Urban Foraging

Uh-oh. Almost everyone who wished me a happy birthday last week said something about my blog. I think I have to start posting again.

My latest adventure in urban foraging is the best one yet. I've found apples, seashells, vacuum cleaners, dishes, and books on the stoops of Brooklyn, but a couple of weeks ago, my stubborn refusal to make eye contact with other pedestrians paid off big when I found an iPod on the ground.

I never wanted an iPod. On the other hand, I never particularly wanted a tablet, and then I got one for Christmas a while back and now I can't imagine what I'd do without it. How else would I be able to watch cartoons AND scroll through my tumblr feed at the same time? Same for my smart phone: what would I do if I couldn't take upside-down videos of  interesting birds I encounter? (Is there a way to flip videos like you flip regular pictures? Because my phone never warns me that I'm shooting upside down, I just have to find out later when I upload the footage to my computer.)

I got an iPod connector from the dollar store across the street from work, spent two hours downloading iTunes onto my rickety old laptop (and uninstalling all the useless toolbars and crap that came with it), hit "restore factory settings," and "Pete's iPod" became "Rachel's iPod."

Poor Pete--hanging out in Brooklyn, having a good time, and just like that, his brand new iPod pops out of his pocket and into the hands of a stranger who replaces his collection of carefully curated 80s dance music with 13 hours of "Star Talk" with Neil DeGrass Tyson.

But enough about Pete! Rachel's iPod also features every episode of "Welcome to Night Vale," and several hours of local music from Brooklyn's hottest up-and-comers. Two years into hosting a radio show and I've finally gotten around to listening to all of those CDs our guest bands leave in the station. And they're SUPER good! They must be amazing live!

Also, I've discovered this new thing, where you stick your headphones in and listen to music instead of paying attention to other people or traffic on the way to work. Have other people thought of this? It's pretty amazing. I haven't been hit by a single bike yet, either. Let THEM get out of MY way.

I've gone too far. This may be too much power for me.

Urban Foraging: Lord of the Flies edition

Wow, if the title of this post was literal, that would suck on so many levels. I'm the one with glasses. It wouldn't end well for me.

It's amazing to me what people throw out in Cobble Hill. I can understand ditching a couple of books on the sidewalk, and if your furniture gets broken beyond your ability to MacGyver it together, there are plenty of other MacGyver-esque people out there who deserve a shot at glory. But this?

How awesome is my new conch shell? Seriously, who gets rid of this? It takes up less room than a space heater and if there's a better object with which to defend yourself in close-range, limited arsenal combat, that object is probably illegal in every state except Arkansas.

I found this on my way to the laundromat today, sitting on a stoop next to the third Harry Potter book, so my only explanation for my incredible urban foraging luck is that the wizards gave it to me. I can't decide whether I should put it out on my fire escape or sleep with it in my bed. That would actually be really uncomfortable and likely make my teddy bear super jealous, but that's how much I love this conch shell.

The spirits of the sidewalk have seen fit to bless me with gifts beyond measure, and yeah, the writer looked out from her studio-plus-alcove and saw that it was good.

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!

Urban Foraging

Here's a tip from an island girl: forage. Nothing tastes as good as the food you find lying on the ground. City dwellers can get in on this action, too, according to the New York Times, which I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't spied this baby on my morning walks to the office. As soon as these apples on Lexington and Classon are ripe, I'm'a gonna have me one. The immunity I'll get from ingesting whatever it's collected from the Brooklyn environment will probably cover my flu vaccination for the coming winter.

I never knew that I liked apples until I moved to New York. Hawaii has some fabulous fruits--mangos, papayas, lychee, bananas--but certain things need cold weather to thrive: tulips, apples, grunge rock, and Vikings all need a good, hard frost to function properly. The only apples we ever got in Hawaii when I was growing up were green ones, yellow ones, and red ones; or, if you want to get technical, Granny Smiths, Golden Deliciouses, and Red Deliciouses (Deliciai?). They were soft, dry, mealy, and if they came from the cafeteria at Naalehu Elementary, kinda salty, too. Don't ask me why.

But my first autumn here, I had a sample of a McIntosh apple from the Union Square Farmers Market. It was blissfully crispy and tasty and all other combinations of 's,' 't,' 'p,' and 'ee' you can string together. I was hooked, and also gainfully employed at the time, so I bought every kind of apple from Whole Foods that they offered: Honeycrisps, Paula Reds, Braeburns, Empires--you know what? Just go to the New York Apple Association website. That's what I eated.

I even wrote an article on the Plenty Magazine website about where to go apple picking during the fall, which I can't link to because Plenty folded and landed me in TempLand. Trust me, it was all kinds of awesome. In fact, since you'll never read it, I'll go ahead and say that it revealed the cure for the common cold, the location of the Lost Ark of the Covenant, and what REALLY happened to Mulder on the X-Files.

Prove me wrong. And have a Brooklyn apple.