More Summer So Far

Crap, summer's almost over, isn't it? I'm going to resist the urge to open my work email on my home computer. I've already slept in late, watched excessive amounts of cartoons, and sat about the apartment in my own filth like an aged cat--I'm not about to start being responsible just yet.

Maybe I could read more Game of Thrones for an hour or four...

I did make it back down to New Jersey to pick berries, but there were no berries to be found. I did see an excessive amount of little wild rabbits, though. Appropriate, since I re-read "Watership Down" this summer.

Oh, and R sent me the pictures of our July hike in Wawayanda State Park!

I'm never going to wear the band shirts I own to an actual performance, so here I am wearing one out in the wilderness where no one can see me buy the bears. And bears are into dubstep anyway, so who cares what they think?

The BF and I had some time off together, so we took Metronorth up to New Haven, Connecticut. Metronorth is pretty fun. You get to leave from Grand Central Station, not Penn Station, and if you don't know what that means, let's just say there's a reason the evil aliens in "The Avengers" trashed the beautiful, elegant edifice of Grand Central instead of the dank, dystopian tunnels of Penn Station.

Aliens: "We're destroying this!" Everyone else: "Good."

Yale University is in New Haven. The campus and its immediate surroundings are quite nice, a bit like Cobble Hill with the little restaurants and bookstores and outrageously priced fair trade clothing and accessories. The rest of New Haven is like Spokane but with slightly better-dressed pedestrians.

I don't have pictures of them. The BF was camera-master that day and he took over 100 pictures of buildings, but nary a one of unfashionable townies.

Yes, so much more interesting than that guy with the top hat and the feather vest.

So that is the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which the BF would have me tell you was designed by Gordon Bunshaft and completed in 1963. I would make a crude joke about the architect's last name, and was thinking up a pretty good one, but then we went inside and--

Guh...

Beinecke Library is this hollow white cube. In the center of the cube is a smaller glass cube full of books. 

Spu...

The building is make of these slabs of marble that are thin enough for sunlight to leak through, but there are no windows or skylights. 
 

It's a little like being underwater.

The rare and ancient tomes, which include a complete and intact Gutenberg Bible, are protected from excessive light, heat and humidity in their glittering glass tower. 

nuh...!

There are these cool Mad Men-era seating areas with low leather chairs and marble tables, where you can sit at the foot of the tower and just stare up at the books resting behind the glass, like the jewelry box of some enormous, nerdy Titan.

I'm spent.

I don't want to read them. I don't even want to touch them. I just want to sit there forever in their presence.

Mostly because they're classics, so they'll be really slow and boring and have those "s" letters that look like "f" letters, which give me a headache. And that right there is why I'll never be a classics scholar. What else is going on in New Haven?

Smash cut!

The BF took this picture from across the street. As soon as he lowered the camera, I disappeared inside without even waiting for him to join me. When he finally made it across and came inside, I was already handing my money over and ready to leave. I found a Catwoman book. It made me happy.

Speaking of cats, the BF and I went to the Brooklyn Museum at MY request (gasp!) to see the Divine Feline exhibit in the Egyptian wing. It's a small exhibit in a side gallery, featuring cats and lions from their permanent collection.

awww...

The BF liked the bronze mother cat with kittens the best.

AWWW...

 You can't see it in this picture, but that little one looking into Mom's face has an open mouth. He's meowing at her! It's so cute, I can't stand it!

I went to the dentist yesterday and got my teeth spackled. Then I went to the farmer's market in Grand Army Plaza, because I'd hate to have a summer where I didn't go at least once to the biggest farmer's market in Brooklyn. But I had to make the trip into Manhattan to the Union Square farmer's market, because nobody in Grand Army Plaza was selling purple potatoes.

I got to Union Square just as the vendors were starting to load up their trucks and take down tents. But most were still open and about three booths in, I spotted a laminated sign with some authentic frontier gibberish name for what we in Hawaii call Okinawan sweet potatoes. A heavily bearded man with a waxed gray mustache took my money and said, "You're looking happy." I replied, "It's because I found my purple potatoes!"

I cooked some last night with fancy purple and yellow carrots in a curry paste I bought at Pearl River. The curry paste kind of covered up the flavor of the funny-colored roots, but I have lots more of each and will make many delicious dishes with them.

And when I go back to work tomorrow, I will sit on the lawn in the rose garden and eat cold purple potatoes and purple carrots from my pink Hello Kitty lunchbox. Like a proper grown-up.

GreenerPenny and knitted beings

My first job in New York was working as an editorial intern at Plenty Magazine. I'm not linking to it because it's no longer there; print and digital magazine are both gone, vanished into the Interwebz-ether (Intetherwebz?), a victim of the Great Economic Collapse of 2008, along with hope, the taxes of my firstborn son, unicorns, rainbows, and any modicum of dignity I may have had leftover from my days as the Warlord of Honolulu Weekly (to the right, Rachel holding court with my fellow newspaper folk; note how everyone's head is turned toward me, except Travis, who was punished for his transgression).

Now I pass out condoms. More to come on that fun development in my life later this week.

Plenty was the first and only professional magazine I've ever worked for. Mostly I wrote blog posts on the Daily Green Bit section of the Web magazine about how to be more environmentally friendly in your daily life: apple picking, bird counting, urban foraging, chemically safe cookware, composting, wind power for your home, flower power for your dog--if it was hip amongst the hippies in late oh-eight, I was on it like Blue Bonnet.

Savor that last sentence. That's why I used to get paid to do this.

I'm writing all of this as an introduction to my good friend and fellow environmentalist-feminist (environfeminist?), Mindy Pennybacker. She was my mentor at Plenty, a fellow island girl in this savage city, and she taught me everything I now know about blogging and almost everything I know about the environmental movement. She didn't teach me how to water the garden with leftover bathwater, that was me mum, but she did teach me about industrial chemicals and hormone disrupters in baby bottles. Oh, the times we had!

Those who have been following my life more closely that I'd be comfortable knowing about may remember when I completed the acquisition of my dowry. Well, that lovely table and chairs came from Mindy, who couldn't take them with her when she moved back to the islands. And now I finally get to repay her, in a manner of speaking, by linking to her website GreenerPenny.com and encouraging everyone who reads this to become a fan of GreenerPenny.com on Facebook. Because if you love da earfs, you love GreenerPenny.

Right now she has a post up on the FB site about the Union Square Farmers Market in New York City. So I'm going to sync up our websites by posting my own pictures of the Union Square Farmers Market. Make of them what you will. Happy writing, Mindy!