reading: The Straw Men by Michael Marshall. "Brilliantly written and scary as hell" -- Stephen King.

Easter in Harlem: wow. just wow. Riverside Church is gorgeous. But you knew that. Mom dragged me there and for me just being in an above-ground subway train in Harlem was WAY COOL. I know I sound like I'm 12. But that's what church does to you. The waaaaay long service was oddly punctuated with opportunities for people to grab your hand and that would've been jake if the lady next to me hadn't grabbed a mini -bottle of hand sanitizer right after giving me my paw back after three verses of Amazing Grace with totally made-up lyrics. No disrespect.

Maine in March...

Plus ca change....

Instead of going to the gym I'm scanning old photos. It's very.... aggravating and slow, truth be told. My scanner is my non-printing printer which is ridiculous since its such a behemoth.

Meanwhile, it's a cool, sunny Sunday and I'm in the middle of renovating my apartment. Step one: move ginormo bookcase that I found on the street (how on EARTH did I get it home alone? I'm so impressed!) out of the bedroom and into the livingroom where it looks very nice against the dusky blue wall. Next step: move all the books (around 350) and arrange in the way that makes me look the smartest.

I do not know why my mother thought it was okay to send me off to first grade in a dress that short. I guess that explains why I was so popular. I remember that pencil-box with such fondness. The shoes? Not so much. Yikes.

Birdland

So, yeah, I've not posted in a while because I went to Maine and wanted to post photos but couldn't find my camera so bought two cheapy throw-aways and took great pics but haven't gotten them processed. "Processed." Can you imagine.

I'll highlight the highlights from my most recent Maine trip. I spotted a mink. No, in the wild! In the front yard! Well, more like "over yonder" and I didn't really know it was a mink at the time. I thought fox, first, then otter. It sinewed blackly on the white expanse of snow about 200 yards from me, went down to the pond but not in, and then silkily scurried back up the hill and away. P. informed me, after my description of the creature, that it was a mink, though it might have been a fisher (the woodland animal that ate some of our cats in my childhood. We think.) I

I thought I had another moment of nature's miracleness when I watched a wood pecker in the tree I used to climb (it got so tall! I got so old!!) and then observed a bunch of chickadees also pecking, at the lilac bush in front of the house. J. informed me that that's normal, they're just also pecking for wood bugs. Like there's not a totally full bird-feeder right there on the terrace. Hello? Greedy little bastards.

Okay, I'll Make This Quick

An exercise in brevity. Highlights of the last week included getting a new person to read to at the Lighthouse (one time thing) who truly inspired and even got me out of the house. We'll call him Dr. R.S., a highly-respected world music expert. He's (I'm guessing) 70, completely blind and is writing a book. He hung out with Fela Kuti (!!!) back in the day and because of him I ended up at SOB's last night to hear Jamaican reggae/hip hop star Sean Paul. Who knew? Star sighting: the young guy from tv's Criminal Minds on Sixth Avenue with his posse. I actually recognized his voice before I saw his face. I bought a couch (ouch) from Room and Board. The color scheme for my apartment is gonna be dusky blue, flannel gray accented with chartreuse. La di da. The only way to watch the Oscars is afterward, same night, DVR'd and fast-forwarded. Makes for a late night but totally worth it.

Quantum Convulsions

The sloth of my writing life is apparently cyclical, corresponding to the arrival in my perpetually unlocked mailbox of Harpers and Atlantic Monthly magazines. They tend to arrive together in an overwhelming embarrassment of reading riches. And they never fail to inspire me. Not every article, no, but usually at least one that has me rapt and joyous (the dryly hilarious "Findings"* in Harpers or depressed (the amazing writing power of Edward Hoagland, in his current essay, "Curtain Calls*) in a good way -- the way that the colorful universe of books in Barnes & Noble makes me want to write, too, and also stops me dead in my literary tracks. *

From "Findings" this month: Australian researchers were trying to solve the problem of humans outliving their eyes; scientists found that brownsnout spookfish grow mirrors to reflect light into the retinas. Gu Gu, a panda in China, bit his third human... Physicists looking for gravitational waves may have discovered instead the noise of space-time breaking down into individuals grains; these quantum convulsions, said one physicist, would confirm the theory that the universe is a blurry holographic projection of a distand two-dimensional plane. .. Coca-Cola is not an efective spermicide."

 And Hoagland's essay made me envision my own inevitable "twilight years" and death in a strangely comforting pastoral and amoral (in the best sense) way. His writing is alive with metaphor and simile: "Believing in life, I believe in death as well, and at seventy-six look forward to my immersion in the other plane of the see-saw also."

He has little patience for regret: "Memories, thank goodness -- not omissions -- make me wistful... As for the graph of my behavior zigzagging behind me through my places of residence like a snail's faintly luminescent trail, arrogant, dunderheaded embarrassments do prickle some of my memories, but no indelibly shameful acts." _________________________________________________

 In other news, my brother the professor joined Facebook. And a Friday night with A. drinking wine at Cercle Rouge and later Oscar included the horror of a sloppy-drunk possibly retarded and dubiously groomed stranger fingering my iPhone at the bar. Note to self: carry anti-bacterial wipes in purse at all times.

Backyard Snow

Mohawks and Lemon Drops

Wow, it's been a while. No wonder I have exactly zero members of the Kitlab Club even though it sounds fun and porny (see left sidebar. Please.) Highlights of this weekend included going to a party (gulp) in Queens (gulp). Yes, I'm very proud to have again gotten not only out of my house but out of the borough. Typically, that involves effort and lots of money and a plane ride. This, however, was relatively easy. Jumped on the R train with E. and got off in Forest Hills (I think), walked for what seemed like forever to finally arrive at the wonderful Chinese New Year party of kooky R. and J. (that's them, pictured)

It involved lots of amazing and occasionally scary real Chinese food, a guy with an actual spiky FOOT-HIGH mohawk, a hookah (that happened after we left), some Rock Star game via video (way beyond me) and shots of tequila (how that's appropriate I don't know but it was fun). I do lament the last lemon drop we downed at the club we dropped by just because we couldn't get enough of Queens. At the Lighthouse this week I read aloud for two hours about Java and parallelism and object-oriented programming. Fun! And JUST the cure for a tequila-lemon drop hangover.

All this tech reading is going to my head and making me a bigger (and more annoying) nerd than I was. I'm not a geek (I'm just not that adept at the tech stuff or too lazy to really learn/apply), just a nerd. I love reading about technology, understand at least 5.3% of what I read, can use pretty much NONE of it except for cocktail party chatter or this blog... I even read tech blogs, but not even the cool ones that would stand me in good stead with my geeky friends and colleagues but the more obscure ones (today it was Life in the Startup Lane, stumbled upon through the vagaries of Web wandering). I like that the fellow is from my original hometown of Boulder. Oh, it's all so random. Goodbye, John Updike.

Happy MLK Day

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Hey, and I live on King Street! How cool is that? Okay, kinda cool, once a year. Allow me to enjoy it.

I'm growing weary of winter. In my head, I'm in a sun-dappled garden planting peonies. It's 75 degrees and I can hear bees. In reality, I'm boiling eggs and preparing to tackle paperwork. Last week, I performed Step 1 in my new cleaning regimen: put all paper (everything) in a paper bag. Put the bag under the desk and leave it. Step 2 (which took a full week to get to) is actually going through all the paper in the bag. Brilliant. Painless. So far.