Almost like a real job

Fourth weekday in a row at the work/study, slogging through the payment request form again. Leftover gazpacho for lunch. Yum.

Wha' happen?

Yesterday was so awesome, I paid for it today by sleeping all day.

And having a slightly unstable digestive situation.

Nice.

I sent John out for some fresh air, and not surprisingly he came back with a small fortune's worth of cds and full of Chipotle.

Oh yeah, married almost five years and the fire is definitely still burning.

Guitar heroes

The menu: hummus and pita washed down with hand-blended margaritas; gazpacho with a garnish of yogurt, paprika oil and home-made croutons; tarragon lobster salad on buttered farm-baked buns with spiced sweet potato fries; cupcakes in chocolate with chocolate icing or blueberry and apricot with cream cheese frosting. Plus copious amounts of wine.

The entertainment: watching these evenly matched contenders duke it out.

Kitty love

I love you, kitties.

Mail from hell

At the work/study gig again today, working on some crazy mailing. Why can't people follow directions? Alternately, why can't other people establish a policy and stick to it?

A task that would have taken an hour for someone not obsessed with doing the right thing and doing it well took me all afternoon, then I capped off the day with a little getaway to midtown's saddest post office.

And I'm going back tomorrow!

Here's the pretty lunch I brought today.

Grant muffin

That's what my favorite co-worker at my work/study gig called me today, after I spent most of the day up to my eyeballs in a final payment request form.

In celebration of my new nickname, I walked down Fifth Avenue to Sephora and bought myself a Benefit lipstick in "Rocket Pop."



If you can't tell from the image, it's "cream/ muted terracotta rose."

Purty grant muffin mouth.

Differences of opinion

That's what Victoria's Secret and I have, on two points:

1) What shape breasts come in.

2) What constitutes "full coverage".

Grrr.

Potty painting

Before the Sloan show, we had dinner nearby at Alias. It was really tasty and fresh, and they had the coolest hand-painted bathroom. (I wish I could credit the artist; I searched high and low for a signature, but couldn't find one.) When we buy a place, I'm going to do this, too. Possibly in every room.

How I spent my OCD Sunday afternoon

Now, don't get me wrong. I like tedious little chores much more than the next girl (got any coins that need sorting and rolling?) but this one made my fingers hurt a bit.

(Thanks to John for taking the picture, and for doing such a great job cleaning the living room!)

Sepia-toned booze

I was out with M and Lala and Jordan today when we passed this block-long ad for St-Germain, which is my new favorite form of alcohol.

I've been a big fan of elderflower cordial since right after high school, when I drank it (non-alcoholic) mixed with mineral water in England. (I remember bringing a bottle back to Houston and being questioned by customs officers until they realized it wasn't alcoholic.) IKEA carries it in their grocery section, right next to the lingonberry syrup; I've most recently picked it up at Kalustyan's, where it is not cheap.

Last month, while we were waiting in the interminable line for the bar on the Met's roof, I overheard the girls behind me discussing the cocktail choices. While appraising the Yellow Dog recipe, one mentioned that "St-Germain is, you know, the elderflower liqueur."

I most certainly did not know. I had been tearing out and throwing away the obnoxiously thick paper ads from magazines for quite a while. They really should put that it's elderflower-flavored in the ads. I'm sad that I could have been drinking it before and wasn't.

And yes, the bottle really does look like that.

PdP Summer Concert Series, Pt.2: Sloan

Golden Dogs opened; they were really cute and very indie pop in a way that is no longer very fashionable: a four piece with boy-girl vocal harmonies that doesn't deliberately lend itself to dance remixing. They were lovely, and set the very casual tone for the evening.



Sloan, Sloan, Sloan. Or, as the audience says: Slohhhh-ohhhhhn. These guys are really incredibly polished, but can approach a show with a lot of spontaneity. I guess that's where nine full-length albums will get you. I've not yet fallen completely in love with the new album, though, and even less so the second most recent one, so about half the show was sort of eh. The new record was just released June 10, and I had the feeling it was unfamiliar to most of the audience. I was surprised, because when I saw Sloan in 2004, the audience new every word to every song from the album they were promoting (Action Pact) although it had not yet been released stateside.

This did not stop me from buying a t-shirt, or from singing along passionately with "Deeper than Beauty," which is one of my favorite songs. Period.

In the afternoon before the show, I was trying to remember how I started listening to Sloan. I might have heard a song on KOOP, but I think it's more likely I just saw the cover of One Chord to Another at Waterloo and thought it looked cool.

For a very long time, I was the only person I knew who even knew who they were, and even now, I think I'm the only person I know who really, really likes them. I would almost say I love them, meaning the music, because I have no idea which one is which. But the songs are so, so good, and I have a lot of memories associated with them, memories that are just mine, not memories of places or people or events, just of being a certain age and loving a song.

Dosa: did it

Mmm. It was beautiful today, and I finally made it back down to Washington Square Park again to look for the dosa guy.

Found him!

I'm also making headway on Jumpa Lahiri's new book, Unaccustomed Earth. The stories seem more subtle, somehow, than what I remember of Interpreter of Maladies. I want more of each narrator so far, and I think it's fair to say that's a good thing.

Here's a picture:



Yep, the building diagonal from us is almost gone.

Ankle rag

The latest fashion trend? This is either why I love this city, or why I hate this city. Sometimes I can't tell the difference.

Treasure Boat

Before.



After.

That's our friend Greg in the background. The hand in the "before" shot is John's. Not pictured but also participating: Jim and Lam.

PdP Summer Concert Series, Pt.1: Sigur Rós

We have tickets to nine or ten concerts this summer. Sigur Rós eased us into it tonight with reserved seating at the Grand Ballroom at the Hammerstein.



How cute was this guy? The opener, Helgi Hrafn Jónsson, also plays trombone with the band.



Jonsi started things off singing into his guitar pickup during "svefn-g-englar".



After a couple songs, the marching band arrived to rock "sé lest" and stayed around for the rest of the show.



The regular set ended with "gobbledigook" and a confetti canon.

Sex and the City: eh

It wasn't horrible. Parts were funny. Parts were, um, retarded. Because I was conned into getting a diet Coke the size of my head, I had to get up and go to the bathroom right around New Year's Eve, and I was not at all bothered to miss a bit or to disturb everyone else in the theater. That eh.

It was nice to go see it with M, who I haven't seen much of in the past few months. Since you can't talk during a movie, we talked after, over dinner and then over too many drinks.

The tiniest smidgen of understanding

Okay, so M. Panique did a little artistic modeling for me, and I see why this happens. I see how some men might see this as an alternative to rearranging themselves. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for taking up more than one body's worth of space. So say I, anyway.

Dickwad behavior

This sort of behavior is not unusual on the subway, but Mr. Friendly here had his knees open wider than any numnut I've ever seen. So I decided to document it. For the record, he also smelled bad, but this behavior knows no race, class, age or odor barriers.

I asked John to demonstrate sitting naked in a chair for me, so I could understand whether this was in anyway defensible from an anatomical perspective, but he has thus far refused. He says maybe tomorrow.

And you may ask yourself...

David Byrne rode past me on his bike today, right in front of the Dick Blick (no, really! that's what it's called!) store on Bond Street.

And I mean, right past me.

And I mean, right in front of the store.

On the sidewalk.

NOT COOL, DAVID BYRNE. I know that block is all wonky cobblestones, but it is NOT COOL to ride a bike on the sidewalk. There is already enough crap fouling up the pedestrian flow of this city without tossing vehicular traffic into the mix. You looked, good though.

On to another of my pet peeves: New York drugstores. Apparently this is also one of Andrew Cuomo's pet peeves. I just want to know how Duane Reade dodged this bullet.

Welcome to the jungle

28th between Sixth and Seventh

Instead of picking up the R at 28th and Broadway when my workshop let out this afternoon, I moseyed west two blocks, through the flower district. There was a cool breeze blowing (I know! I was shocked, too!) and the smell of all these plants (potted, not cut) reminded me of Maui. Sniff.

When I reached Eighth Avenue, I turned south. I stopped at Jamba Juice for a sixteen ounce Mango Mantra, which turns out to be the perfect snack for me. Sweet and fruity, cool and refreshing, with the same calorie count (160) as a measly three oreos. The only downsides I can see are 1) it costs ALMOST FIVE DOLLARS and 2) it left me full and burping tropically when I got to my destination.

Which was Brooklyn Industries' Chelsea outpost. I saw a girl on the subway yesterday with a great bag, and now I have one too. It's really enormous, the kind of enormous that gets you dirty looks on the train, but I like a shoulder bag and the other two styles in this colorway (the feather one) got all up under my armpits. And we can't have that.

Aw, yeah

Northwest corner of 55th and Ninth

There's thunder and lightning, which bodes well for a cooler tomorrow. It's too late for today, though. I'm in a workshop all week, and I'm just embarrassed about how sloppy I was when I got there this morning. Sloppy and smelly. And damp. Have you got the general idea?

My vote will go to...

whoever can make it not be one million degrees tomorrow.

Hillary, I'm so sorry it didn't work out.

No place like...

la grande pomme when it feels like 100 degrees.

NYC welcomes us home with the year's merde-iest weather; merci beaucoup, New York!

I'm working on the Maui posts; they'll be up in the next few days.

RFLDoT, Pt. 2

I won't bore you with the details of the travel home. I slept most of the way, just like the trip out, which was just fine by me.

The image above is from an example of batik by Phil Soo that was on displayed at the Kahului airport on Maui.

It's so hard... to say good-bye

So there I was, relaxing at the Lahaina Banyan Court, writing my postcards and enjoying the breeze off the water and shade of this one enormous tree.

Then I overheard the twitchy teenagers gathered around the bench across the way comparing stories about scoring (drugs) this morning.

And then I just wanted a drink.

Cold and hunger, more cold

It was a long drive today, up to Haleakala National Park. We stopped at the Leleiwi outlook, but all we could see was clouds rolling up the sides of the crater.



When we stepped out of the car at the summit visitor's center, it was like being on another planet.



It was freezing cold, incredibly windy, and there was no oxygen in the air.

When we got back to Ka'anapali, it was only a little better. It was windy and cool, and we hung out at the pool for as long as we could, but eventually gave up and got ready for dinner. We headed back to Paia, on the north shore along the way to the Road to Hana, to Mama's Fish House. It was delicious, well worth the drive back across the island.

Survivor Oheo Gulch

The road to Hana was long and winding (sing it with me) but thanks to drugs and more drugs (thanks again, John's co-worker!) I was calm and nausea-free.

We hightailed it past Hana to Kipahulu, the coastal area of Haleakala National Park. After a lunch of pb&j, chips and water we picked up at Safeway in Lahaina, we moseyed off down the short trail to the Seven Sacred Pools, which were far, far less interesting than what was happening where the surf was coming in.





The breaking waves created little tidal pools in the lava outcrop, trapping tiny and not-so-tiny fishes. It felt very perilous to be in the splash zone down there, but it was probably perfectly safe. After a while, we turned around and headed back to the trailhead to start our hike up the Pipiwai Trail.

I'm not going to lie to you. I wasn't sure we would make it. And by we I mean John and I, because Jim and Sommer were just fine. About halfway there, we found ourselves here:



This should have been serene and peaceful, as the towering bamboo rustled and tocked in the upper level breezes. But it felt more like this:



Obviously, we lived to tell the tale. Was it worth it, you ask?



I'd say so.

Rub you the right way

All four of us got massages today at Spa Grande at Grand Wailea Resort. This place was gorgeous, but was in a completely different (cooler) weather system than our hotel. After a lunch of fish tacos in Kihei, we headed back to Wailea for the beach, which is wider and softer, but shorter, than the Hyatt's beach at Ka'anapali.



See the baby splashing in the surf with mom looking on? TOTALLY NAKED. And I don't even think they were European!

Can you find John and Sommer in this picture? Can you spot the bazillion tiny flying ants we couldn't get away from? They didn't bite, but it was weird, so we eventually packed it in and headed back to West Maui.

Under the sea

Well, we were doing snorkel, so it was more like being halfway under the sea.



Pencil urchin, wedged in coral.



School of fish, stripey ones and black ones.



Four spot wrasses on the bottom, saddle wrasses up in the rocks.



One turtle, floating.



Another turtle, this one missing a front flipper, being cleaned by cleaner wrasses.



The weirdest thing we saw: a giant blob of octopus ink just floating in the water. Our intrepid guide, Suzzy, really lost her cool over this; it was apparently a pretty uncommon occurrence. We also saw some octopuses in the crevices in the coral, sighted by our co-snorkeler Deb.

I could snorkel every day. I just loved this. Big thanks to Suzzy from Maui Snorkel Tours for a great experience!

Our hotel has penguins

The Hyatt Regency Maui has actually successfully bred these African Black-Footed penguins. Mom and Dad are "Waddles" and "George," and their offspring is "Buddha." They're commonly referred to as Jackass penguins, which I remembered when I heard them braying away on our first full day.

Which we spent entirely at the pool.


A very full day, indeed.