Manhattan views and hot chocolate.

February 20th, 2008

1. I’m doing a freelancing graphic design job in midtown Manhattan this week, and they gave me an office to use. It’s an ordinary office, but it has a five foot wide by eight foot tall window with a view of Manhattan that is mind-altering. I can see all of Central Park and way up into Harlem. I will try to get some good shots of it and put them up here.

2. For lunch today I grabbed some Japanese food and on my way back to the office I passed the Maison du Chocolat which advertised having hot chocolate. Hooray, I thought. I went it and ordered a small semi-sweet hot chocolate, since I imagined their dark chocolate is pretty bitter. She poured it for me and said, “That’ll be $8.50.” O…kay. This is Maison du Chocolat and they use very good chocolate, so I’ll let the price go. I get upstairs, I eat my lunch and then I try the hot chocolate (that I paid $8.50 for). Let me try to describe it to you – You take a high cocoa content chocolate bar, you melt it into a cup (so far so good), then you add a couple tablespoons of vegetable oil (uh oh) and a healthy sprinkle of horse manure (oh dear), and drink it. The horse manure part is not a joke, it really did have an “earthy” tang to it. It reminded me of the desciption of the most expensive coffee in the world:

Kopi Luwak coffee comes from the Indonesian island of Sumatra, an area well-known for its excellent coffee. Also native to the area is a small civit-like animal called a Paradoxurus. That’s the scientific name, the locals call them luwaks. These little mammals live in the trees and one of their favorite foods is the red, ripe coffee cherry. They eat the cherries, bean and all. While the bean is in the little guy’s stomach, it undergoes chemical treatments and fermentations. The bean finishes its journey through the digestive system, and exits. The still-intact beans are collected from the forest floor, and are cleaned, then roasted and ground just like any other coffee.

Perhaps an animal ate my cocoa beans and the resulting product was made into my hot chocolate. Civet-digested cocoa beans would also explain the price ($8.50).

Addendum on Feb. 22: Here are those pictures of my view.

From the doorway so as to appreciate the size of the window:

view1.jpg

Through the window:

view2.jpg

Closer-upper view through the window, focusing on that tree-carpet area which is Central Park:

view3.jpg

I am sad.

February 18th, 2008

I’ve worked in Flash for a long time. The Actionscript was pretty much always the same. If you wanted a button to go to something, you typed in this:

old.jpg

See? It’s almost a sentence. “On release of the button, go to and play the scene named contact, starting at frame 1.” It was the only damn code I knew. Now in Flash CS3, they’ve changed things SOLELY to make my life harder. Now, to get a button to do the same thing as above, you have to type this:

new.jpg

Why is the word “void” in there? I don’t want to void anything. It says MouseEvent three times. Why? I have to add an EventListener. Huh? I liked my “onRelease” better. But technology soldiers on, sometimes at the expense of designers who like their code to resemble sentences. Alas.

The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

February 15th, 2008

A dog won. I know, shocker. But really, it was a hoot. See, last year a standard poodle was was the winner in the non-sporting group and a poodle won the toy group. This year, same thing. That’s not fair to the other dogs who were showin’ their stuff. So people are fed up with the poodlage. My area apparently was the heckler’s section. We all rooted for anything that wasn’t a poodle. Some guy in the next section yelled, “Poodle!” at one point and the woman in front of me yelled some very unkind things about poodles back. Oh, and as you can expect, dog fanciers are insane. The woman behind me has a yorkshire terrier. She was talking about how her yorkie goes on wine tastings to different wineries and writes a blog about what wine is good. The dog. Has a wine blog. She rates wine. The dog. I’m just making sure you get this.

Oh, I tried the fair trade organic strawberry balsamic truffles and they were not great. I mean, the strawberry part and the chocolate part and even the balsamic part were delicious, but it had a creamy center and that made it too rich and gloppy. But I’d be willing to try another company’s strawberry balsamic truffles if they didn’t have a creamy, goopy center.

Another chocolate show! Stuff more chocolate in my gaping maw! I am a hellmouth! For chocolate!

February 11th, 2008

For those of you whose mothers are not art historians and did not drag you to every museum in the western world to look at paintings painted by people who are very, very dead right now, a hellmouth is this:

http://www.krepcio.com/vitreosity/archives/screen-hellmouthDET.jpg

It’s a mouth that opens to hell and people fall in. But in my case, it was chocolate.

So Snorth and I went to the Palisades Mall (greatest mall EVAR) for a chocolate show that was being held there. We figured that even if we didn’t buy anything, the entrance fee goes to help developmentally disabled people, so good karma points for us there. But we did buy things, quite a few things. Not only were there chocolatiers, there was wine people and cheese people and baked-goods people. We were walking around and I saw a guy selling maple-syrup products. And he was spinning maple syrup into cotton candy, so hell, I had to get that. It was good, but my brain kept saying, “This is cotton candy! This should taste like incredibly fake raspberry! And be blue! I don’t understand!” I think I like maple candy better. But the best part for me was at the very end. I saw an older woman walking around eating a pickle on a stick, and I accosted her and demanded she tell me where she acquired this pickle. She told me at the end of the row, so I zipped down to the end of the row and sure enough, one of my most beloved things greeted me, a Lower East Side jewish pickle vendor. I was in heaven. I made little squealing noises while I made my pickle purchases (new pickles for my mom, sauerkraut for my dad, pickled tomatoes for me). I later noticed the chocolate-covered pickles they were selling and was slightly appalled and a little intrigued, but I had run out of money and so (probably wisely) did not purchase one.

Let me explain. My father grew up in New York in the 30s and 40s, so he is all about the bialies and knishes and pickles and other Eastern European immigrant food. Every so often he gets the cravings, so we drive down to the Lower East Side and pick up an insane amount of pickled goodness from one of the vendors and then the Buick smells of brine and vinegar for a week. Once, we went down near Passover. Passover, for those of you that don’t know, has horseradish playing a big role in it. Outside the pickle vendor was a man wearing a Vietnam-era gas mask. He was standing in front of what looked like a small wood chipper and he was pushing horseradish roots into the wood chipper and putting the final product in jars. I thought he was crazy until the wind shifted. I was standing a good ten feet away and the air, it BURNED. Through tearing eyes and drippy nose, I silently apologized to gas-mask-man for mocking his headgear. And I had a new appreciation for pepper spray. Owie owie.

Oh, and I did buy some chocolate at the chocolate show. Organic, fair trade strawberry-balsamic truffles. I haven’t tried them yet, but I’ll tell you if they’re good or not.

Octoberfest picture.

February 10th, 2008

I keep telling people about this picture I saw online of a guy at Octoberfest in Munich who:

1) was on a ladder and

2) was playing a tuba with one hand and his foot

3) so he could hold his beer stein in his other hand.

Did I mention he was was on a ladder? I tell people about this picture all the time, and thanks to the wonderful world of the internet, it has been found:

octoberfest2k7_017.jpg

That is a devotion to beer I cannot even fathom.

Similiar but different: if you’re ever in Las Vegas, go to the Hofbrauhaus. Seriously. It’s phenomenal. Cricket, Cricket’s sister and I ate there when we were in Vegas and it was terrific food and the whole staff was German (we were served by Karin). They played that “Ricola!!” alp horn and an accordian and everyone wore leiderhosen – absolutely terrific.

What’s that sound? Oh, it’s the sound of me being AWESOME.

February 6th, 2008

That’s my nice way of saying I did some nice graphic design this week. Meet sloth:

sloth.jpg

I did a drawing back in the day of this sloth and then gave the drawing to a friend. I scanned it in before I gave it to her, but it was a low-res scan. I then redid it in Illustrator with colors and I think it came out nicely. I put it on some porcelain dishes for wall hangings. Next, a giraffe. I’m going to do a couple of tall/long animals and have a series. Very exciting.

A big weekend. One might call it Giant. Also, spam.

February 4th, 2008

I receive a great deal of spam on this website. These are the titles of the last four spammy messages:

Kyjasghg

Ytnfskvu

Wwxukkrf

Bwhjeawz

I feel like they’re not trying anymore. It looks like someone passed out and tipped face-forward onto their keyboard. It looks like a drunk guy typing in Welsh. Stop that.

So, Giants. First, I saw They Might Be Giants on Saturday night. I wasn’t supposed to see them, I didn’t have a ticket. Cricket was going with his best friend Pabby. However, Pabby’s wife went into labor the night before and Cricket couldn’t find anyone else to go, so I got Pabby’s ticket. Don’t get me wrong, I love They Might Be Giants. I just don’t care for live music very much. It’s loud, people are blocking my view, I have to put on pants to go out, blah blah blah.

(Funny addition: Pabby’s baby was born at 4:00 in the afternoon and my first reaction was, “Good! Now he can go to the concert at 8:00!” Cricket had to explain to me that no, he can’t. I have little to no motherly instinct, so it never occurred to me that he should spend the rest of the day with the woman who just pushed the fruit of his loins out into the world.)

So I went to the concert. It was lovely to see They Might Be Giants again, they were my first concert when I was seventeen. They sang several songs I could sing along to, so that was fun. I forgot how much I liked them. Now I’ve been listening to them nonstop for two days. It’s like reuniting with an old friend.

The next day was the Super Bowl. I went to my friend M’s apartment in Brooklyn to watch the game and eat a festive medley of cuisine including homemade jalepeno poppers (excellent, with beer batter, num num). I decided to root for the New York Giants because I had seen They Might Be Giants in New York City the night before and it seemed like there was a theme going. I don’t really give a crap about football, so that seemed like a good enough reason. We made a valiant attempt to watch the game (“They’re flinging the spheroid! Huzzah!”) but by halftime it became a brutal chore for many of us. Two members of the party left during the first half to go play pool. Yeah, we were a devoted footballin’ crowd. Then M’s girlfriend (who had baked cupcakes with green icing to look like the field and other cupcakes with the team’s logos – delicious and pertinent, both things I like in my dessert items) insisted we watch Spike’s halftime show, which was an egg and ham eating contest. It was horrifying. I had to look away from the screen repeatedly. There was a guy eating the ham (I think he was the winner after snorking down SEVEN POUNDS of ham in however many minutes) who had honey glaze and sweat all over his face. He was jumping up and down while shoveling the ham in, oh, it was bad. I blame Cablevision for this. If we had received Animal Planet we would have been watching the Puppy Bowl, but no, I had to watch bloated freaks inhaling food in a way that is NOT RIGHT. Shortly after that, Cricket and I headed for home in order for me to catch the special episode of House (which was excellent, Mira Sorvino was on it, good stuff). It was a good weekend. And yay for my team with the winning. Whoo hoo.

Will Smith and then some more Will Smith.

January 28th, 2008

I’ve been inundated with the Fresh Prince recently. I saw I Am Legend last week, and then I saw The Pursuit of Happyness Saturday night. A lotta Smith, people. First, I Am Legend. It’s a great movie, up until it isn’t anymore, which is about twenty-five minutes from the end. But up until then, awesome. It’s very similiar to Castaway, because it’s just Will talking to his dog (who is named Samantha, but I would have been ecstatic if her name was Wilson. How freakin’ cool would that be?) for two hours. Oh, he also talks to mannequins and the badly-animated vampire-creatures that are animated badly. Also, badly animated. I mean, c’mon people, it’s 2007! They look like they were created around the time The Mummy came out. I’m a total fraidy-cat and I was not afraid. But seeing the shots of Manhattan completely deserted with grass growing everywhere and deer prancing around Times Square* is totally worth the ticket price.

On Saturday I went to a friend’s house. He decided to get a present for himself, and the present was an unreal TV situation. There’s the projector attached to the ceiling that shows movies on the 10′ screen in perfect resolution. And there’s the surround-sound speakers. And the giant comfy couches. It’s like the Sony screening room in his basement. Anyway, we saw The Pursuit of Happyness on the screen and here’s the problem: it’s a depressing movie (uplifting story, my hindquarters), but on the giant screen with the killer sound, it’s just that much more depressing. It was IMAX-sized depressing. I have decided that if I go over to his house, I will only watch chipper movies because I’m still bummed out. If you want to, see The Pursuit of Happyness. But don’t blame me if you walk around with a mopey face for days afterwards. I take no responsibility for that.

* The deer are badly animated as well. But who cares? They’re eating grass in Times Square, their hooves clippity-cloppitying on the asphalt. The coolness of the scenario outways the poopiness of the CGI.

Pat on the back for me.

January 28th, 2008

I took ever so many photos of my jewelry and purses today. Then I scanned them in as well, so each object gets two pictures, one with natural mid-day sunlight and one with scanner light, which is fluorescent. It gives you a better idea of what the piece looks like.

photos.jpg

See? I accomplished something. I have nine pairs of earrings and six pendants to paint, so we’ll see how those turn out and you’ll see them in the store shortly. Also, wall plates to come soon. Very exciting, people!

Welcome to my new apartment! Wheee!

January 20th, 2008

FINALLY. Pics of the apartment. It’s bright, it’s big, it’s nifty. Enjoy the journey.

entrance.jpg

You open the front door and, voila! You are greeted by twenty feet of window. Granted, it’s creepy institutional window, but window nonetheless. Do not be fooled by how big the room looks. It’s very big, but if you look carefully, you will notice that the wall at the end behind the light fixture is mirrored. The mirrors will be going. Also, that octagonal thing in the right corner? We’ll get to that in a minute.

kitchen2.jpg

That’s the kitchen. It’s BIG. There’s two ovens and a dishwasher (called the Potscrubber 700, I just love that, so futuristic). And a ginormous fridge with the freezer on the bottom (score!). The previous owners built that little wall there and the octagonal thing was a big Formica table in the middle so someone could sit in the kitchen and someone could sit in the dining area and it was like a breakfast nook. A breakfast nook FROM HELL. That wall will be going. As will the octagon. I will not miss them.

kitchen.jpg

Different view of the kitchen. See the Potscrubber 700? Also, please appreciate the Formica FESTIVAL going on in here. Countertops, backsplash, cabinets, even the handles on the cabinets. The previous owners must have had stock in Formica, it’s all over the bathrooms as well. I can’t afford both a new countertop and refacing the cabinets, so I may have to get all DIY and do some stuff to the kitchen myself. Luckily I have handy friends who will join me in my quest to end Formica’s reign of terror in my apartment. We may have some casualties, but we will win this war. For organizing the space and creating a more polished look, a Custom Closet Company such as Bella Systems can provide tailored storage solutions that complement your DIY efforts and elevate your home’s functionality.

hallway.jpg

Now let’s head down the hallway with too many closets to…

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…the guest room! Note: more giant windows. I don’t know precisely what to do with this room yet, maybe library/guest room, maybe office, we’ll see. Oh, and all the carpeting in the whole apartment is going. It’s icky and I am prone to allergies, but underneath is parquet which I’m having sanded and refinished and that will be nice. I’m also planning to add some wool vintage rugs to add some texture to my apartment.

Moving on.

bathroom.jpg

Across the hall is the guest bathroom. This is the major project in the apartment. I’m ripping this whole sucker out. It be hideous and I no likey. The fixtures will be in the same place, but they’ll be white and modern and nice and the Formica will DIE and I will rejoice over its Formica corpse. I may even dance upon it. Check out the 1 Bedroom Apartment for sale in Kileleshwa being sold by Sarabi Realty Group.

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Another view. The tub is six inches tall so you can only cover your kneecaps in water and the tile makes you feel like you’re bathing in a big quilt.

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Now, my bedroom. Again, windows out the wazoo. Also, it has its own bathroom and a freakin’ awesome closet.

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This is the master bathroom. Now, it’s also kind of unattractive, but you have to pick your battles, and since I’m probably the only person who’s going to see it, I don’t really care if it’s kind of unnatractive. Also, the previous owners were a thousand years old, so there are a delightful collection of bars in the shower stall. And they built a seat into it. Truly. They bashed out a chunk of wall in the closet next to it and built a happy little divot into the shower. Niiiiice.

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And this is the super-killer closet with built-in super-killerness. I don’t need a bureau in my bedroom, I can fit all of my clothing items in this puppy. There’s plenty more I could show you in the apartment, like the millions of closets I’ll never use or the water heaters, but I figure you get the idea.