staten island

we rode the ferry to staten island today and went to the alice austen house for a dance performance (exerpt below). the view of manhattan and the verrazano was breathtaking, and the breeze coming off the water felt so fresh. m. and her friend said, "it smells so good out here!" is staten island really a part of new york city? there were no coffee shops from which one could buy a cappuccino, and k. and i were craving one, but we weren't so desperate that we resorted to buying from dunkin donuts. there was a little italian trattoria, but they didn't make cappuccinos to go. to go! how gauche!
the ferry rides in the afternoon and at night were very crowded. it's been many years since i've ridden the staten island ferry, and i don't remember there being so many people!! maybe i just never rode in the summer or at rush hour? is the ferry more popular than usual with the tourists? i don't know, but my memories of riding the ferry are of hardly anyone out on deck and today i could hardly get by to take a picture. i guess i'll have to go again in the winter. and i have to add that i really miss all the state flags that used to hang along the wall of the old st. george terminal building. i wonder if they are in storage somewhere? maybe hanging in a new space? trashed?

teacups

these cups are in the window of juicy couture on bleecker street. i'd like to put biscuits in some of them and let jack snuffle through.

back in the hood

we got back on sunday to a hot city, but nice breezes by the river. surprisingly, i'm already completely unpacked! it usually takes me much longer. but then when you aren't running around from appointment to appointment, you can stay home and get things done. i like having nowhere to go except the playground.

on the road

"things are turned around now. i'm behind the wheel. i feel much better about it . . cruising to the squeezetones, i set the cruise control dead on 70. maybe i was born to be a chauffeur. maybe that's it. i love this open road."
"spencer tracy is not dead" from cruising paradise by sam shepard

packing

i'm taking the girls to my sister's for swimming lessons in a few days. she has a lake in her town and they go every year. i actually was going to skip a year. i felt so tired of running around all winter that all i wanted to do was stay home this summer. but they wanted to go so i called to see if there were any openings in the session we wanted, and there were. now i'm (slowly!) packing, and this knitpicks capri blue yarn is coming along. it's the spiral baby blanket yarn i've been wanting to work with. actually, it's lying around hoping i'll cast it on before leaving . .
on another note, this photograph is too bright for me. i tried fussing with the settings on the camera, and with the light coming into the room, but it continued to allow too much light into the shot. it's an olympus digital. i've always been so happy with the pictures, but lately i've been wondering if something is wrong. are the batteries that i have too old? is the chip worn? is "chip" even the correct term? i think i better get out the manual and read a book or two about digital cameras.

found: one window screen

g. lost our window screen last summer. (he gets the blame since he was the only one home when it happened. we were away visiting relatives). it just fell out of the window, somehow. only the cats may know how. it just fell. into the magnolia tree. g. was running out the door to catch a train (to meet us) and couldn't rescue it. when we all returned home it was gone. it's been gone for one whole year. this past week the girls and i have been going on our usual merry way up and down our street when lo and behold . . there's a window screen resting against the cement stairs next to our building. same size, same color . . same screen? the screen fell out of the window into the back courtyard of our building. this screen was found in the front of the building . . well, you never know. we checked everyone's windows above where the screen was found. all were satisfactorily dressed with screens. so i brought it home. i washed it. it's now gracing our window and keeping out the mosquitos, much to my children's relief.

spiral baby blanket post #2

it took me all day yesterday to sew this little pink flower on and get this blanket into a box. all day! i had to clean the table after breakfast, hunt for the yarn needle, the scissors, the crochet hook, the white tissue paper. oh, and there was a big obstacle: i discovered that the pink flower k. had crocheted for me on sunday was the wrong color yarn. so the next step (no, i could not settle for a lighter colored flower) was to search the yarn bins (jaws theme music here please) and, believe it or not, i completely emptied each bin and vacuumed them out. of course the yarn was never found until m. got out of bed and informed me that even though i had cleaned out five bins, there was still another to be done that i had overlooked. oh, thank you! luckily, it was a little one and in it were two tiny projects that were made with the pink yarn. the little unfinished piggy was not permitted to be unraveled, so it was the second one, the bracelet, which became the flower.
after all that, duane reade needed to be visited for the purchase of pink tissue paper in which to wrap the box in. now it still needs to be taken to the post office. no wonder i never did this all winter. let me just knit the item and fling it aside . . let the brownies block it, weave in the ends, sew on the flower, stuff it into a box, wrap it, stuff it into another box for the post office, label it, take it to the post office and finally mail the darn thing.
today i'm starting on another spiral blanket knit with knitpicks superwash in blue (capri!). last night i assembled all my needles, double and circular, and i finally found the yarn hidden in a box in my closet (searching for the pink yarn wasn't the only catalyst for cleaning out the bins).