We finished our taxes online but had to mail some supplementary forms, so we fed the googly-eyed mailbox before lunch.
We walked over to Park Slope and had a giant sandwich at Bierkraft. Foreground: Defiant Porter, pulled from a cask.
On the way home, we stopped at Park Delicatessen for some Valentine’s Day flowers, then had a very nice piece of salmon for dinner.
Maggie writes:
THIS is currently outside of our apartment, making one helluva racket. I don’t think I’ve actually seen or heard the word “cesspool” in serious context since David Macaulay’s Castle.
Ate crab. Maggie and I decided to go big and stay at home for Christmas dinner. The menu: snow crab legs, artichokes, and sweet potato fries. A duet of Hitachino Nest ales complemented our meal.
Brewed beer. This one is an imperial wheat stout. I made a yeast starter for the first time, which created such a vigorous fermentation that it blew the stopper off the top of the carboy on the first night. The blowoff tube I rigged up to handle the excess CO2 provided quality entertainment for two days straight… if you’re a fan of fart jokes, that is.
Raced Buddy. I had a lovely New Years in frigid New Hampshire with Maggie’s family. In spite of the temperature, I wanted to spend a little time in the wide open spaces of rural New England so I went out with Buddy out a couple of times. We raced him up the driveway in near-zero temperatures—while it’s humbling to be beaten by a dog, it’s perhaps even more humbling to have to catch one’s breath for a solid ten minutes after the defeat.
I admit it, I was one of those people who made sarcastic comments when the first camera phones came out several years ago. At the time, it felt like an arranged marriage between two uncomplementary technologies. Many “Nuts and Gum, Together at Last” jokes were made.
At any rate, I was wrong. I use my phone to take pictures all the time. What I love about camera phone pictures is that they’re the exact opposite of digital camera photos in so many ways: where the latter are planned, high-quality, and of events deemed memorable, the camera phone captures only the spontaneous stuff I come across every day.
coffi yes ready today (My office)
Digger Phelps Ct. (Beacon, NY)
Parsley Plus: Cleans with the Power of Parsley (Met Foods, Vanderbilt Ave.)
I’ve taken to sitting on the floor. The book on the floor is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, a book I’m told is extremely insightful and influential. About every four months or so I’ll pull it off the shelf with the intention of reading it, but I never get very far.
I sit on the floor because it got really fucking hot last week, hot enough to swear. Our window air conditioner does the best it can, but on the warmest days we usually find ourselves loitering in the four foot radius the little Frigidaire is able to cool reliably. Those days usually result in a lot of sleepless nights, which I’ve had my share of lately.
If you’d told me five years ago that the primary means of cooling my apartment at age 28 would be a fan on a chair… well, honestly, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that.
You might remember last year’s attempt at fire escape gardening, which yielded dozens of thick-skinned, pugnacious little cherry tomatoes. They were the product of their gritty urban upbringing, to be sure. We moved tomatoes to the roof this year (so far so good) and use the fire escape for a few houseplants that could use some direct sun in the morning.
A few weeks ago Cheeks decided that sleeping on top of these boxes was luxury living. Her residence here meant that the top of these odd storage boxes was quickly matted with cat hair. So, she got a towel today. There’s something comforting in watching a twelve year old cat pick out a totally new place to snooze. Granted, she’s not doing anything differently, but hey, it’s never too late for a change of scenery.
