Life in 3D

Okay, now the end is really in sight. I promise.

Hopefully the last renovation update before everything is finished.  But first!  Since the last post was about the awesomeness of Mothra, I had to take this opportunity to wax equally rhapsodic about another member of the bugworld: fireflies.  I remember loving them as a kid -- they really filled you with such a sense of wonder on a quiet summer night, flickering on and off in the dark.  I feel like for whatever reason, I went through a period of years where I just didn't see them, either because I wasn't looking or because they just weren't there.  I'm happy to say that after the Great Firefly Dearth of ninety-something to now (can I please say "aught eight"?), fireflies are back.  Maybe it's because we're in the wilderness of Brooklyn, where fauna abound (including the rat I almost ran over with my bike last night).  Maybe I'm recapturing the joy of youth...or something.  Anyway.  Fireflies rule.

Reno stuff: so we were basically waiting on the delivery of an undercabinet pull-out garbage can.  Our cabinet person sent one, and when we opened it and put it under the sink, we were like, "Pff!  Whaaa?!  Midget!" -- or something like that.  Behold:

One of the things that bothers me when I cook is trying to stuff onion skins/potato peelings/butcher paper covered in yuck juice into an overstuffed garbage can.  We saw this lil' guy and immediately requested a bigger one.  Those of you who are plumbers probably can tell what the problem will be, but what we pipe-impaired people didn't realize was that the drainpipes from the double-basin sink were not in yet, and that Shorty was probably all that was going to fit.  Here's where the pipes will go:

So we sheepishly told our cabinet person that we'd have to wait until Norman came back to see which sink we could use.  But wait no more!  Norman et al. are coming on Monday!  Hooray!  In the meantime, here's a picture of the sink and the counter with the undercabinet lights on:

I know it's rude to boast, but it's kind of the hotness, right?

We also need to figure out if we should put pull-out wire baskets in the pantry, which is very deep.  I like the idea of being able to access cans and boxes of dry goods easily (and Lord knows I hoard stuff like it was Y2K all over again -- ha!  remember that? -- because I come from a family of (noseblowing) people who have an irrational but totally endearing fear of starving to death.  Seriously, we love food and obsess over it.  When we sit down to eat lunch, we talk about what's for dinner.  When I was little, apparently I would climb on people's laps when they were eating and ask, "What's in your mouth?  Let's have a share.").  But the baskets themselves look a little...forbidding, or something.  And like they might actually reduce the available space for the beans and the crushed tomatoes and the pasta and the rice and the dried cranberries and the five types of vinegar and the eight cartons of broth, etc.

Thoughts?

Oh yeah, we found the camera.  It was in my purse.  Oops.

Days of Mosura and Roses

Everything is still on hold with the renovation stuff, so here's a post about the very interesting scientific things going on lately.  I think I'll do the pretty stuff first and then the gross/bizarre/furry-and-bug-eyed stuff.  Stuff, stuff, stuff - someone help me come up with new nouns.

So, first.  These pics are a few weeks old, but remember when I got super excited about the roses lining Borough Hall?  Regardez:

This is like 1/8 or even less of the roses on either side of the
plaza leading up to the big post office building.  Nice, huh?

Here are some closeups.  These were taken with my cellphone, which apparently does some funky stuff with colors in extreme beautiful sunset-light:

Doesn't it look kind of overexposed or something?  And the weird thing is that the leaves look pretty normal.  In this next one the rose itself looks kind of normal, but the leaves are all glowy:

Hooray for flowers!  Oh, and the linden trees are in bloom near us.  Yum yum.

Onto the other stuff.  Tonight on my way home, I was looking in my bag trying to find my keys, and when I got to the front doorway, look who was there to say hi to me!

Mosura!!!  This was super cool, as lately I've developed a mini-obsession with Mothra (and with the Japanese pronunciation of it, sans dental fricatives).  I mean, check it out: she's female, takes three forms (egg, caterpillar, moth), and is "one of the more powerful kaiju of the Toho universe," according to Wikipedia.  She's kick-ass, and she's on our front door!

Long legged shadow lady

I mean, my parents always told me that my legs were long in proportion to my body, but this is ridiculous.

But seeing this shadow (and having my cameraphone on hand) made me think about these kind of little things that often go unnoticed, at least by me.  I mean, how cool are shadows?  At least the ones that make you look like you're on stilts?  I am all leg, baby!

In that same vein, recently I have been trying to make a point of literally stopping to smell the roses, the lilacs, the linden trees (not in bloom yet), all that stuff.  Real roses in someone's front garden, or the lovely ones along Borough Hall in Brooklyn, smell amazing - so much better than those mass-produced ones from the corner store.  Hooray for spring!

Back to work

Our little family, as it were (T, Nina, me), had a nice long weekend lounging about and being decadent on Fire Island.  Beach, beer, barbecue, repeat.  The weather was really nice - a little too windy and not hot enough to be true bake-in-the-sun weather, but perfect for reading, drinking vinho verde, and practicing cartwheels.  Ahem.

So, in the opposite of what usually happens weather-wise, it was really creepy yesterday afternoon.  More pictures from the office window:

I'm not quite sure why the clouds seem so much more dramatic from this viewpoint than they usually do.  Maybe it's the nice combo of height (12th floor) + relative paucity of tall buildings in Brooklyn.  There were bizarro spots of light in the clouds, too:

[cue chorus "aaah" angels-in-the-sky-type music].

Oh.  In bummer news, we forgot to reserve the elevator for our countertop and appliance deliveries today, so it got bumped to Monday.  Disappointing - I can't wait to show you all the new fridge.  But I will try to be patient!