Brooklyn Flea Market

 Today is Saturday and there was some rain in the forecast, but we were still able to go to the Brooklyn Flea Market in Williamsburg. We met a friend who has also moved here from Minneapolis. The last time we met was when we were all in Kyoto! She bought a white satin robe and he bought a cropped bomber jacket. Youth! Lunch was fried chicken, collard greens, mac and cheese and a great biscuit at Pies and Thighs in Williamsburg.

Since rain is likely tomorrow as well, it might be the time to go to the Met. It now costs $25 for non-residents and I'm not old enough yet for the senior discount. One more thing I'm purchasing with my government money. I'm looking forward to the Alice Neel exhibition.

walking around

On Wednesday, it rained, so we stocked up on cheese, sausages, and duck rillettes and delicious Vista Hermosa totopos at Foster Sundry. I am reading Tom and Lorenzo's book Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul's Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life. Lunch was cheese, fruit, and charcuterie, and dinner was ratatouille and sausages. We took a beer up to the roof for a view of the skyline of Manhattan. Since it had rained earlier, the view was rather hazy but still striking.  

Thursday was sunny so we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. The weather was perfect and it wasn't too crowded.

Next, we strolled over to Chinatown  and got dim sum at Mei Lai Wah-- roasted pork buns, sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf, shrimp dumplings, a pork and pineapple bun and a coconut cream bun--all delicious!  We walked a block over to Columbus Park and sat near the older Chinese women playing cards and the men playing their own game. Next we just wandered around Little Italy until my feet told me it was time to go home. Even though I've been walking two and half miles a day for months, walking for four hours straight is a lot for me.

After a lie-down, we found a hardware store where we could get a few items for the  new apartment, and then had drinks at Maite's near Maria Hernández Park. The neighborhood dog and people-watching was a treat.

Today we are going to visit the Poster Museum in Manhattan, then check out the Chelsea Market and the Mercado Little Spain, and walk the High Line in-between them. We love the High Line! This little video has fascinating images, both from when it was a working railroad line and from when it was abandoned and became overgrown with vegetation:

Anticipation

I leave for Brooklyn tomorrow! It is only supposed to rain for one day, on Wednesday. I'm truly blessed that my child actually welcomes the time we spend together and we've done it often enough now that we know how to give each other space and communicate our needs. I'm packed and ready to go, watered my plants, took out the trash, emptied the fridge. Set up a USPS account to have my mail held. No kitties to feed for the first time in nineteen years (seventeen for Leo and two for Smokey). That feels strange.

All during the lockdown over the past fourteen months I had not eaten out or ordered food to be delivered. Saved lots of money and got wildly bored with my own cooking. Since I am fully vaccinated now, it feels OK to venture into restaurants, although I'm still eating outside, exclusively. I have been craving Korean fried chicken, and on my walk today, I had planned to stop at the Bon Chon location (part of a chain) that's about ten minutes from home. I turned down a block I usually don't walk on, and saw that there was a haircut place with nobody waiting, so I stopped to get about five inches of pandemic hair lopped off--it was looking so dry and crispy. I had forgotten my wallet (!) but the kind woman who cut my hair just went ahead and cut it anyway, and I dashed back home to get it (more exercise!) My hair has changed a lot in the last few years, and it makes me kind of sad, but I guess I get to practice acceptance of aging.

At Bon Chon they told me I'd have to wait twenty minutes so I put in my order and walked around the corner to Spats' bar where I though I'd get a cold drink. It turns out that they are the new location for Smoke BBQ, so on an impulse I ended up getting a BBQ pork sandwich (the "burnt ends" of pork belly, yum) with some garlicy cole slaw and iced tea. I ate sitting outside and took the leftovers (most of it) and the KFC home. I will freeze the fried chicken (yes, you can, I looked it up), and eat the rest of the sando tonight, along with the pickled daikon from Bon Chon. I also got a piece of sweet potato pie for breakfast tomorrow before I go to the airport. It's going to be a long travel day. I get picked up at 6:30 to get to the airport by 7:30, for my 9AM flight. Then it's about five and a half hours, and I get to decide if I want to wrestle my suitcase onto the three-stage subway ride from JFK, or splurge on a cab. I'm tempted to get the cab because the government gave me some free money and I will not have to pay for a hotel  since my daughter moved into a new apartment and now has a sofa-bed for guests. I'm so used to being a champion frugalista that it feels wrong to spend good money on a cab when I could just jam myself, my backpack and my luggage into three different subway cars. The up side of aging: treat yourself!

An excursion

Well, for the first time in fourteen months I took public transportation to go into the City to visit my mother at her place. We've been able to see each other a few times in socially distanced picnic situations, and we talk on the phone every day, but I might as well have been living back in Minnesota for the past year. The walk to the BART station now includes many new clusters of tents. All but one of the entrances to the BART station are closed. There weren't that many people on the train and we were all able to space ourselves out. I got off at Embarcadero and took the 38R Geary, since the 2 and 3 buses have just been discontinued due to lack of ridership. Luckily, the 38 drops me just a few blocks from my mom's place. The ride back on BART included a hostile ranting crazy person who followed me from one car to another while ragefully screaming, so there was that. Sometimes I wish I had my car again, but then again I don't miss Bay Area driving at all.

I spent some time helping my mom go through old files to see what could be discarded and to make sure things were easy to find. I'll go back tomorrow and do some more. We walked up Fillmore Street to get a document notarized but I messed it up by filling out the signature area incorrectly so we'll have to go back and try again tomorrow. It was not a long walk but it is all uphill so I was concerned about her stamina, but she did OK. She's going to be 88 this summer. We stopped for lunch at the outdoor parklet of a burger place, and had a mediocre burger and lousy fries (so disappointing!) for a whole lot of money. Oh, well, I have to say that almost all of my dining experiences of the pandemic have been like that--I get all excited that I'm going to have someone else cook my food for a change, and then the food turns out to be not so great. I'm hoping my dining experiences will improve when I go to Brooklyn next month.

It was really foggy and cold and I was slightly under-dressed (East Bay fog isn't as damp and bone-chilling as SF fog), so tomorrow I will make sure to add a few layers. Gotta remember how these things work! Must have a hat and fingerless gloves! One more layer between the long-sleeved shirt and the sweater! Just wear that down parka!

Ceramics

 Watching the Great Pottery Throw Down has reminded me of my desire to own a dinner set of Heath ceramics, something that will never happen because the prices are astronomical. I do own a couple of their bud vases because I got them on sale at their Sausolito showroom, but $40 for one dinner plate is more than I am willing to fork over, no matter how beautiful they are, or how much I appreciate the process of their making. I will visit their shop at the Ferry Building when I start taking BART again, and admire their beautiful wares. 

The other china pattern I crave is Blue Danube because that is what we used when I was growing up and I love it. I have a few pieces: a jam pot I use for salt, two dinner plates and one salad plate, two cups and saucers. I only have one salad plate because I broke the other one, which is why I won't pay to collect them; I'm too accident prone. 

Here's a documentary on Edith Heath and her pioneering ceramics design business, part of a public television series called Artbound:

second dose reaction

I had my second vaccine dose on Friday. This time, I felt pain with the injection and my arm got sore by the evening. The next day I felt achy and feverish, and ended up crashed out on the couch, watching episodes of a kdrama and The Great Pottery Throwdown. I was too tired to read or take a walk. I woke up in the night with aching teeth and jaws--I must have been grinding my teeth. But this morning I feel fine--no more soreness or flu-like feelings. I'm glad it didn't last too long. I'm grateful that in two weeks I'll be fully protected from the virus, at least for a while. 

Meanwhile, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while:

taxes

I qualify for free tax return filing using an online tool, and was able to finish preparing and submitting my taxes in about an hour. The tool loads the forms that have been submitted to the IRS, and after a few false starts I was able to complete the return, even though some aspects of it were confusing. As has been the case since I started taking retirement payments from my IRAs, my total withholding means I owe the Fed but get a refund from the state in twice that amount, so I end up with a net refund. Now I have to wait to see if the submitted returns are accepted, which may take a few days. Last year I got a mysterious message that made me believe that my Federal payment had not gone through on the credit card, so I ended up sending them a check. Then I learned that it had, in fact, gone through so I had to call up the IRS and get the over-payment refunded. This time, I'll check my credit card statement instead of the tool's website for confirmation because they confused the goose.

Jury duty

      My first experience with jury duty was when I was a graduate student, preparing for my oral exams for the PhD. I was called to appear in court in Berkeley, and was very anxious about whether the case would interfere with my exam date, which had been very hard to schedule. When I showed up, there were about fifty of us in a very large room, and each juror was asked if they had any relationship to the University of California. When each person answered yes, the lawyers finally turned to the room and asked if there was anyone who didn't--almost everyone did. What a company town. This turned out to be relevant because the case involved a trespassing charge made by the UC police against a man--an elderly person with a bag of papers who we called a street person then-- who had been sitting in an inner courtyard in the math building on a Sunday, have his lunch, not bothering anyone. The rookie UC cops arrested him when he argued with them about leaving. He insisted on defending himself, in spite of the judge's advice against it, so the case went to trial. He wanted to argue that UC was funded by the taxpayers and therefore was a public place and should be open to the public. The judge instructed us that according to the law, the Regents of UC had to be considered as persons, and as the property owners. Most of us were resentful that the charges had even been brought at all, and we didn't want to find him guilty, but according to the evidence and the instructions, we had to. It was an educational experience about how one ends up going with the system in spite of one's beliefs. He got off with a warning by the judge.

      This week's experience with jury duty is being conducted over zoom because of covid; a hundred of us are sitting around in a zoom room while the lawyers question the smaller jury pool of sixteen (twelve jurors plus four alternates). We have to look at the screen and act as if we are attentive, although, in fact, I have discovered that it is easy to browse or type without detection (we are all muted) because it just looks as if you are sitting there looking at the camera when in fact you are scrolling for BTS news on Twitter.

     The case is a civil case involving a lawsuit against a corporation. On the questionnaire we filled out before the voir dire, we were asked how we felt about corporations, and I answered "Not a fan." This could be one reason why I was not included in the pool for questioning, but I bet it's because I'm a "little old lady" (and therefore more likely to be sympathetic to the plaintiff) and a retired university professor (and thus "less amenable to persuasion") according to some of the rule-of-thumb ideas I found when I looked up voir dire guidelines. Since they are supposed to finish up very soon and have almost made their numbers, I am not going to have to serve. I still have to show up again for one more session, but it looks as if they will seat a jury and four alternates with the pool they have. Fingers crossed.

Trying to grind my way out of a pity party. Let me think of something good: oh, yeah, I'm successfully transferring auto-payments from one bank account to another! This feels like a big accomplishment in my uneventful life. I used to pay phone, PG&E, and rent from my old MN account while AmEx is paid from my Berkeley account. Since almost all of my autopay transactions for streaming services or charitable donations are on that AmEx card, and I've been doing almost all of my purchases there, I'm able to track my spending with my statement. My SSDI deposits have been going to the old account, and that was how I paid my rent. But all my retirement income is going to the new account, and it seemed silly to have these two things to keep track of. I hesitated to make these changes for so long because I was almost superstitiously afraid to try to change that SSDI deposit, in case something went wrong. 

It did take a few false starts because I started out using the wrong account number for the new account. Once I figured out what the correct number was (involving just a few hours of online research and phone calls) I was able to get the changes to work  properly. Today I saw that my rent was paid from the new account-yay! This means that I should have no more business transactions with the MN account by the end of March, and that my SSDI should also be moved by April. Once that is confirmed, I can close out the MN account and shift the balances over to CA. I'll still have a credit card there but I don't have to use it.

All of this was incredibly tedious to set up but it needed to be done. I'm grateful I can afford any of these things. I just listened to a podcast about what's going on in Texas after the freeze, and it's absolutely dire: folks with burst pipes that have ruined their homes, sleeping on a bus so they don't freeze,dealing with the aftermath of Covid, working three jobs to take care of their kids. I'm so fortunate.

I've been living in this place for five years now, and for the most part it has been good, up until it got sold to an absentee landlord and a management company that's an hour away by car. Yes, I have neighbors who screw up the garbage, don't clean up their dog crap, and make too much noise. But I looked at rental ads and was overcome by how dreary and expensive everything is. To get the kind of place I used to have in MN would cost me at least $4000 a month. To get a better one-bedroom would cost me at least $500 more a month and even that would not be for anything special.  I really hate the trend in layouts that have the kitchen in the living room, which is what so much new construction has.  I may have a shabby place, but at least the kitchen-dining area is separated from the living room by a wall. I may never close the door-screen, but it's there. If I ever want to get a better place, it would have to be a shared apartment, and I don't want to have to share. 

I wish my mom would talk about a back-up plan: if she isn't able to live alone any more, we could pool our resources and rent a two-bedroom apartment. She could sell her place. I could pay our shared expenses and do the cleaning; she could do the cooking. We'd each have to be able to close the door on a bedroom that had room for seating so we could have privacy and quiet while streaming or watching. It would be hard, but we could make it work. I think I would be able to tolerate a lot if we were in it together.

So, the noisy road work that has been going on for the last two weeks should be done this week, at least that is what I hope. They dug yet another trench this morning, and were out there yukking it up on their lunch break. Now we're back to grinding and whining machinery. It has made being stuck at home that much harder.

2012 that was

As an exercise in reflection on 2012, I looked at the first post of each month. This has been a year of transformations in my household, many of them wonderful, exciting, and joyful. And at the end of the year, I have had to buckle down to finish a task undertaken a while ago, but not yet completed. I'm ready for 2013.

January. We were in Spain for the holidays last year, too. We took a day trip to a restored wetland that has become a place where flocks of cranes and all kinds of other birds and wildlife are flourishing. Restoration, new life, possibilities!

February: I posted the Ted Talk by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, because he writes (and speaks) so beautifully about the sense of self and our physiology. I'm working on changing up my meds so that I can live with my wonky brain chemistry in a healthier way.

March: "8: The Play" Same-sex marriage was to be theme throughout the year, up through the elections. It feels as if a corner has been turned. I can't/won't become cynical.

 April A death: Adrienne Rich. I owe her a lot. Rereading "Diving Into the Wreck."

May: another death, another formative context; Tomás Borge, the Sandinista revolution. Idealism, degradation. Can we pardon those we feel betrayed us?

June: commencement speeches (from Laurie Anderson, from Neil Gaiman)  for my high-schooler's graduation.

July: for me, this was the year of modest, but joyful gardening: a new rain garden in front, tomatoes and herbs in back.  Tending my garden, rooting out invasive species:

August: Another death: Chavela Vargas, lived to see the world ready to celebrate her (public) coming out in her eighties.

September: a year of dance, a moment when my pop culture TV fix unexpectedly gave me with a shot of genius: Axis Dance Company's performance.

October: the video for "Get your cray on" by K-pop idol G-Dragon.  Where do fandoms and pop culture meet up in acts of translation/opacity?

November. By the time election day arrived, I felt like Shamus the dog in this political ad Montgomery Burns made for Mitt Romney: quivering, whimpering, desperate to escape ("another jumper).

December: The Pixies, then and now. I only learned later that the performance I saw last year was by  people who had created a second chances for themselves after breaking down and breaking up. "Where is My Mind?" (1988).

1988-2012. Twenty-six years

Great-aunt Alma:

My mother's aunt Alma is her mother's youngest sister. My grandmother, Giovanna Nitti, was the oldest sibling, and Alma was the youngest. Alma is only ten years older than mom, about the same age as my mother's oldest brother, Jim.  She was the only woman in the family who didn't marry or have children. Instead, she had a career in Manhattan working at BMI until she retired in the '80s. She loved interacting with the musicians. I don't think she was well treated at the end of her career, something that happens to older women rather frequently.

        When I used to visit her in New York, while she was still working, she would always send me to her hairdresser (she was always perfectly groomed, then as now, and was appalled by my lack of polish). She would buy me tickets to a Broadway show from the half-price dealers: I saw a Tommy Tune musical, Frank Langella in Dracula, and the original cast of Hurly-Burly.  When we went out to dinner, she never let me pay, although I always tried. She  told the maitre-d' ahead of time not to take my money. It seemed to me that she lived differently than many other women of her generation, as a career woman when it was not the norm, but she always upheld very traditional gender roles. The man was always right.

         Now she is 92, and lives in an assisted living facility on Long Island. They have filmed these short interviews, or "Life Stories," and my mother shared this with me.  

Sagamihara

When I was five, our family left El Paso, Texas, on the first stage of our journey to Japan, where my father was to be stationed. We drove to California. I don't remember the drive, but I do remember that we stopped at the San Diego Zoo and Disneyland on our way to San Francisco. What must it have been like to have three kids under six in the back seat of the car? 

From San Francisco, we took ship to Japan, a two-week trip with a stop in Hawaii. The ship was  the USNS Gen. Hugh J. Gaffey, one of many ships in the Military Sea Transport Service (MSTS). This essay by Tom Barry on the JapanBrats blog includes the memories of many kids who made the trip with their families during those years. I also remember the spartan conditions, the boredom, the cramped cabins (I think we were all sick at one point), but also crossing the International Dateline, seeing flying fish, and arriving at Yokohama, welcomed by a band.

 When we arrived, housing wasn't ready for us yet, so we lived for a few months in temporary housing at the Sagami Depot. I remember the rows of tanks and half-tracks parked on the other side of the fence. We slept in a bunk bed, which was exciting, but at least one of us fell out. I had my sixth birthday there. 

We then moved to Sagamihara Dependent Housing Area, which was part of the military complex supporting Camp Zama, where my father was working in the hospital as a surgeon.  Here we see the base as an island of green in a highly urbanized area, but I remember farmland.


According to my father, in the first two years we were there, it was like working in a small town, but with the escalation of the war in Viet Nam, the number of wounded being transported was such that the 100 beds were increased to 500, and three other hospitals were built, to receive the thousands of casualties that were to arrive in the next few years. 

Of course, I knew almost nothing of this. What I remember is my first grade teacher, Miss Bell, whom I adored.  The Snack Bar had a jukebox and hamburgers. We loved an excuse to eat there.
 

 Teachers from the Elementary School. We lived next door to Mrs. Allen.There were three kids: Sharon, who was twelve, was like a goddess to me. Debbie Cynthia, who was my age, beat me up. Billy, who was younger, was, according to my mother, a brat.

 I learned to swim in this pool, where we spent hours and hours in the summer.

 

So glad we bought a snowblower last week!

 By the time I took the brand new "snow blower" out for its test run, seven inches of very wet snow had fallen. It is called a "quitanieves" in Spanish or "souffleuse de neige" in French, according to the trilingual manual. I got it on sale last week, fifty dollars less than today.

 I was thrilled! It did a great job of shooting the snow over to the side ( your turn a little crank to redirect the spout), and cleared the sidewalks down to the last half inch, but there was so much water in the snow that I had to use a shovel to hack up the stuff that was packed down by pedestrians. Still a workout to haul it around without running over the extension cord (special! for super-cold temps!), but I got the hang of it really fast. It's easy to use, and I don't have to worry about gas. The snow is still falling, and they are predicting 14" total by tomorrow morning's commute. I'll be doing it all again in the morning, but at least I won't be trying to move over a foot of wet snow, which would surely burn out the belt in no time.

A Snow Emergency has been declared, so parking restrictions go into place. In Minneapolis, for those of us without garages, this means the dance of odd/even sides of the street. If you don't move your car correctly during the time frames, you WILL be towed and it will cost a lot of money and take at least half a day to get your car back.

 My first snow tow, several years ago now, required a three-hour wait in a line at -11 degrees, so that by the time I got to pay my fine, I had to pee so badly I almost didn't make it home in time. NEVER AGAIN. Even with my butt-ugly Sorel boots that I bought in 1988 when I moved here, a full-length down coat with a hood, a wool hat, muffler and double ragg-wool mittens, I was miserable in that line

Tomorrow, I'll also have to shovel out  the garbage and recycling bins aren't so they won't be behind a snow berm in the alley, that will freeze and be there for the rest of the winter.

UPDATED TO ADD: 15" total,  and I"m so glad it shoveled the first 7" yesterday. It made today's job so much easier. But there is not getting around the fact that shoveling the snow away from the garbage and recycling bins, without getting it in the alley, is freakin' hard work.  It is one good way to meet your neighbors, though.

Someone made this nifty little song to help remember where to move your car and when.

Change is good

This week, I made a big decision. It will take along time to put into action, but in my gut it feels right. I'm going to let go of a dream that has been dead for a long time now. I'm very fortunate that the change I'm going to make can be done slowly, and in a way that shelters me from uncertainty, but it will be a big change. Looking back, I realize that I have been working hard in the last few years to make positive changes, but the paths I followed were dead ends. It's time to cut it all loose.

No more gnashing of teeth, no more chasing my tail, no more struggling, mired in the Slough of Despond. It exhausts me; it is dreary, and boring, and it could go on forever while I sink in over my head, every semester, and gasp and drown and flail.

I hereby declare that my war on reality is over. I surrender, and I'm going to move on. I have tried valiantly, and then foolishly, to change things I cannot change. (Because it wasn't FAIR!) They are not going to change. I, on the other hand, have changed, and need to make change, for the better. I'm must try to move forward  from possibility instead of fear. The fears have not gone away, but now I also feel a sense of certainty that I have always trusted in the past. This feels right.

Already, I am flooded with relief and eagerness for the future. At the same time, I'm humbled to recognize that I have choices that most people won't have. I can't, I won't let fear prevent me from making them.

Small steps.
I'm taking a medical leave to regroup, rest, recover. I'm leaning on my medical team: changing medications, working to find the right therapist, doing my spiritual homework.
So much clutter. It's time to cut it loose.