I am back from vacation and finally settling in enough to blog and do things people normally do. We were in St. Thomas again, which was the last place we went for a 'real' vacation almost 2 years ago. We did go to Cleveland last summer, but hey, it's Cleveland. Anyway, as you know, St. Thomas is nothing but beach-lounging and relative-mooching for a week. Jeannie's sister took care of the cats while we were gone, guaranteeing her eventual canonization. People covered for me at work for the first time in recorded history, so this trip did not involve driving halfway across the island to an Internet cafe to do 'urgent' job crap. It was very relaxing; and a good thing it was.
Getting back to work was rough, none of these emails made sense, nor did I remember why I cared about it all. My boss' boss was in town, which should have been a sign. She hadn't been to this office for over a year (she's based in the UK). But she took us out to a fancy lunch and said many nice things about our dept's work. Then like a drunken one-night-stand, the next morning brought with it long faces and muttered apologies.
"This has absolutely no bearing on the quality of your work," she assured us repeatedly. As it turned out, she had come to tell us that our group will be eliminated by the end of October. The work we have been doing will be distributed among the staff who are lucky enough to live in the UK and Asia. Despite the fact that we are a global business and are all well-versed in conference calling and asynchronous group work, management apparently has never been comfortable having the marketing people in the US. So they've quietly hired more marketing people abroad and finally threw the switch.
Reaction was a stunned silence, although later everyone said they had seen it coming. Still it's hard to be told that you're losing your job. I felt a strange sense of relief, like the billion emails I was still catching up with suddenly just don't matter anymore. Unfortunately, they still do sort of matter, I have 3 more months to slog through before emancipation. So how do you ramp up the faux-enthusiasm for work you've been barely maintaining when you know you're getting canned anyway?
I guess I can stop thinking up ways to distinguish myself in the field. No more favors! Troubleshoot your OWN printer difficulties! Create your own PDF files, dammit! I have to figure out what my job has been for the past 3 years so I can update my resume (circa 1999)!
I'm getting a severance "package" which is some money and near as I can figure, not much else. I have the option of paying for my own health insurance and receiving $405 a week from unemployment. I'd be fine with all of this but I'll be out of work going into November, not known as a great time to find a new job. I might get a new job before the deadline, but then I don't get the severance dough, right. Screw that! I wanna get paid!
So now I am faced with the notion of finding a new career, mid-30s style. I sure hope I don't have to work in the same industry as I have for the past decade. I would like to think I won't have to do web-related work, but what else is there? I have a master's degree in poetry; my main skill still is a knowledge of Microsoft Office slightly above that of a novice. I gotta find a way to work in an industry I actually care about, like music or art or cats.
Cursory job searches are demonstrating little so far. I could get a job driving the ASPCA's mobile adoption van, that would be pretty sweet. But maybe I have some other skill I could apply in the service of a discipline I admire, yet to be revealed. I dunno. All I know is I can't believe I have to stay here 3 more months before I can get outta here! Do they really think I'm gonna give 110% anymore? No! I shall give no more than 65% at any time until Halloween.
Every New Yorker without a car should force themselves to rent a car at least once a year, if only to reiterate the inherent smartness of living the rest of the year without one. Sure there is the initial joy of feeling like you can go anywhere! do anything! You feel possessed of the heady sense of self-determination that no-doubt drove our forefathers to wagon-train into the Great Unknown of the Louisiana Purchase only to settle in what is now Utah. Then you realize that all the assholes who get in your way on the subway are now in front of you, each in their own metal exoskeleton, and each of them with as little clue as to where they're going or how much room they're taking up than on the L train platform.
I just returned a rental car (from Image on Empire Blvd, cheapest Sentras in town!) and despite how useful it has been over the past four days, I am relieved to not have to drive one for the foreseeable future (at least, not in a major metropolitan area). We got the car to drive to Baltimore to surprise Jeannie's mom, who turned 80 recently. We snuck down and stayed at a friend's house for the night, then emerged while the Moms was at what she thought was a casual dinner at her friends' house. The surprise worked (video to follow, I left my camera in Jeannie's purse), and a lovely time was had by all. We got to spend some time with her and I got to see the many faces of Baltimore, something I had wanted to do since Female Trouble. A misreading of the map landed us in West Baltimore, which indeed does have that Wire feeling, although to me it looked a lot like Bushwick in places. Our friend lives in Hampden which is like a flower-filled and silent Williamsburg, with better architecture. In between we saw sweeping mansions and blasted out hovels, historically-significant buildings and an influx of skinny jeans.
The rest of the time we were driving, to Baltimore, to Bel Air, back to Brooklyn. I know Robert Moses didn't invent the superhighway but I still like to curse him every time I'm in traffic. There was a lot of traffic to and from Baltimore, mostly severe jams that lasted hours and seemed to have no cause whatsoever. Also there are like a bazillion tolls between Brooklyn and Baltimore, whose costs were only slightly less annoying than how the constant stopping and paying affected traffic. It's impossible to relax while driving, and relaxing isn't something I'm that good at anyway, so I'm still a bit frazzled from the trip.
One shining light was the fact that Costco is right off the BQE, and we got back into town just in time to duck and grab more cat food and dish soap. Our car was minuscule but it held all the crap we got there, as well as all the crap we bought at the Bel Air Target (I know we have one in Brooklyn but it's always so picked over). The Costco trip was something we needed to do anyway so it was a nice perk to get that out of the way. We dragged the stuff home and thankfully got a decent parking spot in front of the house. Despite the positives, I still can't see how people can live like this every day.
I took the car back in the morning, thinking the trip would be a nice cruise over to Crown Heights, but once again the Impossibly Stupid Drivers of Brooklyn were out in force. It should have taken 20 minutes, tops, to get over there but it took twice as long, due to bad drivers, a plethora of red lights, and perhaps a bit of my own poor driving skills. With the car dropped off, I walked around the corner and got on a 5 train taking me almost directly to my office halfway up Manhattan in less time than it took me to drive a few miles in the car. Now that's transportation.
I look at the floor and now I don't see you anymore
The last two weeks were supposed to be a vacation but at some point we decided we would be doing some of our long-ignored home improvement projects. Originally we intended to replace the kitchen and hallway floors with new hardwood flooring. But in making the preparations for this, we realized that underneath the plywood floor (which we had painted 2 years before) there existed a totally viable hardwood floor! Once we determined this floor was in good enough shape to use, we abandoned the new-floor idea and set up to refinish.
To get there, however, we first had to knock a bunch of plaster off the fireplace and remove the brick hearth form the front. Once we did this, we realized he had to remove the walls on either side of the fireplace since it stopped a few inches before the brick started. Meanwhile, the hallway needed to have its ugly tile removed.
The hallway isn't much space but all of it was covered in linoleum tile. Jeannie took most of it off without much trouble before realizing there was ANOTHER layer of tile below it. This layer had been applied with so much adhesive it was literally pouring off the edges of the tile; the paste never really dried and was reminiscent of a quarter inch of the gunk they put on flypaper. Jeannie's sister came over to help and spent basically 24 hours chipping away at it. After much effort and injury on the part of the Purvis sisters, the tile was finally banished. The plywood lifted up relatively easily, leaving us with the pine subfloor (which was actually in pretty good condition). If that second layer of tile hadn't been there, we could have had the project wrapped up with a few days to relax afterwards. Instead we spent Friday to Sunday in refinishing hell. Friday we sanded, Saturday we stained, then Sunday we put 4 coats of polyurethane down. I guess it's good we did it so rapidly, if only because the cats were getting antsy being locked up in the bedroom for three days.
There's still a lot of work to do, but at least the floors are done. Of course, most people will tell you to do the floors last, since crap will invariably fall on it during other projects. But considering how much time the floor took, we didn't have much choice, we'll just have to be thorough with the dropcloths and whatever other prophylactic devices we must employ to protect our nice new floors!
Other upcoming projects include: painting the walls revealed around the fireplace, fixing the brickwork I broke on the fireplace, painting the kitchen walls because they're nasty, placing/replacing quarter-round molding and doorway thresholds to cover up shoddy edge work on the floor, and (finally!) painting the banister because there's too much damn paint on it and it's too banged-up to bother getting it professionally done so we're just painting it dark brown and hoping in dim light it might look like finished wood. Fun Times Accomplished!
I took an actual vacation from work, but now I am back and I am trying to determine if the time off has made any difference. So far today it seems that all the work I left before is still here, plus a bunch of stupid crap that has piled up in the mean time. I don't mind it so much since I can pull the "hey, I just got back from vacation and I am swamped" for the next week or so. I suppose the fact that I don't mind this means the vacation succeeded in relaxing me adequately. I blew off just enough steam to once again resume my cog-in-the-wheel status.
In two weeks my office moves downtown, which would be interesting if it didn't mean I will have to start dressing up for work. I think I have to start wearing ties and shirts that tuck in. Does anyone know if they make pre-tied neckties that can be buttoned in the back? Not a clip-on, which is pretty obvious, this would be something that would look like a real tie from the front but be easy to attach in the back (the clasp would be covered by the collar). I looked for this but I couldn't really find any; doesn't this seem odd? Why do people waste valuable time tying their ties every single day? I thought about just loosening the knot so I could put it back on, but this tends to rumple the tie. Is this a million-dollar idea the corporate world has been waiting for?
Anyway, I'm back. Our vacation consisted of a short jaunt to the Greater Cleveland Area, to visit some people up there and generally not do anything. The highlight of the trip was holing up in the lovely Super 8 motel, eating junk food and watching cable television. Of course after 3 days of this, we were both totally sick of junk food and agreed that even with 60 channels there was absolutely nothing to watch (although we could almost get by on just Bravo and Animal Planet). We hung out with my sister's family and finally got to see lifelong friend James' new house. We hit up Corky & Lenny's, Tommy's Diner (soy milkshakes!), Aladdin's (best baba ever), and drank free Starbucks the entire time using the gift cards our bosses had given us last Christmas. We ran through the endless aisles of Giant Eagle and the non-crowded Whole Foods, went to the mall and bought some clothes, and remembered to swing by Big Fun on the way to the airport to buy some crap (actually I bought some tin crickets to help train the cats to do my bidding). In short, we lived like Ohioans, if only for a short time.
There is something to be said for sequestering yourself away from your life. I kind of scoffed at that sort of thing in the past, but the older you get, the more necessary it may be. Even if we hadn't gone to Cleveland, we could have booked a room at some local fleabag motel to get out of our house for a couple days. The remainder of our vacation was spent at home, and although we got a lot of work done on the house, that's exactly the problem: you can't sit at home and do nothing. I've tried before but sooner or later I find myself weeding, or fixing something, or god forbid, cleaning. In that Super 8 with the uncomfortable headboard and nonexistent maid service, we were forced to actually do nothing, which is harder than it sounds.
Anyway, when we returned to Brooklyn we set about out our tasks, which included hitting the newish Ikea. We've been in our house for almost 2 years and we still haven't bought any furniture or anything. My night stand is a storage chest; Jeannie's is a chair. Our couch (a gift from our pal Sean M, who has basically outfitted our entire home with his hand-me-downs) once was an elegant fixture from the 50's, but it has been used to the point that it cuts off leg circulation when you sit on it for a while. I don't know that I ever had any political issue with the opening of the Brooklyn Ikea, but if I did, I forgot all about it when I realized we could outfit most of the house for less than one couch from Room and Board.
Ikea was nice enough, we picked out tons of stuff, then came home and bought it online. Annoyingly, a few items were not available online, so we'll still have to go back there at some point. The shipping costs were also outrageous, but we still came in several hundred bucks below my intended ceiling. Who knows when we actually will get the stuff, this doesn't seem to be their strong point.
Oh god, life is passing me by! And by 'life' I mean summer. Summer kind of sucks for adults, especially when the weather is nice out, like it has been lately. Sure, most of the summer was super hot and I honestly didn't mind coming to my windowless office to bask in the air conditioning that forced me to bring a sweater to work. But it's been so temperate lately, I have been increasingly despising that force that drags me back into this hell hole every day.
Or maybe it's just because my job sucks.
Of course, some would disagree with me. Most of the time I don't have all that much to do. But in the past few months I have had to work like never before, often without much guidance. If I was doing work I cared about, this would be an awesome opportunity to really dig in and test my skill set and grow as a person. Unfortunately those jobs that would provide this rich, philosophically pleasing experience (Kittenhugger, Freestyle Rapper) do not pay the bills. Instead, I'm doing work I don't like for people who demand too much out of us.
Meanwhile I gotta deal with unhelpful tech people who always treat my questions with this weird threatened defensiveness, as if helping me do my stupid job somehow robs them of their elvish secrets and render them only +2 strength and agility. They're cagey and refuse to answer questions straight. They do ask me to call them, but frankly, their English is bad and their phone connections are scratchy and I fear this would be even more intolerable.
Clearly I'm feeling burned out. The remedy: vacation! It's been a year since the last one, and this one promises even less work than the last one! Yes, I'm actually hoping to have no contact with the office while I'm out. Of course, it's pretty doubtful this will be possible, but I swear I won't check my email until I return.
And where does the burned-out web grunt go to unwind? Cleveland, Ohio! Yes, one of the most sought-after cities for people looking for an immersively relaxing experience, Cleveland is synonymous with luxury and sheer happiness. Who can stay stressed out while the soothing fingers of the Cuyahoga river caress their aching muscles? Who can refuse a third helping of zebra mussel salad? Who can resist the temptation of that part of town so relaxing it's called 'The Flats'? I'll be flatlining in no time!
I didn't notice it so much during the past week, but when the last of our visitors had successfully decamped, I realized how exhausted I was/am. The upside is that the whole Christmas visit thing went fairly effortlessly; the downside is that it left little time to really relax.
We picked up nephew Devon on Friday. Man, JFK really needs to get their story straight about picking up unaccompanied minors. We ended up running all over Terminal 8 trying to get him, being variously told to wait by baggage claim, the security check-in, or that we were supposed to have visitors' passes to meet him at the gate. No two people had the same answer. Even with everybody conferring on cell phones it took a long time to snare him.
Jeannie's mom came up the next day, and her sister (who lives here and we see all the time anyway). We did a lot of the touristy stuff; Little Italy, Chinatown, Panna II, Pearl River, (veggie) sushi, South St Seaport, The Bodies Exhibit, the J&R computer store, Thai food, World Trade Center, the Natural History Museum, an abortive trip to Rockefeller Center. The latter was like being in a Night of the Living Dead movie, except instead of rending human flesh the zombies assault you with their manfactured Christmas cheer.
Other notable moments: we thought we should see a movie to pause from the frantic running around. None of us had ever seen an IMAX movie so we got tickets to see I Am Legend on 68th St. We totally blew it, getting caught in the unforseen rains on Wednesday and not making it to the theater until it was too late to find a seat. In short, everything the movie was supposed to alleviate stress-wise ended up only compounding our aggravation. The one good thing to come out of the day was stopping at Economy Candy which never seems to be open when I'm there normally. We saw the movie the next day; it was okay, but that big huge screen scared the hell out of me!
Christmas Day was festive, though I learned the hard way that the grocery store actually does close that day. I made another vegan pot pie, even better than last time (I swear I just want to make this recipe and nothing else all year). Devon, however, was in dire straits as we didn't pick up much of the meaty variety (hey I thought the store was gonna be open!) We did have some hot dogs and frozen pizza at least, which everyone knows they had at The Last Supper.
Later in the week we did end up getting a game console, a Playstation 3 specifically. The games seem interesting, if very complex. For my money though, I am more excited that the console acts not only as a gaming device, but also as multi-function DVD player. It's got that Blu Ray technology, so now suddenly I hope to god that format wins out over HD-DVD. But it also plays video files in the Divx/Xvid formats, the primary format I get movies from on Usenet. Which reminds me, No Country for Old Men kicks ass, but the Joy Division movie, not so much (and I'm a fan from way back).
The week ended with us getting Devon's return flight time wrong. We thought it was Sunday afternoon when it had actually been at 7 in the morning. His mom was able to reschedule for the next day, meaning we'd have to leave for JFK by 4:30 AM. So we just stayed up all night.
We took a car to JFK and waited in a huge line for no good reason. Why can't everybody use the kiosk things? I know we had special circumstances but was this true for all the other people in line with us? Anyhow, we get up there and I fill out some form, at which time they tell me I have to go with him to his gate. Jeannie would have to wait outside the checkpoint. A little awkward, but whatever. I figured I would take him to his gate, where he would be met by an airline rep, who would chaperone him the rest of the way. Devon was asked to pony up $75 for this privilege.
So we go through security and to the gate, where we proceed to wait for an hour. We ask what he's supposed to do and they tell me to hang out and he'll go on after everybody else is on the plane. Then they tell me I have to stay until the friggin plane takes off. What?
So Devon finally gets to get on the plane, after asking "So what did I just pay $75 for?" and I stand around like a chump. I wait for a while, thinking that if I bail, someone will arrest me for child abandonment. But eventually I slip away, find Jeannie and hop on the Airtrain home. It doesn't take all that long to get home, we end up on the exact train that we normally pick up at Halsey Street every morning. We go home and pass out. Consequently, New Year's Eve was a decidedly low-key affair this year.
Whoa, what a long week. We've been preparing the house for our visitor all week, which was a lot more work than I thought. And now I'm not even sure the house looks that much better than it did before (there's only so much a broom and a sponge can do when you've got mismatched moldings and poorly-patch ceilings). But things should be stable enough to weather a couple of people coming over for a few days.
Speaking of visitors, Mugsy the feral cat showed up after disappearing for almost half a year. We assumed he was dead, but as you can see he's as beautiful as ever.
We have a bunch of brochures for stuff to do this week. Lucky for us, we haven't done anything culturally-relevant since moving to Bushwick. We'll probably go to that Bodies exhibit, even though I think it might make me hurl. There's another brochure that advertises a "Tour Simulator," some kind of IMAX type thing with footage of the city. I love the idea that people travel here from all over the world then see a simulation of what they ostensibly are here to see.
Last weekend, our interior designer Sean (so named because we keep furnishing the house with stuff he's throwing out) lent us an Xbox plus a bunch of games, so that should keep everybody occupied for at least a half-hour. I still can't tell the difference between the PlayStation and the Xbox; the Wii still seems like the most fun, but I usually get broed with video games after a couple days anyway. What's really fun is ... building cat shelters!
This weekend I am hoping to finally assemble the shelter I ordered from FeralVilla, it's basically a 2-story, shingled-roof house for cats. If the cats don't use it, I'm moving in.
So much stuff is going on, and all I want to do i lie around on the couch. No such luck, however, as the Holidays are upon us.
I gotta remember to take a picture of our Xmas lights, it's so lame. Rite Aid has a sale on lights so I bought a couple strings and put them around the perimeter of the windows on the ground floor. They're white lights too so they don't even look all that festive; it looks like a dressing room mirror. Oh well, I'm a Jew, your traditions are 'strange' and 'frightening' to me.
Great upheaval includes the departure of our tenants. Yep, they moved up to Greenpoint yesterday, piano and all! Incredibly, we were able to sleep through most of the actual move, except when one of the movers loudly bet another that he'd pay him a hundred bucks to ride Buzz's bike down the stairs. Without going into it too much, they decided to move due to some safety issues, for which I totally don't fault them. We knew going into it that Bushwick is not exactly the safest place on earth, and I always felt a little bad that we sort of dragged them here in the first place. Still, they got a darned cheap rent for a duplex apartment! But money isn't everything and now they're in a neighborhood that's not only one of the safest in town, but is full of those amenities that everybody normally aspires to: grocery stores, restaurants, book/record stores, and an Irish pub right across the street. Damn, I could use one of those!
That's what sucks about home ownership; we're stuck here. Eventually this might turn into an advantage, say, if the neighborhood gets all fancy around us and we make a killing in real estate. Of course, the way things are going, this doesn't look too likely in the foreseeable future (for instance, all eyes were on the local corner property that was about to open, as a litmus test of the area; it opened as a wig store.) But I still like the house and, barring any personal violence I might endure, I'm okay with the neighborhood. But what are we gonna do with this house?
For the time being we are going to see if we can afford the whole joint without rental income. This comes mostly because the house, as it is set up, is unworkable for a rental to any but those we can wholeheartedly trust (and of course, my motto is: Trust No One). It's a legal 2-family, but there's no actual division between the units. To divide the house properly would take quite an undertaking at this point, and honestly wasn't something I was planning to do for a while. But if push comes to shove we'll have to jumpstart the renovations. Assuming we win the lottery, no problem!
Having the house to ourselves at this point has another big advantage: we have people coming for Christmas. Jeannie's mom and nephew are coming up for the Holidays, so they will be camping out on separate floors, on their respective futons (futons currently make up 50% of our furniture now, classy!) We certainly won't feel crowded. Now the problem is, what do we do with a 13 year old kid?
The nephew looks like he's in his 20's, he's 6 feet tall and otherwise precocious, so he's pretty flexible. But the law is not. So we can't just blithely take him to shows and bars as we would do with, say, Jeannie's mom. We're trying to figure out what a kid from St. Thomas would want to do in the city, but we're coming up short. Worse still, Todd P, purveyor of all ages shows, just announced he's cutting back on his bookings, meaning shows we could get a kid into will be in short supply. Argh.
I dunno, if I was a kid raised in the Caribbean, NYC in the winter sounds like Siberia. Hell, now that I've visited the Caribbean, NYC feels like a gulag to me too. Don't get me wrong, I love it here, but I just don't wanna have to leave the house. Aside from the requisite tours, museums, restaurants, what do kids do here? Should we give him some spray paint or what?
I don't know that I've ever taken a regular vacation. I've traveled some, taken time off here and there to visit relatives, I've backpacked and canoed and hiked and biked for most of my life. But I can't remember the last time I went somewhere and just rested. I always say I'm gonna take a vacation and just sit around the house, but even that wouldn't work, since I would invariably start working on some house-related project. So when Jeannie told me her family was getting together in the Virgin Islands, at first I didn't think much of it. But then it started to sink in: I could tag along, ostensibly to meet and hang out with her family, while getting a chance to sit in an exotic location and, in the immortal words of Peter Gibbons, "sit on my ass and do ... nothing."
Tickets were cheap because it was off-season. My dad gravely informed me that mid-September is the height of hurricane activity. But they hadn't had one in over 10 years, and anyway, according to all the insurance companies, New York is where all the cool hurricanes wanna go these days. We had a direct flight there, which was great. 3.5 hours and we're there. Downside was the flight was at 7:30 in the morning. Consequently we slept through a good deal of the flight.
Jeannie's sister and her husband run a construction company on St. Thomas. This means they were able to build their house themselves, which resulted in one of the most awesome houses of all time. Y0u can see in the photos, it's deceptively large, has pretty much every amenity you can think of (plus something like 5 bathrooms), and is smack dab in the middle of a rain forest. The plot of land that house sits on contains a huge boulder that would have been very, very expensive to disintegrate. Normally, home builders would just have to bite the bullet and pay for the rock's removal, but they had a better idea: just build the house around it! So in several rooms of the house you see this big rock protruding from the wall. the best example is in the master bathroom, which gives the room a grotto-like atmosphere. The other big protrusion is being turned into the centerpiece of an indoor koi pond (!) That is what we call "pragmatism."
The house has a hot tub and an in-ground pool, plus satellite TV that receives just about every channel every invented (though "Top Chef" and "Judge Judy" seemed to be on a lot). the forest surrounding the house was full of plants that I normally only see as indoor houseplants, and there were lizards all over the place. Between the lizards and the tiny (but really loud) tree frogs, the bugs were kept mostly in check (I didn't really get any mosquito bites until I got back). The days were warm, but comfortable. It only rained once I think, and even that was fairly picturesque. Everything about the house said 'relax, have a drink or three ...' Just what the doctored ordered. Frankly, I would have been happy to lie around for a week, catching up on Good Eats (ah, cable!)
But of course, there was a whole exotic world out there to see. St. Thomas has those beaches you see in the movies, with the white powdery sand and the weird, turquoise-colored ocean. There were palm trees and iguanas (!) all over the place, some of which we fed lettuce and bell peppers (iguanas are vegetarians more or less). The water is very calm, warm, and the salt content makes you float like a bar of Ivory. We hit three main beaches, two on St. Thomas and one on St. Johns, where we went for a day trip. At the latter we snorkeled around a coral reef, which was pretty sweet. I gotta look up all the weird fish we saw. I know I saw a sting ray, some parrot fish, Blue Tang, and something called a "Sergeant Major" which looked like Charlie Brown in his yellow and black jersey.
Despite my best efforts, I got sunburned pretty much by the second outing. I don't understand how sunblock is supposed to work, I got SPF 50 and the first day I was fine. But after snorkeling (picture my hairy back directly skyward for a couple of hours) I looked like a lobster and felt like a stupid tourist. My only solace came from the fact that everybody else got burned as well. Misery loves company!
Somehow I ended up doing a lot of driving. Jeannie's sister lent me her car (some kind of 4x4) to tool around the island. Let me say this about the roads of the Virgin Islands: they will scare the hell out of you. Even the well-maintained roads are incredibly twisty, turning back and forth at a moment's notice, going up and downhill and severe inclines, with hidden drives around every corner. I don't think one intersection on that entire island describes a 90-degree angle; every street crossing was at odd angles, making it hard to tell which way was 'straight.' And god forbid they should put street names at the intersections! Is this 33? 301? 35? 42? Augh!
That said, I did all right. No accidents, just a lot of sharp inhales from the back seat, and a fair amount of turning around to find a turn I had missed. Of course, the real upside is the autonomy having a car provides. We were able to go wherever we wanted (though with the threat of getting lost), we could happily turn down the near-constant barrage of taxi come-ons when we were down in the shopping district in Charlotte Amalie. When we took the ferry to St. Johns we rented a big car to comfortable seat all 5 of us, which again added to my whole "relax in comfort" thing.
Speaking of shopping, because the Virgin Islands are not states, they skirt many of the regulations that burden us landlubbers, including sales tax. Consequently, anything that's pricey due to tariffs was generally pretty cheap there. I bought a liter of Bombay Sapphire for $13 (I paid nearly $50 for one bought at the liquor store down the street). Cigarettes ranged $11-23 per carton, compared to around $70 here. I guess perfume was also cheaper, but I don't really have a frame of reference. For some reason, gas was really expensive, as was a lot of fresh produce. There was a gourmet grocery there, so we had all our usual lazy vegetarian stuff, plus supplies to make guacamole, hummus and mango salsas. I would also like to point out that while my local grocery store does not carry tahini, this store carried 5 varieties (two of which are manufactured in New York. Go figure.)
At some point, the cat chased an iguana into the house. This was awesome, a huge-ass lizard scurrying around the house like a trapped pigeon. Eventually he was shooed out the door, no harm done. I wish we had big lizards roaming around. I was happy to see there was a stray cat being fed, who strongly resembled one of our strays, Flossie. They also had a hamster, who didn't really do much except sit around and stuff peanuts into his mouth pouch. At night, the tiny tree frogs came out and made an enormous racket. It sounded like something off a sound effects record. I wish I had brought my dB meter, they may have been louder than the J train when it passes by my house.
We hit a few bars, the best one, Sibs, was the quintessential locals bar. Damn those drinks were cheap. And with all the money we saved, it was time for some video gambling! These multi-game machines are all over the place on the Islands (St. Croix is the only one with a real casino). Jeannie and I lost modest amounts on blots and blackjack, while our host won $200 playing Keno. I have no idea what Keno is or how it is played. But apparently it pays to learn.
Anyway, we went on like this all week, at times it was a little more exhausting than I would have liked. But no matter how tiring a given activity was, everything was mitigated by the fact that I had no hard decisions to make. I was up for anything, but was happy doing absolutely nothing as well. It was nice to have the physical separation from home so it was easy to forget about an unstable job situation, a messy house, stray cats, gunplay on my street, irritating commutes. I think I understand why people get hooked on heroin now!
The journey back was hard. I felt ill most of the morning, which was either due to nerves or the gallon of whiskey I drank the night before. We may never know. We had to make a connection in Miami so our trip was nearly twice as long. We were seated next to a baby who, while very cute, also made a lot of noise, not to mention the fact that it basically meant there were 4 humans in our row (Why do they let people 'carry on' a baby without buying it a seat? they spend all that time telling you to strap yourself in, but a tender-headed infant? Just plop it on your lap!) After an interminable wait at baggage claim and a traffic-ridden ride home, I was relived to be back. Even if our house isn't as fancy or full of cool stuff, it's still our house, full of our cats. Plus we feel inspired by example to do stuff to our house. Now we just need our own construction company.
One of Jeannie's other sisters lives in Hawaii. I'm feeling uncharacteristically familial all of a sudden.
Here's the pictures of our trip. I'll write something more about it in a bit, still got a lotta work to deal with and everybody at the office has been taking Stupid Pills since the merger announcement. For the time being, I think the above photo captures the essence of the entire week.
We are back from the Virgin Islands and dealing with all the shit that has been hitting the fan since we left. As they have been warning us for the past year, the parent company who owns my division has sold us out to some other company. This happened in the middle of my vacation and since nobody can be trusted to handle anything while I'm gone, I found myself at an internet cafe inside a tourist spot in Charlotte Amalie, posting boilerplate statements from the CEO and whatnot while people played pool and drank all around me (okay, I was drinking too).
Ultimately, this 'transition' as they constantly refer to it, probably won't be that big a deal, it sounds like everybody will get to keep their jobs, though they might just be telling us that so nobody freaks out prematurely. Other than this ground-shaking stuff, we have all the usual post-vacation blues of having to catch up on work and dealing with having to get up every morning in a sub-resort quality home full of cats who are not as accommodating as the ones we spent the week with.
Actually, the cats are fine. They all weathered the week well, it seems, even the outdoor ones. One of the kittens has already been by and there's even a new kid in town: a big orange tiger cat. We'd seen him around but in the past week he seems to have befriended the locals. He's fixed, so I think it's just the neighbor's cat (he was previously spotted darting into a window down the street). Jefe has a lovely new habit, however: he grabs the roll of toilet paper and just starts biting it, ripping out huge wads of paper which are all over the bathroom now. Jeannie noted that it resembled the act of rending meat from the bone, maybe he misses the chicken wings upon which he used to subsist on the streets.
Anyway, we took nearly 400 photos, which I am going through now (so far 50% seem to be of the little lizards which run all over the place there). So I'll soon have a whole album/write-up of the experience, but in short: the folks who put us up are now our favoriteist relatives ever and we intend to spend much more time with them in the foreseeable future. And I'm not just saying that since they let us stay in the super fancy deceptively large house in the middle of a subtropic island which contains those white beaches you see in postcards and the cheapest liquor I have ever seen (where else can you buy a liter of Bombay Sapphire for $13?) It was a great time all-around, in every way pretty much the polar opposite of New York City (in a good way on both sides).
Except for the stray cats! There were only a few, but each one corresponded to stray cats we have here, which was pretty strange (there was a calico whose markings matched Flossie's unusual patterns, AND is currently nursing a littler, just like she is). So we felt at home. Anyway, I gotta do all this stupid work now, I'll talk more about the trip shortly. Work sucks.
Tomorrow I'm going to the Virgin Islands. I'm not really clear on where that is exactly, but I was looking at a map and it seems to be among a tangle of little islands in the Caribbean. I also learned that there is no real difference between the terms "Caribbean" and "West Indies." I used to think these were discrete regions but apparently not. I'm not sure I should be allowed to go to a place I know so little about, but hey ... God Bless America.
My girlfriend's sister lives there, otherwise I'm not sure we could justify such a trip. I'll be spending the week surrounded by her relatives, which I am hoping will be very enlightening. She has a lot of siblings, some of whom she hasn't seen in many years, so neither of us really knows what to expect. We're both optimistic yet slightly fearful that somebody will want to do stuff while we're there.
My parents have a problem in that they can't sit still for five minutes, they're constantly running around futzing with stuff. It's like living with enormous hummingbirds in the kitchen. I am striving to deny this genetic predisposition and actually relax instead of feeling the need to jump from one project or another. So I'm looking forward to this trip for its possibility of doing nothing.
We're both hoping to lie around on a beach or something while we're there, unconsciously re-enacting a Corona commercial while slowly acquiring sunstroke. Our fear is that somebody in the family will utter the phrase "parasailing" or "walking tour" or "mini golf." Maybe later in the week I'll feel like, I dunno, snorkeling or something. But for now I just want to do nothing for a little while. When I get home then, theoretically, I'll be raring to go on the many projects I have been putting off, not to mention finishing the new web site at my job with the exceptional flourishes that have come to be my professional signature.
Tickets were cheap because it was off-season. My dad gravely informed me that mid-September is the height of hurricane activity. But they hadn't had one in over 10 years, and anyway, according to all the insurance companies, New York is where all the cool hurricanes wanna go these days. We had a direct flight there, which was great. 3.5 hours and we're there. Downside was the flight was at 7:30 in the morning. Consequently we slept through a good deal of the flight.
Jeannie's sister and her husband run a construction company on St. Thomas. This means they were able to build their house themselves, which resulted in one of the most awesome houses of all time. Y0u can see in the photos, it's deceptively large, has pretty much every amenity you can think of (plus something like 5 bathrooms), and is smack dab in the middle of a rain forest. The plot of land that house sits on contains a huge boulder that would have been very, very expensive to disintegrate. Normally, home builders would just have to bite the bullet and pay for the rock's removal, but they had a better idea: just build the house around it! So in several rooms of the house you see this big rock protruding from the wall. the best example is in the master bathroom, which gives the room a grotto-like atmosphere. The other big protrusion is being turned into the centerpiece of an indoor koi pond (!) That is what we call "pragmatism."
The house has a hot tub and an in-ground pool, plus satellite TV that receives just about every channel every invented (though "Top Chef" and "Judge Judy" seemed to be on a lot). the forest surrounding the house was full of plants that I normally only see as indoor houseplants, and there were lizards all over the place. Between the lizards and the tiny (but really loud) tree frogs, the bugs were kept mostly in check (I didn't really get any mosquito bites until I got back). The days were warm, but comfortable. It only rained once I think, and even that was fairly picturesque. Everything about the house said 'relax, have a drink or three ...' Just what the doctored ordered. Frankly, I would have been happy to lie around for a week, catching up on Good Eats (ah, cable!)
But of course, there was a whole exotic world out there to see. St. Thomas has those beaches you see in the movies, with the white powdery sand and the weird, turquoise-colored ocean. There were palm trees and iguanas (!) all over the place, some of which we fed lettuce and bell peppers (iguanas are vegetarians more or less). The water is very calm, warm, and the salt content makes you float like a bar of Ivory. We hit three main beaches, two on St. Thomas and one on St. Johns, where we went for a day trip. At the latter we snorkeled around a coral reef, which was pretty sweet. I gotta look up all the weird fish we saw. I know I saw a sting ray, some parrot fish, Blue Tang, and something called a "Sergeant Major" which looked like Charlie Brown in his yellow and black jersey.
That said, I did all right. No accidents, just a lot of sharp inhales from the back seat, and a fair amount of turning around to find a turn I had missed. Of course, the real upside is the autonomy having a car provides. We were able to go wherever we wanted (though with the threat of getting lost), we could happily turn down the near-constant barrage of taxi come-ons when we were down in the shopping district in Charlotte Amalie. When we took the ferry to St. Johns we rented a big car to comfortable seat all 5 of us, which again added to my whole "relax in comfort" thing.
At some point, the cat chased an iguana into the house. This was awesome, a huge-ass lizard scurrying around the house like a trapped pigeon. Eventually he was shooed out the door, no harm done. I wish we had big lizards roaming around. I was happy to see there was a stray cat being fed, who strongly resembled one of our strays, Flossie. They also had a hamster, who didn't really do much except sit around and stuff peanuts into his mouth pouch. At night, the tiny tree frogs came out and made an enormous racket. It sounded like something off a sound effects record. I wish I had brought my dB meter, they may have been louder than the J train when it passes by my house.
Anyway, we went on like this all week, at times it was a little more exhausting than I would have liked. But no matter how tiring a given activity was, everything was mitigated by the fact that I had no hard decisions to make. I was up for anything, but was happy doing absolutely nothing as well. It was nice to have the physical separation from home so it was easy to forget about an unstable job situation, a messy house, stray cats, gunplay on my street, irritating commutes. I think I understand why people get hooked on heroin now!
