The State of the Borough

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, My Fellow Seventh Borough Fans, you do not need a formal speech here for me to tell you what state our Seventh Borough is in. 

It’s fricken cold!

My fellow Americans, tonight President Obama will deliver the State of the Union Address, and I give him full permission to borrow my State of the Borough Address: It’s fricken cold!

I mean, I think that sums it up, no?  We could go on and on about the economy and foreign relations and social services and immigration, but those issues are on the table every day.  As of late, and as most of us are acutely aware, we have been in the grips of an extreme cold for an extended period of time, single digit temps, wind chill factors bringing us below zero degrees (Fahrenheit!!) for several days in a row, and I’ve even taken 4 ‘snow days’ off of work myself and let me remind you, banks do not have snow days.  And then we still have to get through February. 

The real beauty of a State of the Union Address composed of only three words (1. It’s (contractions permissible) 2. Fricken (FCC will permit this on live tv?) 3. Cold), is that it’s absolutely factual and politically indisputable, and would not take over too much prime time TV.  There would be no rebuttal by the opposition (the Republicans, the Teabags), because it is what it is.  Most of North America is in the throes of the Polar Vortex, and we’re all feeling it.  It would be a uniting theme in a divided time.  (Do they air the State of the Union in Puerto Rico, Guam?)

As things will likely go, President Obama will probably not take my advice for a succinct and timely speech, as thus far, he’s taken none of my policy advice either, and he probably doesn’t even read this Blog.  I bet if George W. Bush read this blog he’d think to himself, “I didn’t know New York had Seven Boroughs”.  Well Godspeed, Barack.  I voted for you.  But only one time!

In many ways, the current State of the Seventh Borough, is as it would always be in January, and in other ways, life as we know it is changing irrevocably.   Most of my day remains the same: walk out of a house covered in icicles taller (longer?) than a small child (and I live with a small child, so this is an accurate measurement), walk as quickly as possible in the ice-slalom hills of Westchester to a commuter train, whose schedule has been severely whacked-out by the effect of extreme temps on metal equipment, ride that train over the East River, counting the number of studio-apartment sized ice floes float down the river, and off to work in an office where everyone has added a layer of polar fleece over the usual suit-and-tie ensemble. 

 January is typically our busiest and most harried month at work, wrapping up a December 31^st fiscal year-end, and I’m glad it’s almost fully behind us.  This January was particularly challenging, as I got hooked on Pintrest, and by ‘hooked’ I mean, like in a full chemical dependence state of being.  It’s so good, it’s bad. 

And January has brought about the publicizing of other lovely news, as some of you know, we’re expecting a baby in July.  Obviously, I’ve known about this baby for some time, specifically since October 28^th, when I had to ask my dental hygienist to hold off on the x-rays.  Now we’re out of the first trimester and so far, so good.  I’m definitely more relaxed about this pregnancy, except when it comes to not falling down the aforementioned ice-slalom hills of Westchester or receiving a blow to the head from a falling toddler-sized icicle (I broke them all off the front of the house and the next day they were back! Like pointy-white cockroaches, they multiply!).  When I was pregnant with Nick, I read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, hanging on to every word of that book.  This time around, I downloaded the book to my phone, but I’m skimming it like preparation for an open book test.  I also downloaded I Heart My Little A-holes, a short book by blogger ‘Baby Sideburns’ (that’s the author’s nom-de-plume for real), where she hysterically recounts ridiculous kid stuff, like going to the bathroom with an audience and 500 ways poop escapes from diapers.  Well, that’s where my mind is these days.  When I can find it.

Yes, this silly forgetfulness that accompanies pregnancy has fully set on, and as I’m trying to do my hectic fiscal year end, I’m dying.  It was a struggle.  Fortunately I’m a good list-maker.  When I can find a pen, or remember how to log on to my computer.  My mother assures me this is a fake symptom of pregnancy, and that I should not ‘get the vapors’.  But I think having kids 30 some-odd years ago, or maybe even 20 years ago when we weren’t such forced multi-taskers with 4,000 passwords and pins to remember, may have been slightly easier.  In that regard, at least. 

Now, more than ever, I’m trying to keep my stuff together at work.  One way to separate the humans from the cold-bloods at work is to tell them you are expecting a baby.  The humans are happy for you, the other moms may give you a hug, the guys will start letting you use the pantry/copier/elevator ahead of them.  The cold-bloods start acting weird around you, even though many of them have kids themselves.  They say things like ‘bad timing’ and ‘work-around’, not to my face, but 1. We are in an open floor plan office and 2. English is my first language.  I don’t fully hate on them, seven years ago I had to fill in for a colleague who went on maternity leave and I wasn’t too happy about it either.  I see both sides of the coin, but it’s OK to be human, to be kind.  Despite these cold remarks, our maternity leave policy lets me stay home for thirteen weeks, at full pay, with full benefits.  I appreciate that policy, knowing I have a more generous maternity leave than many others, even if it's a policy that falls far short of the generosity of policies offered in other Western nations.  But that is the state of our Union, when it comes to maternity leave.  That's our valuation, even if I just created another human and some of these guys can’t even match budgets to actuals.

 I’m playing the game of fully functioning employee even though I feel very forgetful, sometimes tired, and pretty nauseous.  I’ve managed to only throw up at work once.  And I made it to the restroom that time.  I’m proud of that.  But these are the victories that nobody sees.  At least not management, and those guys are never in the ladies room anyway.  At least they shouldn’t be, though some of them seemed curious when another female co-worker mentioned that the ladies room has a small lounge section which apparently the men’s room does not.  Sorry guys. 

But if any one guy deserves an apology, it’s my coffee wagon guy, Francisco.  I have had the worst aversions to some of my favorite foods, especially coffee.  I haven’t gone to the coffee wagon in like 4 weeks.  I did go for a while to get a tea and a roll, but now I walk past him each morning with my eyes lowered in mourning for my coffee, and my brief daily chit chat with a friendly guy subject to spending the polar vortex in a glass, baked goods-filled box.        

As if the cold wasn't enough, we took Nick to see his first movie in the theater: aptly named, "Frozen".  I loved this movie and was glad Nick was able to make it through 98% of the film.  I filled in the last 2% of the ending with the typical Disney schmaltz.  About 5 minutes in, Nick realized it was a Disney film, but that it would not be starring Buzz Lightyear nor involve any dinosaurs, so he spent the rest of the time fascinated by the glow of the emergency exit lights along the floor of our row of seats.  Bemused by lighting devices, he is his father's son. 

Stay warm, America!  We're only five days away from Superbowl Sunday, just across the iceberg-laden Hudson River in SnowJersey.  And we're only eight (8) weeks from the first day of Spring.  We can do it!  

Next time in the Seventh Borough: back to our Life in New York theme.  I'd like to draw attention to the rise of a very unique number-loving lady from Brooklyn, and no I'm not talking about myself.  Tonight, all the self-aggrandizing will take place in Washington, D.C.  Tonight, I'm going to bed.  Under no less than 7 blankets.

Day One

Wishing everyone a very happy New Year from the Seventh Borough to all you other numbered Boroughs out there, all you megalopolises, all you hamlets and villages, all you urban sprawlers and one-gas-station towns, all you nutballs freezing your tuchases off in Times Square, to those of you snug in your bed, be well, be healthy, be happy,  and enjoy 2014's first day!

Not one hour in, our 2014 is going great.  We've got a fire going in the fireplace, the baby's fast asleep, and the Dick Clark/Ryan Seacrest/ Ball Drop show just segued into the Billy Joel concert at the Barclay Center.  So my impulsive husband just bought tickets for the Piano Man himself live in concert, which has really been a dream of mine, and trust me, I'm not a concert lover.  Tickets for September, so time to be patient. 

I promise I will be back to reporting the news from the Seventh Borough shortly, after just finishing my 2013 continuing professional ed credits not just 36 hours ago, I guess you can take the procrastinator out of school but you can't take the procrastination out of the student. 

Thanks as always, for your readership, and see you soon, in the Seventh Borough!

Side Dish

I wrote this on the morning of Thanksgiving Day, but totally forgot to press 'publish', so here it is:


I’d like to take the time this Thanksgiving morning to wish everyone a very happy holiday season, a warm Thanksgiving, a fantastic Thanksgivukkah / Hanugiving and a lovely day with friends and family.  I’m not going to start enumerating everything that I am thankful for, because I am pretty much thankful for everything.  My family gives me such a feeling of abundance I could have never expected, and I’m coming off a two-week paid vacation so I’m in no position to complain, life may not be easy, but it’s good.  I am also thankful for the crazed man who called my husband’s work cell phone at 3 AM this morning, threatening us that if we did not get the super to put up more heat in his apartment, he was going to call the cops, because he kind of just epitomized Life In New York right there.  I hope he gets his heat because as I sit here in the Seventh Borough, it’s cold and blustery outside.  But when a 718 Area Code call comes in at 3 AM, it’s easy to assume the worst. 

I love holidays even more so now than before, because I get excited for Nick to get excited about the events of the seasons.  By now, I’ve probably had 35 Turkey dinners on the fourth Thursday in November, so there is no novelty there.  Some time, when we’re not facing gale-force winds, we will take Nick to the Thanksgiving Day Parade in the First Borough, just like my parents had taken my brother and I, and Rob’s family had taken him, and that will be great fun!  But as I prepare for my 35^th Turkey Thursday, it’s the little things I look forward to.  A giant Kermit the Frog balloon coming down Central Park West is awesome, but these days I get my kicks out of that ‘woosh-slup’ sound of a log of jellied cranberry sauce slip-sliding its way out of the can.  Once out of the can, it resembles the can more than an actual cranberry, with the can’s ridge marks on the side of your jellied log. 
And now that I've put 'jellied log' into writing, it sounds horrible. 

So enjoy your turkeys and all the fixins' and trimmings, whether it involves jellied logs or fresh cranberry with orange zest, or cranberry juice + vodka, it's all good.  Thank you for reading this train-wreck of a blog on your own free will.  And let's all be thankful for food in our tummies and the heat in our home, even if the cops had to show up and turn it on by force. 

Other People's Ghosts

Sometimes what you see is not all that you get.  Sometimes you make a purchase with a little sumpin’ sumpin’ thrown  in for good measure.

We closed on our house on December 29^th, but the turn of events would be more Halloween-ish  than  Christmas-ish.  After not eating breakfast at a local diner, due to nervous tummies, Rob and I headed over to our attorney’s office in Eastchester. We were dressed in full business attire, because we were, after all, about to become property owners.  This was serious.  This was the biggest financial transaction of our lives, at least the biggest transaction with our own money.   We were about to purchase a house on nine one-hundredths of an acre of land.  That was a lot of one-hundredths of an acre of ownership (for us).  This was our 40 Acres and a Mule moment, (hold the mule) by New York standards.  Immense. 

We arrived at our attorney’s office.  I had enjoyed working with our attorney, Christopher, though it was also my first time really working with (read: paying for) an attorney.  He helped us get this closing in under the wire of a tax year quickly coming to an end.   Despite our professional dress, Christopher greeted us in a hokey reindeer pullover sweater (granted it was a cold day), and introduced us to his notary, a guy donning a too-small black velvet blazer, which made him look like a lounge singer or a valet parker, or a guy who does both in between notary engagements.  Our mortgage broker was also there, and he  was rocking that fine line between business casual and the festive holiday red and green color scheme.  In the opponent’s dugout was our soon-to-be home’s seller, Mrs. Reinhardt, in a white and red Mrs. Santa Claus parka outfit with her post-cateract surgery sunglasses, her daughter, dressed normally, and their attorney, apparently a friend of the family, and a smartly dressed professional, the only one in the room taking ‘billable hours’ seriously.  Missing from this picture, to my surprise, was the real estate agent, on her big commission day.  I say “the” agent and not “our” agent because she was working for us but this house was also her listing, so the seller’s agent and the buyer’s agent was one and the same.  This is a bad situation I would recommend avoiding at all costs. 

Sitting in Christopher’s conference room, we filled out about 5 trees-worth of papers, while the seller, her daughter, their attorney, the valet/notary and our attorney had a mini Eastchester High School reunion and chit-chatted about the teachers they had, who was still coaching what varsity team and which teachers they knew who were still teaching there now.  We were clearly the outsiders.  Well I was clearly the outsider.  I’ve learned much of ’good’ Westchester is filled with two kinds of people: those that left the Bronx, and those that left the ‘bad’ parts of Westchester.  I’m still not sure what constitutes ‘bad’ Westchester, but if you live in Westchester and send your kids to private school, you must live in a ‘bad’ section.  ‘Good’ sections are those where the residents freely utilize their public school district.  At the closing, we had two Eastchester school district-graduated attorneys, so it couldn’t be that bad of a school district, even if one was wearing a reindeer sweater.      

There was some more chit chat about our walk-through in the house the prior evening and by the way, where was the door bell?  Initially confused by my question, the Reinhardts realized they had packed up the chime box of the door bell, so that was settled.  The doorbell wasn’t your typical ‘ding-dong’ sound, no, it played songs when you rang it, so I was sad to see that little nugget of charm walk out of our lives.   Perhaps noting some pettiness in my question about the doorbell, the seller’s attorney passed a comment about “Kicking an elderly woman out of her house at the holidays”.  Hey, I can’t help it if the holidays coincide with the end of the tax year.  They do every year so let’s wrap this up.   We went into contract 2.5 months ago so let’s get moving, and there was a first time home buyers’ tax credit on the table and 72 hours left in this tax year so let’s cut the chit chat and close already.

Then two unique events occurred at our closing.  I had brought a bouquet of irises for Mrs. Reinhardt.  She was selling us her house of 55 years, she was 85 years old and recently widowed.  Mr. and Mrs. Reinhardt had bought this house during the Eisenhower administration in their early 30’s to raise their family.  We were buying this same house during our early 30’s.  As yet an unmarried couple, times had changed,  Obama was president, and we house-hunted on line.   If I was having separation anxiety from my rented studio apartment of six years, I am sure Mrs. Reinhardt was going through a lot, even if she had her poker face on behind those huge, dark glasses.  During the walk through, it was evident Mrs. Reinhardt had left her floral curtains up all over the house, and her fake flowers all over the bathrooms and even in the back yard.  She loved flowers.  I’m not sure she loved fake ones more than real ones, or if that was just a matter of convenience.  So I brought the lady some real flowers.  Our lawyer was touched, even the valet/notary was touched, as was the hard-nosed seller’s attorney, and of course the Reinhardts as well.  It was the least I could do.

In this warm-fuzzy post-holiday moment of sharing = caring, Mrs. Reinhardt decided to share something with the rest of us.  Her husband had died earlier in the year and loved their house very much.  His passing prompted her to sell after all, but not before she spread his ashes over the back yard. 

Silence.  Pin-drop silence.  Stunned silence all around the room.  I think the two attorneys were quickly spinning their wheels to make sure the disposition of human remains on the property didn’t nullify the transaction.  The papers were signed.  The checks were handed over.  Did we all just hear what we think we heard?  Did we just exchanged a bunch of money for nine one-hundredths of an acre (no mule) and a sacred burial ground?

 

We closed on our house in December when the days are shortest and the nights are long and we had no reason to be in the back yard.  We went through a paint and plaster repair job.  We hung new curtains, we unpacked, we moved in.  That first spring time in our house I’d go in the back yard with a suspicious eye like I was going to see something out of place.  Though I eventually threw out all the fake flowers (placed amongst the real ones) in the yard, I have never touched the other knick knacks left behind in the yard, like the fake birds or the plaque with the sun on it or the ceramic frog, or the wind chimes, and especially not the American flags.  Mr. Reinhardt was a WWII vet and employed by the Eastchester Fire Department.  He could be anywhere.  He is everywhere.   Rob has felt a ‘presence’. The cats sometimes watch things I can’t see move around the room, and then Nick would do the same.   Other friends have felt a ‘presence’.  Sometimes even skeptical me has even felt a ‘presence’.  The presence probably spends most of its time in the littlest bedroom, which is the guest room, so come on over and stay a night or two!

The Post Season: Seventh Borough Updates

Back in July, I wrote that this blog would run a few posts for each of its 'season' and that the Summer 2013 'season' would be about summer itself.  And I got two entries in and Summer was coming to an end, Labor Day had come and gone, Columbus Day had past us, Halloween was now a distant memory, and here we are in November.  I had written an entire post for election day, and by election day, I mean the primary, which here, is early September, and scrapped it altogether.  And I was trying to write a post about Baseball, a beloved summertime game, and it was becoming an Albatross of an entry.  I couldn't get it out, I couldn't pin down how to fit the entire 100+ year history of America's past-time as it related to me personally, and with meaning and humor, into one blog post and not try to produce the "Seventh Borough's Encyclopedia of Baseball".  As we Met fans are all to familiar with the phrasing: Maybe Next Year for my Baseball summertime entry. 

However, today's post, Dark Chocolate, was churned out in under three hours, as it related to a discrete and recent event, and I think 1. Reopening the blog with the word 'Chocolate' in the title is a cheap (but effective, no?) gimmick to get your attention and 2. A direct parlay into the 2013 Fall/Winter Season's theme: Life in New York.  I gave you my first hand account of visiting Red Hook, Brooklyn (in apparently what was its off season) and the changes going on there.  And by Life in New York, I'm not referring to fancy 5th Avenue shopping trips and visiting the Statue of Liberty, that's tourist junk.  I'm talking about your day-to-day life, as enhanced when eight million people squish on to a few, closely-connected islands, I'm talking about an appreciation for mass transit, even when it smells bad, I'm talking about the strategy it takes to get to work in East Midtown when the entire UN General Assembly and their entourages and their entourages' entourage have blocked all your paths to the office, I'm talking about my loyalty to my favorite coffee wagon man, even though I have a back up wagon man, and yes, a back up to my back up wagon man, just in case.  Even though I've had the privilege (the horror?) of paying $40 for a parking spot and $70 for a cocktail on occasion, I'd like to use the next season to get to the guts of the people and places and events that have made this place what it is, and its residents who we are.

And I'm playing loose with this theme of  Life in New York, generally I mean the City, but then the title of this blog puts us out of its official jurisdiction.  Things are never so black and white, are they?  I lived in the Second Borough until I was 31, my parents lived in the Second Borough, my grandparents lived in the Second Borough, my great-grandparents moved to the Second Borough after coming through Ellis Island, and I went to school where at least 75%* of the class had a relative come through Ellis Island as well, I always wonder if I made the right decision to leave the city even if I'm still only a stone's throw from it's geographic borders.  But then, the Seventh Borough has got to be filled with at least 75%* of NYC transplants as well**.  And I wonder if they feel the same way.

So welcome to "Life in New York", or what possibly could have just been titled "Stuff That Happens Near By And Involves Highly Opinionated People Who Talk Loudly", but that's not catchy.  Definitely not as catchy as "Dark Chocolate".

(* my best guess, no documented proof behind these figures, but seems better than writing 'a lot')
(**just a quick one - I feel most of the NYC transplants here are from the Bronx.  It seems no one from Brooklyn ever relocates to Westchester.  Though there are at least three of us, Myself, My Aunt Jane, and of course, Jay-Z.)

But really, I'll leave you with a vignette about baseball:
In late October, Rob, Nick and I took a long weekend up to Boston and were in town right about when the Red Sox won the pennant and were heading off to the World Series.  A few day later, the Sox had won the Series.  I mentioned this phenomena to my boss: I said I was just in Boston, and the Sox win the Series.  In 2009 I was temporarily living in the Bronx with Rob while waiting to close on our house and the Yankees won the Series that year.  Where ever I go it seems to be good luck for that home team.  My boss looks me square in the face and says," Could you move to Flushing?" 

Stay-cation Road Trip: Dark Chocolate

Sometimes a wife wants to surprise her husband with a trip to a place they have not yet visited, and once there, sometimes the wife realizes that their trip is not all it’s cracked up to be and the husband thinks his wife has lost it. 

A co-worker of mine, well, to be clear, the Grumpy Cat, is a big foodie and wine-y (?) wino(?) and he’s been talking to me about his trips to Brooklyn for local eats, artisan food merchants, butchers, bakers, wine cask makers, and other nom-noms he can buy at the source of production.  The Grumpy Cat has family in Brooklyn, though he grew up in Long Island and now lives in North Jersey, I was sensing, like myself, he had a bit of an inner urban child who needed to get out of his Xth – Borough and back into the grit and grist of Brooklyn every now and then.  So I paid heed to his stories.  Our group at work is also mostly a bunch of non-drinkers, so I think he felt able to discuss his vineyard, brewery and distillery visits with a fellow imbiber such as myself. 

So a few days ago, I drove Rob to Brooklyn for our ‘Surprise Destination’ trip, and I gave him a hint: it was in Brooklyn.  He thought we were going to Spumoni Gardens, which is, like a lot of Bensonhurst, an entirely concrete ‘garden’, that sells (obviously) Spumoni, Gelato, ice cream, Italian Ices and some of the best Pizza you could ever sink your teeth into – that’s why I capitalized  the P in Pizza right there.  But in my personal opinion, they make the best Sicilian Pies on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Their Sicilian Pies have to be 2 or 3 inches thick of fresh crust, and everything there is always so fresh because it’s never not crowded, they are a Pizza making machine!  About 2 years ago we went to Spumoni Gardens in the summer to have ices/spumoni/gelato in the ‘garden’, which is a giant concrete patio on the street filled with concrete picnic tables and lines of people waiting to order food reaching around the corner.  But Rob never got a slice of Pizza at Spumoni Gardens, and he’s still looking for his return trip.

I told Rob we were not going to Spumoni Gardens, but in fact we were going to Red Hook, and I think he immediately thought about our last trip to Red Hook, which just involved checking out the new Ikea Brooklyn down there.  I promised him we were not going to Ikea, or at least, that wasn’t the main attraction, though we did end up there on this trip to use the restrooms and get a snack.  (OK and then we ended up buying stuff because who doesn’t love Ikea?)

Red Hook, Brooklyn is both in a state of urban renewal and yet frozen in time.  It’s a small swatch of waterfront land, a grid layout of maybe only 15 blocks by 8 blocks, north of the Gowanus canal, just southeast of the very tip of lower Manhattan, grossly underserved by public transit, and isolated in a way, as the BQE cuts it off from flowing into Cobble Hill or Brooklyn Heights.  Exiting the BQE and heading past the public housing projects, Brooklyn’s cruise ship terminal makes use of the northern-most coastline in the area, and the large blue box that is Ikea sits at Red Hook’s southern coast.  In between those commercial establishments is a mix of old industrial buildings, some in disrepair and decay, others renovated but still in the shell of old brick buildings, advertising crafts and trades shops, and two- and three-storey brick row houses, also in various stages of decay or renovation.  Some of the row houses had their front doors or window trim painted bright, happy colors.  Others had gardens in their small front courtyards.  But it was entirely hit and miss.  Some blocks looked entirely renovated, while others looked like they had suffered an air-raid bombing.  Some streets were paved and some were cobblestone.  It made driving a little tricky but the whole area, in spite of what I thought was a home to burgeoning artisan industries, was in parts, desolate.  The most people I saw in one group was a team of Firemen checking out a very decrepit (and hopefully unoccupied) corner house, that looked like it was on the verge of collapse. 

I don’t think that Red Hook ever had such an industrial or commercial heyday as the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which lies just a short trip north up Brooklyn’s coastline, but the combination of houses and low-slung industrial buildings made me think it was once its own, self-sufficient port, like an old New England fishing village, the people who worked the docks and the boats, were probably all the residents just the same.  In between the old and renovated buildings, there were chunks of land entirely out of use, empty plots, in some cases dumping grounds, where you’d find remnants of a waterfront town – buoys and dinghies tossed about on land, a handful of motor boats in a lot, broke down and forgotten.  Like once upon a time people could launch a boat from here and now the waterfront isn’t a system of piers and docks, but chopped up concrete and wood pilings all over the place.  There was no seawall or formal coastline, just jagged edges.  I wasn’t sure how much of this was pure decay or how much was recent damage from Hurricane Sandy, which gave low-lying Red Hook a real beating last year, but I’d say it was more like time moved on and forgot about this little slice of Brooklyn, whose ridiculous proximity to Manhattan should have warranted it a better fate. 

We found our destination, and I had like 9 parking spots available to me, which in any other part of Brooklyn, would be considered akin to winning the lottery.  Nine open parking spots gives one pause, to think maybe these spots aren’t really legit, or maybe the streets were being vacated for a parade or a feast.  Given the general lack of souls about, including the general lack of traffic cops, I took my chances, parked the car and walked into the open steel-framed glass doors of a three-storey old brick industrial now operating under the name of Cacao Prieto – or literally – Dark Chocolate.  (www.cacaoprieto.com).

Cacao Prieto is both a rum distillery and a maker of their own chocolate.  What more could you possibly need?  As a lover of Rum, I thought Rob would love it, even if we had to drive though an urban ghost town to get here.  The building seemed to be cut into three parts, on the right side, you could see large steel (metal?) vats and piping, most likely the mechanics of the distillery itself.  On the left side, there was a bar and café, which was dark and empty.  In the center area, was an old fashioned cart of sorts, stocked high with wooden casks and decorated with dried ears of corn and pumpkins.  Behind this cart, was one guy who seemed to be running everything by himself.  I never caught his name but he was wearing a flannel shirt and had several small tattoos on his fingers, which I was trying to make sense of while he poured some rum tastings.  Rob tried a coffee flavored rum, a chocolate flavored rum, and another type of rum which they let age in barrels which once held whiskey.  This rum was called ‘Widow Jane’ and Flannel Guy informed us that this rum is cut with mineral water from the Widow Jane limestone mines in Upstate New York.  We bought two bottles of Widow Jane, she was clearly the winner!

I have no idea how people figure these things out, say age x liquor in a barrel that used to hold y liquor, or use this mineral content in your production and it will taste great.  Like whiskey or beer, rum has been around for a long time and I guess all that much time to tweak and enhance flavors.  Once I tried to make olive-infused vodka thinking it would amount to like an already-mixed martini.  That went badly. 

Flannel Guy also informed us that they weren’t selling any more Chocolates, as their cacao supplies from the Dominican Republic had all been used up for the rest of the year.  That was sad news.  I chatted with Flannel Guy about the café, and the overall desolation of the area.  He said that Red Hook’s location near the water made it an exceptionally cold place in the winter, he thought on average being this close to the water left them about 15 degrees colder than say any other part of Brooklyn.  Come summer time, the café fills up and the area is hopping, but late November on the cusp of a Nor’easter, the stray cats outnumber the humans. 

I thanked Flannel Guy for his time, and we made our way out of Red Hook, with a quick stop at Ikea, then over the cobblestones and past the projects, and in 10 minutes we were back on the BQE, in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and full re-entry into the 21^st Century.

Sabbatical

A year and a half ago I had this fantastic idea that when I went on Maternity Leave, I would get to enjoy a sabbatical of sorts.  By then I would have been working for 10 years + straight, with no real break, aside from holidays and vacation days and such and during my sabbatical I would organize my house, organize the storage in my house, visit all the museums and stuff I wanted to do but never had the time to do because I was working, have a baby, write thank-you notes for all the baby gifts, take care of that baby, recover from a C-section, and plant my spring garden while making home cooked dinners for three months. 

Then reality set in. 

The first two months of maternity leave were just spent understanding the whole newborn thing and being glad to have brushed your teeth and put on clean clothes by 2 PM.  I did get to do a few things that I typically wouldn't do while working but none of that involved taking the newborn to the abundance of cultural exhibits in the First Borough, in fact, it was more along the lines of meeting my mom or my aunt for lunch and going to Starbucks for a coffee and drinking it there, instead of getting it to go.  Yes, that was the extent of my 'sabbatical'. 

Nowadays, it's possible, though rare, to get a break to do something entirely for yourself, and enriching, all the while minimizing the guilt you feel for not spending a Saturday with said newborn and newborn's daddy.  I'm not talking about doing one's CPE on 325-page study guides on Variable Purpose Entities.  This will get jammed into 2013 somehow.  Last weekend I was able to be a part of a sailing crew on my co-worker, Kristine, and her husband John's boat, Liberty, as part of the Luekemia and Lymphoma Society's regatta for the cure. 

I love boats.  I love water, I love swimming, I love the beach, I love scuba, I theoretically love sailing, though I don't really have any first hand experience at it.  In 2012, during said sabbatical, while Rob was away for business in (sadly, landlocked) Pittsburgh, I got into watching these Coast Guard rescue shows on the Weather Channel and decided I missed my calling to service as a member of the Coast Guard.  Had I been employed by USCG, I'm sure I would never have to work in a place like the desert and be subjected to 50 Shades of Brown.  The experience of my youth, growing up in Bay Ridge near the mouth of the Hudson clearly qualified me as a maritime expert, if not also an expert on suspension-span bridge engineering and thus bridge toll calculating.  ($15 WTF?)

Kristine and John, along with their sailing mentor, Margot, were plotting a sail on their 30 foot Catalina (this is a brand of sailboat) Liberty for the late August Leukemia Regatta.  Margot was recovering (in remission) from Leukemia and this race had a special meaning for them.  They also enlisted another couple, who, during a practice run proved to be quite the seasick crew, and had to be replaced.  Kristine asked me if I was interested (you bet I was), and I just needed to make sure that leaving baby and baby daddy home without a car for a day would be a workable situation.  Rob and I sailed around for a day two years ago with Kristine and John when I was 4 months pregnant.  This was not a race.  That was a nice calm sailing day and I got to 'man the helm' (steer the boat) most of the day.  Without an inkling of seasickness at 4 months of pregnancy, I had earned my slot on the regatta team.  Margot enlisted her oldest and best first mate, Shaunie.  Shaunie and Margot grew up on the south shore of Connecticut, and Margo was Shaunie's sailing instructor at sail camp in Essex some 45 years earlier.  These two ladies, now in their late 50's, spoke to each other about sailing in a code only the oldest and best of friends would understand.  I was fairly clueless, but I was not seasick.  And that's all that mattered.  So I thought.

I had been studying sailing for about 7 years now, and by studying, I mean I found a very thorough text book, bought it and read it.  I had never taken a sailing lesson.  Location, timing and cost of instruction was never making it real easy to just sign up.  Even my growing up next to the Narrows was not a sufficient nautical education, nor was watching Coast Guard Rescue on The Weather Channel for a few days.  True sailing skills seemed like something learned only by sailing as a child or teenager.  Or buying a boat as an adult and paying outright for instruction.  I had none of this.  But I had Kristine and John who were willing to invite me to sailing world here and there and I appreciated that. 

On the morning of the regatta, I was up at the crack of dawn, no, before the crack of dawn, drove out to the marina in Westbrook, CT and on Liberty by 8 AM.  I got to meet the sailing legend that is Margot shortly there after, and then Shaunie.  Both ladies asked me about my sailing experience.  I felt like I was on an interview  for which I was grossly underqualified.  Then they asked me about my racing experience.  That was a flat out nil.  Margot then asked me my surname, for which I was surprised by, and also figured she was fishing for some kind of sailing bloodline, which I also did not have.  Was my surname WASPy enough to sail in a regatta off the coast of Connecticut?  I gave her both my maiden name and my married name and let her pick which one she liked better.  I don't know the root of that question but it kind of died there. 

We were a crew of 5.  John was technically the captain but Margot was really calling the shots.  Kristine and Shaunie were in charge of tacking, which means to bring the jib (front) sail from one side of the boat to the other.  I was in charge of moving the main sail, but we didn't really do much of that so I became the weight and the lookout at the front of the boat (really the sides) and as we tacked from side to side, I moved my position from sitting off one side to the other.  This was a real physical work out as I had to get up from the edge of the boat, across the deck, over the cabin, under the boom (holds the main sail in place) all while wearing a hat and a life jacket.  On one tack my leg got stuck between two lines (ropes) and I lost a bit of skin there.  This was a grunt job but I guess that's what you get when you are the least skilled, least knowlegable, and perhaps have an insufficient surname for sailing a boat. 

Skinned calves and a few black and blues later, I got some reprieve to just hang out on the side of the boat while we made good time.  I cannot explain to you the start of the race but according to Margot and Shaunie, it went badly.  We then headed south into the Long Island Sound and had to arrive at and turn port-side (to the left) around a fixed buoy.  It was a big red buoy with bells, and as we approached, it looked as though the tides switched and the wind just died.  It took us about a half hour just to turn around a thing no more than six feet in diameter.  My job was still to tack myself left to right, as requested.  But the gong, gong, gong of the buoy bells were like a sad reminder, with no wind, that we were going no where fast.  At this point Margot and Shaunie were yelling commands and observances to each other in a sail-talk I had never heard before, not in my sailing textbook, not on my last-minute YouTube crash courses in sailing, the two skippers got us around the buoy in regulation direction with no wind.  That's a skill you can't pick up on the Weather Channel.

As we made our way to the finish line, I sat off the edge of the boat, as directed watching the man-of-war sized jellyfish of late summer skim the surface of the Long Island Sound.  Shaunie came over and sat with me and we chatted about sailing and water and such.  She was familiar with the Verrazano-Narrows and my little slice of the Hudson River.  Shaunie was a landscape architect and worked on a project at Poly Prep, a private school not far from where I grew up in the Second Borough.  I later found out she was a Capen House Smith Alum ('77) and our paths had a lot more in common than we first thought.  It was like an instantaneous connection between the big sister and the little sister, or the skipper and the indentured servant working her way for sea passage. 

We came upon the finish line, just before 1600, when the race time would expire.  We started at 1100 and I thought five hours was a ridiculous amount of time to finish a race but we needed every second.  Again, just as we needed speed and steering ability, the wind died down on us, just a few feet away from the finish line.  We were so close I thought I'd have a better chance of jumping off the boat and swimming to the mark.  At least I knew how to do that.  Again, Shaunie and Margot jumped into their long-term sailing mate code-speak, not wasting any over- or under-steer to preserve every little bit of wind speed to get us over that line and ahead of our two competitors who were just on our heels.  Margot and Shaunie got Liberty across the line at 15:58, with just moments to spare. 

Apparantly sailing has a very thoroughly calculated handicap system, and this vaulted us from next to last place to third to last place, or out of seven boats, we came in 4th.  Liberty's heavily handicapped due to its hull being built for recreation and not for speed.  It became very evident to me that sailing is the kind of sport where you do your best, but you can also keep an eye on your competitors, and there is no shortage of sh1t you can talk about them/their boats amongst your own crew. 

Team Liberty went to the after-regatta barbeque, had some more chit-chat  and some beers.  Margot's boat had been dry docked since she had become ill and she had full expectation to back-seat drive (sail) John and Kristine until she could get her boat and her self back to full speed.  I made my way home on the 75 mile drive from Westbrook to the Seventh Borough.  Tired, bruised, a little sunburnt, and thoroughly educated. 


                                                                                     *****


One random Tuesday in May I was suited up, all dressed up for a meeting related to the Long Island City Project, plus another presentation, so I decided some time late in the day to go to another presentation after work, leaving baby and baby daddy home to fend for their own dinner. 

The Smith College club of NY was hosting Professor of Economics, Mahnaz Mahdavi, to discuss the recent financial meltdown in the Eurozone.  So I registered for the event just a few hours before it started, made my way to East 83rd street and entered the old brick townhouse-now-political-club which was hosting the event.  As with all the Smith Alum events I've been to in Manhattan, it was set up for a relatively small gathering, supplying cases upon cases of wine and very little food.  So I fixed a plate of about 3 strawberries, one piece of cheese and two crackers, and a full glass of red wine.  I remember I had been to a similar event when I was a junior or maybe a sophomore in college, and alum who lived in a full-floor doorman-elevator-straight-to-the-apartment kind of set up on Park Avenue kept feeding those of us just a hair under the legal drinking age plenty of wine, but the food portion of the event consisted of a few crackers and maybe a  handful of grapes.  Now where I'm from, no one leaves hungry, in fact I've left block parties with plates of food for the rest of my family who didn't even show up at said event.  #FirstBoroughProblems.

So as to not get wrecked at an Economics presentation, or start 'donating' randomly to the college by writing blank checks, I've learned my lesson and had a half sandwich before I showed up.  While people were milling about, I took a seat and noticed many of the alums were much older than I (they must come for the wine), though there were a few younger alums, who of course turned out to be PhD candidates and all work for the World Bank or IMF.  A much older alum ('46) struck up a conversation with me.  Her name was Ruth and she grew up in Manhattan and then moved to White Plains (Seventh Borough) after she was married.  We immediately struck a chord about adjusting to the suburbs and hating it at first, even though her transition was some 60 years before mine.  I told her it was my impetus to start a blog.  "An accountant who blogs, that should be interesting" Ruth said.  I smiled, "Well that was kind of the gist of my opening blog post", I said.  Ruth got it.  Nail on the head.  Turns out she still works as a consultant to a law firm after a long career as a political science teacher/lecturer.  She asked me if my company was giving out free tickets to Citifield.  I told her if her firm banks with us, she should talk to her relationship manager about free tickets, given the Mets record, and it was only May at this point, you know something will always be available.  She thanked me for the tip.

Professor Mahdavi got up to speak, and her Euro crisis topic was nothing new, but the level of details she went into brought a lot of clarity to the issue.  When countries joined the Eurozone, a sort of 'equalization' went into effect impacting their lending rates.  Some countries got cheap money, some used these funds well, others squandered it, and their failures brought the whole house to its knees.  Can Europe work together?  See World War I.  Not convinced.  See World War II.  Well life is a compromise boys and girls, life is a compromise.  During the lecture Ruth, now in her 80's, started to nod off.  I was surprised she was still working at her age, and she had told me her daughter had just retired, but she was not ready for retirement herself.  She told me she had another lecture to attend to at 8:30 and promptly, at 8:15, as if she were the only one to hear an alarm, jolted up, excused herself and went off to her second lecture of the evening.  I was impressed.

Even though Mahnaz was still fabulously stylish as she had been when I took her Corporate Finance class in the pre-Euro days of 1999, I was more interested in her work with the Women and Financial Independence project at Smith than the we've-already-taken-our-EURO-write-downs lecture of the night.  After the q &a I went to wait in line to speak with her and gave her my card, if there was any way I could assist with the financial independence project, I would be happy to help.  I thought that program was a fantastic idea and I wished it was up and running when I was a student.  It's a disservice to our students to give them a $200K education and put them out in the world not understanding not only the cost of a $200K education, but the value of a $200K education. 

I left that lecture in a happy mood, having had an intellectual discussion about current events, a nice chat with fellow alums, including my Seventh Borough Sister, Ruth, a catch-up with Mahnaz, and the hopes she'd call me to help with the Financial Independence project.  Like call me the next day.  I then realized it was late May and the school year was over, but it will start again.  I would be truly excited to help out with that project, maybe get a day trip to Noho, I'd have to bring my own sandwich, but I know they will supply the wine.