very simple

I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that the kitchen won’t be done before I move in. Among other things, my plumber found out today that his father died, necessitating him traveling to Poland(?) next week. Which sucks. for him certainly more than me. And of course I can’t really complain about it because, really. His dad died. I managed to keep my moment of selfishness about the whole thing between my dad and myself. My dad who keeps trying to get me to postpone for a few weeks, apparently not realizing that…

• …I’ve already shut off my phone, electricity, mail, newspaper, etc. in anticipation of the move
• …I’ve signed a contract with the moving company
• …I scheduled the week off of work months ago, because summertime vacations are at a premium. And everyone else in my group scheduled their vacations around me, just so I could move
• …oh yeah, and my lease is up. I’ve already given notice, and they’ve already hired their own contractors to renovate this place as soon as I move out so that they can rent it as soon as possible. Nevermind that I don’t exactly have another month of rent and mortgage in my budget.
• …I really really want to move already.

Given that I don’t actually cook, I think not having a kitchen for a week or two is not exactly the end of the world. Pretty much everything else is on track to be done, or close to done. Tomorrow the building plumbers are actually changing out the old building pipes, so that’s one more thing done. Oh, and I was up there tonight, so…more pictures:

I went up to the new place on Monday night to check on progress and take a few more pictures. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that everything won’t be done when I move in two weeks (two weeks!!), largely because they won’t be able to come in and measure for countertops until just a few days before the move. And installing the kitchen sink (which I ordered on Sunday) requires the countertops to be there. But almost everything else should be able to get done in time.

So, on Monday, I took these photos (which have already been overshadowed by the fact that they painted the bedroom and the bathroom today):

Oh, and did I mention that I kind of have outdoor space? The apartment actually overlooks the roof of the building lobby, so while I don’t technically have a patio (and I do technically have to climb out the window for access), I have this lovely patio-type area right outside my living room window that only I and the guy in the apartment on the other side have access to:

So this afternoon I left work early because I wasn’t feeling well, but did manage to stop off at PC Richard on my way home, because my plumber needed more information on my stove. So here’s a picture of the back of the stove, which apparently does have some room for the gas line to be hidden behind while the stove is still flush with the wall:

And now for the real prize. On my way home I saw what was quite possibly the ugliest car I have ever seen in my life parked in an outdoor lot on 23rd Street. I had to stop and take a picture. And when I did that, another person stopped and copied me because it was just. so. hideously tacky:

That’s right – it’s a Gucci emblazoned Cadillac Escalade.

My latest computer project is less about the internet and more about family. When I was a kid, my dad had a Super 8 camera that he was pretty addicted to, and filmed tons of movies of my mom, myself and all of their friends when they were young (my personal favorite shot of course is my mother, 8 months pregnant with me, at her baby shower, with a cigarette permanently attached to her hand). About 15 years ago, my mom had all of these films converted to videotape, because we just had no means of watching the old reel-to-reel 8mm film anymore. I, of course, realizing that video is worse than 8mm film for preservation purposes, have meant for some time to take the videos and digitize them. We finally found them over Memorial Day weekend, and one MovieBox purchase later they were all on my computer (or, more realistically, my external backup drive since there’s about 35GBs of material). The picture quality is terrible, and my next purchase will probably involve FinalCut Express or something else like it because iMovie just doesn’t have the tools needed to restore the images.

Anyway, the actual reason for my post. On one section of the tapes was footage from a trip my folks took with me when I was three. My dad’s best friend got a job driving a van across the country, so my parents (being much more carefree back then) grabbed my 3-year-old self and decided to go with him. Some of my first memories involve this trip, but they’re really just fragments, some of which may actually be memories of watching the playback of these films when I was young. So I’m chopping up the video into separate clips because they were all jumbled together, out of order, when they were put on video, and I come across this image from the trip:

And I’m looking at it thinking that it looks really familiar.

And I realize, after a minute, that I was standing in almost the exact same spot, on a balcony in the same hotel, where I stayed when I went to visit my brother this past February:

Almost everything else has changed, but the pool and that building with the angled roof (on the right side of the image) are still there. My parents were obviously in a room much closer to the pool, but otherwise, it’s the same place (other footage also confirms what the balcony looked like, so it was definitely the same place). This past season was that hotel’s last, and they’re tearing it down to build a Four Seasons. It was kind of a dive (a cleaner and more comfortable dive than my brother’s couch, however), but I imagine that 30 years ago it was pretty much the only game in town.

It’s just weird when these little moments from your past and present coincide. I mean, my brother wasn’t even born for 3 more years after the first image, yet he was the reason for my (second) trip.

I have a deep-seated, blinding fear of bug…photographs.

Bugs themselves? no problem (well, except for cockroaches which are just gross on any level). I know how to wield a hard-soled shoe like the best of them. That time that we had a bizarre fly infestation in the country house, leaving me, in my glasses-less almost blind state to step into the shower and to hear them practically crunching under my feet? I had the presence of mind to get redressed before screaming for my dad. That scorpion inside my suitcase in Mexico? Sure, I stood on a rock and yelled for Daryl, the bartender-slash-scorpion expert, but that was the correct response, because otherwise I couldn’t keep an eye on it to make sure that it didn’t scurry into, like, my bed. Heck, growing up my room was in the basement (don’t get me wrong, it was a cool room because I had the entire basement), and spiders were constantly showing up for my cat to kill. or stare at for hours. Never bothered me.

But watch me flip a page in a book and come across a photograph of an insect? and you’re next watching me run from the room trying not to vomit. Even when I was a little kid, and I got my first world book encyclopedia, I’d come across a photograph of an ant or a fly, and I had to turn my head and oh-so-gently flip the page over by the very corner, so that I wasn’t even touching the picture of the bug.

I don’t know where this comes from. I know it’s completely and totally irrational. But that didn’t stop my heart from beating through my chest when the NY Times Magazine ran a photo of giant cockroaches a few months ago (article abstract only, it’s too old, but the intro paragraph gives a nice sense of the article).

I only bring this up now because yesterday, in all of the brouhaha over the whole fruit-fly gender reassignment thing, the Times decided to publish, on the front page of it’s website, a super-magnified picture of a fruit-fly. I had to avert my eyes and shut down my browser. And then I refused to go back and read the Times for the rest of the day.

Part of me thinks this is all some bizarre latent reaction to the fact that the movie Them! scared me half to death the first time I watched it. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 at the time.

And seriously, I’m just reading through my newsreader, and here’s another one!

Last weekend I did manage to get up to the new place so that I could measure a few more things and take a few pictures. At this stage, my parents were in full-on pre-packing mode – in other words, they were throwing out years of accumulated junk (have I mentioned that my stepmother moved in in 1978?!). They’re actually moving to the new, adult-sized apartment tomorrow. That’s my long-winded explanation for all of the boxes and such in the living room.

So here’s a little tour:

And for the plans…We’re going to rip out the entire kitchen, replacing the wiring, plumbing, fixtures, appliances. Pickle and restain all of the apartment the floors, scrape/plaster and repaint the walls…
well, to start at least…

Now that my web hosting provider has upped my storage capacity from 250 MBs to 5 GBs, I feel much more free to start posting some additional photos from time to time.

As I’ve mentioned before, I tend to wander around the neighborhood taking pictures in my spare time. Lately though, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s something wacky with my digital camera (of course, I was playing with some of the settings to see what they would do). Here’s the result. First, a building on 6th Avenue that is just really nice to look at…

Taxicabs in motion…

Then, on my way home from work, I stopped to take some pictures of the Metropolitan Life Tower, which turned out a little bizarre. Check out these two pictures from the same spot, one with a flash and one without:

How cool is that?! I don’t even know what I did, but it’s pretty wild looking, huh?

This morning at 8, I made my way up to Central Park. Got off the bus at the CPZoo entrance, and they were still all wrapped up. Then ran into a few other determined people who were looking for the action to all start, and when we went over the ridge, there they were.

Teams running up parallel paths, trailed by large crowds of people, as the wrappings were pulled off and the fabric was set free. I wandered around taking pictures, finally exiting at the oh so appropriate Artists’ Gate. It was gorgeous.

More:

New York Times: Dressing the Park in Orange, and Pleats
Gothamist: The Gates are Open

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos referenced in this post now appear directly below.

Once it stopped snowing this morning, it got gorgeous out. Freezing, but gorgeous. I spent some time running errands, including buying (finally!) a humidifier for my apartment. It’s so dry with the radiator on that it’s like living in the desert. Only stuffy too. On my way around, I took a bunch of photos of the post-snow shenanigans. Some things I noticed today…

This is what the street already looked like only a half an hour after the snow started.

A caravan of city snowplows, none of them actually plowing the street.

For some reason, no one ever takes pictures of this side of the flatiron building.

One of the less well plowed streets.

This guy is going to have a hell of a time moving his car tomorrow.

A documentary I own has pointed this out before, but I can’t help loving it – one of the most amazing things about the grid plan in the City is that regardless of how close the buildings are to each other, you can stand at almost any intersection and see for miles.

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, pictures are now directly below.

I added one more photo to yesterday’s album – the rain has finally stopped (briefly), and as I was leaving work I thought 6th Ave towards Radio City was somewhat cool looking. This was actually taken directly on my office building’s corner. You may begin to understand why I have such frustration with holiday season tourists.

Also, I had included this picture [ed note – that picture is no longer functioning correctly, so it has been removed from the album], not because it was anything particularly artistic, but because as I was walking home last night, I realized that it is now going to be the 5th or 6th restaurant to open in this space in the 5 years that I’ve lived here. It’s just somewhat amusing, because every time it turns over, they do a complete overhaul of the interior. I think the most successful business to run out of there was when I first moved in – back then it was a Dunkin’ Donuts, but it was also 1999 and I’m sure the owner of the building figured he could get 5 times the rent from a high-end restaurant. Well, that’s only true if they ever actually open.

My personal favorite restaurant to fail spectactularly in this spot was the one that immediately preceded this current incarnation – it was called "Choice", and it was literally open for three weeks, before all of a sudden the doors were sealed up and notices were placed in the windows that the property and furnishings had been seized by federal marshals for failure to pay taxes. That probably amused me significantly more than it should have. I mean, you go through all of the trouble and investment to get a business up and running, but shoot yourself in the foot by not paying your taxes. And not just being a little late and having a penalty assessed.

Anyway, the new restaurant looks like it’s going to be an outpost of Haru, which is actually in a few locations around the city. It’s actually the preferred times square/pre-theater destination for my family. I’m not quite sure that we need another sushi restaurant in the neighborhood, being that Yama (my favorite, and where I had dinner tonight) is on 17th, Hamachi (my dad’s favorite, from back in the days when he worked in my hood) is directly across from my apartment on 20th street, and the uber-trendy Sushi Samba is on Park between 19th and 20th. And that’s not even counting the 800 "hole-in-the-wall" sushi bars that litter the neighborhood. And that’s just sushi. I was looking at a copy of the 2005 Zagats today, and I realized that at least a third of the restaurants in the to 50 were between my apartment and Union Square (Danny Meyer and Bobby Flay really like the neighborhood).

Oh, and in one more neighborhood-related piece of news, Ian Schrager has purchased the Gramercy Park Hotel, and is selling off all of the furniture (including full ashtrays) before it gets renovated. It’s actually somewhat sad, because it’s a somewhat legendary hotel in the rock and roll lexicon. The bar recently re-opened after a two-year renovation (which is apparently going to be redone, again), but prior to that it was still full of it’s original 1960s/1970s era glory. If you’ve ever seen the movie Almost Famous, you’ve seen the interior immediately prior to the renovation – the near-final scenes when they’re in NYC and William tells the band that they’re going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, before he spots Penny? That was shot on location. The Gramercy and the Chelsea hotels were pretty much the biggest haunts of folks like Dylan back in the day. Definitely the end of an era. But the beds are bound to be significantly more comfortable. And the elevators will probably work with more regularity.

Lately, I’ve taken up the habit of carrying my camera around with me everywhere. It’s actually a trait that I picked up from one of my bosses, who is a big photophile. Once in a while, I’ll be walking around and realize that there’s something cool that would be a great picture. Here are the first couple of pictures from the last day or two. They’re a little spotty, because it’s been raining here, and the rain and the glare from the lights causes some massive visual disturbance once you add a flash to the mix.

Also, this was my first opportunity to try out something new with the web coding as well. For all of my older photo albums, I had essentially hand-coded everything (using stylesheets of course), but I finally downloaded Galerie (I’m not sure why it took me so long, since it’s free software), and I made myself some custom templates that work off of my existing stylesheet. This album is the first test of that, and at least on my iMac, it looks perfect. Please feel free, however, to let me know if it’s completely screwed up anywhere else (except of course, IE for windows, because I just don’t care about that outdated software).

[Update 2015] In an effort to reduce the number of holdover pages on the blog, I am slowly (very slowly) integrating these albums into the appropriate historical posts on the blog itself. As such, photos now appear below.