Pondering my options

As some of you may know, my employer is going through something of an identity crisis (among other things) and in the interim, before our new name was announced, our old name was removed from signage. Literally. As in: blanked out. See above.

This is what greets people as they step off the elevator on our floor. Heh. I thought I'd better take a photo of it before they put up the new sign (and honestly, I have problems remembering that "oh yeah, I work for [the new company name] now"). However, I care not what they are named as long as they still employ me, especially since my major medical coverage rocks! (While I applaud and appreciate the healthcare reform efforts in progress, I am dubious as to how much of an actual improvement the end result will really be.)

But just like my newly rebranded employer, I am trying to start looking ahead instead of rubbernecking at the past several months. Now that my LAST chemo treatment is just one week away (!!!) it feels like I can finally look further ahead than the next round. Sure, six weeks of daily (weekday) radiation treatment will be a logistical hassle (there is just no easy way to get from my home to the hospital, and the limited stop [semi-express] bus takes an hour from the office, while the express bus takes 30 minutes from the office but costs $5.50 per trip [an extra $165 total] since it is not included as part of my monthly MetroCard pass) but the end of active treatment is finally in sight! (Let's not get into my 5 years of tamoxifen pills yet -- lemme enjoy my "glow" for a bit, ok?) Plus, there will be NO NEEDLES involved, or throwing up, or fevers, or infections, or any of the other fun side effects of chemo, with the exception of increasing fatigue -- that stays.

And since that IS staying, and my treatment ends the day before the 2-day NYC AvonWalk, I am giving serious consideration to postponing my participation until next spring, when they are holding it in DC and Boston. They are holding it in other cities too, but I have friends in DC and Boston, and the Chinatown express buses can get me there for less than $20 one way. Heck, even more than one of them white-folk bus companies are getting in on the act. My AvonWalk contact (each walker is assigned a specific person they can go to for training or administrative questions) said it should not be a problem to transfer to another city's walk (I do, after all, have a REALLY good reason).

Although I know that I can walk only part of the 13-mile-a-day route, (a) I suspect that I may probably be too tired less than 24 hours after my last radiation treatment to even contemplate getting up at the crack of dawn, (b) several people have pointed out to me that the point is not to further abuse my battered system, and (c) I mentally really WANT to do the whole 26 mile route as a sort of symbolic "up yours!" to breast cancer... I just wish it didn't have to be 7 months later. Oh well.

True, I could actually train properly for it then -- since it does cover as much mileage as a marathon, actual training is involved. And also true that I could make said training part of my post-treatment weight loss regimen. (Even though Mom has quit making comments about my expanding "rice pack" region, I still notice it, and I'm not happy about it. My engineer has been very understanding and said not a single word on the subject except to respond to my discontented mutterings by pointing out that I do have some other things on my mind at the moment -- one of the many reasons why he's a treasure. But I digress. As usual.)

Gee, I guess I kind of have made up my mind, haven't I? The only question is: Boston or DC?

And now that I have FINALLY cooled off (my subway ride uptown had no air-conditioning, plus it was packed -- more body heat, oh joy -- since nothing had shown up for a while [ah, the joys of late night subway service]) and my apartment is nicely chilly from the A/C I turned on when I got home, I can finally contemplate sleep (can't sleep when I'm overheated). Added bonus: the closed windows and white noise drown out the drilling from the construction outside my window in the mornings -- 5 frakkin' YEARS and that traffic circle is still not done!

So I will leave you all with a pic of the yummy grilled shrimp salad my friend Jackie made us for dinner. She has gotten me addicted to the morbidly humorous British mini-series Jekyll (there are only 6 episodes, but I don't think my heart could take many more!) and so every week (well, we try to keep it regular) we have dinner, knit, and watch the telly. If our friend Marci joins us, then we switch to the recent BBC Doctor Who series. Was there life before DVDs or video on demand? Yes, my life is THAT exciting these days... and that's a good thing!

Zippity do dah!

Little Bubbles for my grandniece Lillian is finally finished, thanks to Mom's generous assistance with the zipper installation. Poor Mom was understandably aggravated with trying to align the stripes, since knits really want to pucker when you're sewing with them. She has informed me that from now on, I can go back to knitting buttonholes, since she ain't doing this for me again. (heh)

Despite the WRONG PATTERN INSTRUCTIONS from Knitpicks (I'm supposed to always check their pattern errata page prior to embarking on a project? really? feh! bah! and boo! ...which is why the pink stripe across the chest looks oddly short ) I think this is pretty cute, don't you?

As someone else said on their knitting blog, the insanely thin garter stitch border wants to curl up, so I think that for the next sweater, I will be making a wider border around the cuffs and edges. (I've already finished the yoke for the next one...yippee!)

Now I just need to wrap the present for the birthday party on the 9th :-)

I was going to post more info about the upcoming radiation treatments, and tonight's dinner with my friend Walter at Uncle Nick's new(er) 8th Avenue location, but I am tired and it is late, so I will save those for another day, and actually skip the food photos tonight.

Forte Baden Baden

So today I met my radiology team and liked them all. Hooray! I have not met the radiology technicians (they who will actually be zapping me every day) but since I liked the two (!) radiology oncologists & the radiology nurse I met, I'm hoping that is a good sign.

The only not so fun thing I discovered is that I am having not five but SIX weeks of radiation (5 weeks of "regular" weekday treatments + 1 week of "booster zaps")... which will begin on Tuesday, September 1st (after I get back from Seattle and my visit to my friend Margaret) and end on Friday, October 9th... the day before the 2009 NYC Avon Walk! Eeeek!

This has left me rather stressed, since radiation -- while not painful and thankfully needle-free -- by all accounts results in a cumulative sense of fatigue after a few weeks. Since I am already dealing with chemo-induced fatigue -- which has left me rather slacking in my training -- the bonus round of fatigue is extremely undesirable, especially right before I am supposed to walk 26 miles in 2 days! As Bill The Cat would say, "Ack.. Ack.. Ack!"

Speaking of fun beings named Bill, my Avon Walk buddy, Bill, who has been very sweet and supportive throughout, pointed out that I have an entirely justifiable reason for not completing the entire 26 miles, but I, however, would feel like a fraud if I raised money without putting in the miles. (Who says you have to be Catholic or Jewish to be raised with a guilt reflex? Try having a Chinese mom raised during the Second Sino-Japanese War! [better known to us Westerners as WWII in China])

Speaking of Mom, I will at least walk a measly 1.3 miles from the office to her home tonight -- unless it's raining when I leave (and hopefully also 1.3 miles back to work tomorrow morning).

And where there is Mom, thoughts naturally turn to vast quantities of unhealthy but extremely delicious FOOD... which brings me to Saturday night's group dinner at Forte Baden Baden... a Korean beer hall that I am so going back to at some point!

With no English signage (or I think even a street number on the building) and a location on the 2/F in the middle of Koreatown, it did feel almost like being back in Hong Kong. Finding it is a challenge for the uninitiated as I defy you to figure out where the entrance is in this streetscape.

My sweetie and his WingTsun class all went there after their exams on saturday. (When I say exams, think along the colored belt system of grades in karate.) Their sifu (teacher/sensei) also invited SOs along, so I got to hang out with a bunch of buff guys (and one female instructor whose handshake nearly crushed my fingers -- before you think of various unflattering stereotypes, she is a petite and attractive woman with zero body fat -- her hubby and I represented the rest of us mere mortals).

We attacked the following dishes at BBNY --

Their signature deep-fried rotisserie chicken with super-crispy fries... so yummy: crispy skin and moist flesh (I'm drooling just thinking about it...)

Rice cakes in spicy (kimchi?) sauce with vegetables...

Deep fried shrimp (hiding a deep fried green pepper ring/slice underneath)...

Far side: Sweet & sour deep fried pork with fruit (but it tastes different than Chinese sweet and sour dishes). Near side: deep fried beef and onion rings... Are you sensing a theme here?

Somehow, I seem to have misplaced the photo of the Don Ka Su -- deep fried pork cutlets, similar to Japanese tonkatsu, but with mushroom sauce. One of the guys said it reminded him of wiener schnitzel, since it was breaded and the pork was pounded flat.

We then headed off to Red Mango for a tasty, healthy (and remorsefully lo-cal) dessert. I found their yogurt tastier than Pinkberry, and rate the pomegranate and tangomonium flavors best. MY engineer got the pomegranate (which has POM Wonderful juice), which I liked a teeny bit better than my tangomonium w/ bits of fresh mango.

Okay, time to get me some Mom-cookin'... hungry and tired (low blood sugar will do that to ya)....

Cookie quest, continued

So here's the visual chronicle of Cookie Quest, Pt. 2 -

The dough after 18 hours in the fridge, prior to my heading out to dinner last night -- dunno if you can tell, but it got quite a bit darker...

Even darker, after a total of 36 hours in the fridge...(pardon the blue tint -- that from the sun hitting my Tupperware bowl, not the refrigeration)...

Prior to going into the freezer (so I can bring 16 of these down to my sweetie's mom during our next joint visit -- she wants to taste-test this recipe)...

Prior to heading into the oven (the knife is for scale)...

The final result (that huge cookie took 8 bites to kill off... yes, I made that sacrifice for scientific curiosity ;-P)
Yep, these are definitely the best cookies I have ever made. While this could be due to the 3 cups of chocolate chips (!) I chose to believe it is because of the sustained refrigeration, as the NY Times article seems to indicate the longer the fridge time, the better. Since I am a fan of chewy (vs. crunchy) cookies, this combination of crispy edges surrounding a soft & fluffy center = bliss.

Let's backtrack a little and start off with yesterday morning, when I talked myself into a 3-mile walk to the 58th Street location of Crate & Barrel with thoughts of buying their cookie dough scooper (which looks and costs the same as their spring-loaded ice cream scooper, albeit with a smaller capacity).

Although I did indeed walk there, I managed to restrain myself from buying it with the idea of going to the nearby Bed Bath & Beyond to buy the Oxo medium cookie dough scooper. Good call, as I now adore the Oxo, going so far as to submit my first Amazon product review and now I covet Oxo small (2 tsp) cookie scooper. (My reasons are described lovingly in the review, if you're curious.)

So okay, I wound up buying some other stuff -- 2 leakproof 1-cup Snapware lunch containers (note to self: reacquaint myself with proper portion sizes!!!) and an $8 glass pitcher for my fridge (I like the one I got for work so much I decided I needed another one at home) -- but that was just $15 more. Plus I had a coupon for 20% off the Oxo (i.e., the most expensive item among my purchases).

I continued my walk with a trip to the public library for some food science books -- Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (by the same author as the molecular gastronomy book I borrowed from my engineer's mom) and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Despite what their zippy new online catalog said, What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained turned out to be missing, so I placed a reserve request for it.

Rewarding myself with a late lunch at Vino proved a wise choice: their Melanzane Della Nonna (thinly sliced baked eggplant in tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan cheeses) was delicious, as was their hearts of palm & avocado salad, and mixed berry tart (blackberries & currants over a thin slice of wafer/cake, above a light & fluffy ricotta/mascarpone filling and buttery crust).

Having an empty stomach and slight dehydration, I skipped over their vast assortment of Italian wines (hence their name) but the atmosphere was fabulous: mellow, breezy, and very Italian -- these 2 gentlemen having espresso typify, along with the Liverpool v. Thailand soccer game on TV (1-1 tie, by the way -- I'm impressed: thought the Thais would get creamed). And the small plates allowed for happy sampling without overstuffing myself.

Tomorrow morning, I am off to meet my radiation oncologist, a/k/a she who will be in charge of my upcoming radiation treatment, most likely beginning in September. Although the treatment itself should be less distressing on my body than chemo, the logistics are rather more brutal: it's at the hospital instead of the breast cancer building (i.e., 2 more avenues east), and it will be every weekday for 5 weeks. Oh well, it's a sign of progress, eh? And on the bright side, Vino is nearby: maybe I'll have lunch there!

Choco-Chip Cookie Quest

So on Monday, due to vacation schedule logistics, we are having an office party trifecta: my boss' birthday, our admin Vonetta's birthday (or as I call her: our Trinidadian Radar O'Reilly -- sidenote: my youngest niece was born after M*A*S*H went off the air in 1983 --> there's an entire generation who would have NO IDEA what I'm talking about! although this satiric song warbled by the cast seems still appropriate 25 years later, now that we've been in Iraq and Afghanistan for...HOW long?!), and my coworker Dennis 20th anniversary with the company (yes, 20 -- my mind be boggling -- albeit we will technically be working for a different company soon).

Since the 2 birthday ladies are supposed to be "surprised" (after this many years, a party is not exactly a shocker, but still...tradition) only Dennis got to express a menu preference: chocolate chip cookies. This has motivated me to finally try the recipe for chewy (not crispy, oh no) chocolate chip cookies from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook. (They have a separate recipe for crispy cookies.)

Although they have many recipes on their website, none are exactly the same as the one from the book (which makes sense, or why else fork over moolah?) but this one comes somewhat close to the cookbook version: King Arthur's soft chocolate chip cookie recipe. Besides some minor differences in sugar types, the key change is that the web version omits the crucial step of refrigerating the dough overnight (although their blog did give me some interesting suggestions on freezing cookie dough).

Between the King Arthur's Bakers' Banter blog post and the July 2008 New York Times Dining article on their concurrent searches for THE ultimate chocolate chip cookie, I have been convinced of the superiority of refrigerating cookie dough prior to baking, the longer the better. (The New York Times article explains the food chemistry behind the various ingredients and techniques and has made me keen to track down some books on food science from the good old NYPL, in addition to the book I recently borrowed from my sweetie's mom, Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor.)

We'll see how this all turns out. (This may be old hat to experienced bakers, but it's an exotic new world to me.) In the meantime, cookies in progress....

The drippiest cookie dough I've ever seen, pre-fridge:


3 cups of semisweet chocolate chips -- you may notice slightly different colors since this recipe used A BAG AND A HALF of chips, (granted, it's supposed to make 4 dozen cookies, but still!) -- one bag of Hershey's, and half a bag of Guittard:


Really, it's more like a mountain of chips with some dough to hold them together:


To be continued...

Orange, red, and blue

Orange is for pumpkin puree. (See "before" photo, at right)

Blue is for blueberries in the pumpkin blueberry muffins (Mets colors -- Hi, Margaret!) which has too much sugar in it -- Americans are nuts: I will be revising the recipe downward to 1.5 or 1.0 cups of sugar next time. Sheesh. But I suppose better too sweet than too bland... Then again, the recipe claims 15 muffins, while I got 20 out of the batch.

Red is for the FLASHING ERROR LIGHT on my computer. Apparently my battery has died. Permanently. Considering it's lasted me 23 months, this seems to be 9 months longer than the average customer review on the Dell website would seem to indicate.

So while I'm cranky at having to buy another battery ($135 OEM via Dell, $45 non-OEM on ebay) I guess I had a less crappy battery than most Dell Vostro 1500 owners. Lucky me. (Did I mention that the laptop occasionally doesn't recognize when the AC supply is plugged in? THAT'S been since day 1, as Hilary would say.)

I will console myself with (a) more blueberries at my local supermarket (2 pints for $3! Score!) and (b) a console table (heh... I punned, I know -- sorry). Unsurprisingly for a librarian, my books have overflowed my shelves, and so I have purchased the 'Oxford 47" Open Console Table' in "Merlot" from Home Decorators Outlet. Also unsurprisingly, I have gone cheap: a solid wood table for $83 WITH shipping.

Believe it or not, it is actually a replacement for an even more inexpensive pair of LACK tables from IKEA which I inherited from my friend Ellen years ago. For those of you who have been in the cave of clutter that is my home, you can visualize it next to my couch, facing you when you enter the apartment. (Get this: my couch, the Green Monster, is 45" deep. Heh.)

The "Merlot" finish should go with the wood carving in my couch frame, Ethan Allen's Pratt sofa which is shown in a lighter wood on the website. (It being my first grown up furniture purchase -- a whole 5 years ago! -- I did not realize that not only do you get to choose the upholstery, you can choose the wood finish too!)

Okay, time to go to sleep, so that I can continue to remain employed in order to afford this schizophrenic consumerism. Ciao!

Epilogue

So this round wasn't TOO bad -- a floating feeling of queasiness that hangs over me like the London fog, but no active, um, nauseated actions (shall we say). And I did sleep 16 out of 24 hours yesterday (yes, I was just a barrel of laughs for my engineer as a companion yesterday), but consider the alternatives.

In fact, I felt well enough last night to lobby for a visit to our favorite joint in Jersey City (I jokingly call it our Cheers since everyone in there really does know our name), where I had been pining for the gigundo bacon-wrapped scallops special for the past week. Note the size of the lemon wedge vis a vis scallops. Note that 10 of those suckers = 1 lb. Yummm... So huge that I didn't even have room for tartufo (!!!) for dessert, though I did nibble on a tiny bit of my sweetie's Italian cheesecake. Their food is simple but well executed, and you can ask for "rearrangements" of the ingredient combinations a la WW, so my engineer has created his own perennial favorite: fried calamari over linguini in a spicy hot marinara sauce.

And the night before one of my book clubs met for dinner at El Castillo de Jagua, on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side. Since the book is about a Dominican family, it seemed only fitting to meet at a Dominican restaurant, and this one sounded tasty, casual, and cheap -- the perfect trifecta!

The food was delicious but not exactly photogenic (brown stews tend to be that way) but I will show this photo of the Friday night pepper steak special which will give you an idea of the mammoth portions.

Once I again, I could not fit in dessert -- since we also ordered mofongo and sweet maduros for the table -- but my fellow book members did order tres leches cake and flan.

Okay, get this: I was so full that not only did I take home the leftover (mletingly tender) chicken stew I ordered but I did not even try a TASTE of the other desserts. Ponder that.

So considering the vast amount of food p*rn I have just posted, I guess you could say I'm not feeling so bad. Heh.

Round 7

So for some reason I've been having a craving to make blueberry muffins. Et voila! My local supermarket across the street (how convenient is THAT?) helpfully obliged me with a sale on blueberries: 2 pints for $3.00 and of good quality!

I used a recipe from The Joy of Cooking (did you know they have their own website? I didn't) which my sweetie's mom gave to me (she was appalled when she heard I did not have a copy). This recipe advised adding more oil if I planned to eat/serve these over the course of a few days instead of immediately. (It also told me to reduce the sugar/brown sugar from 2/3 cup to 1/3 if I were to add blueberries -- I missed that footnote: whoops! --> extra sugar)

However, changing the amount of oil from 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup turned out to be a wee bit excessive: it soaked completely through the paper liners and left little pools of oil in the muffin pan. (It also made 15 muffins instead of 12, possibly because I don't have the GIANT "Texas-sized" muffin pans.) We'll see how it holds up when I return home late tomorrow night, since I am staying at my mom's tonight, post-chemo. Maybe I'll freeze some...

That was yesterday morning, when I woke up for some unknown reason at 6:30am (again) and decided, "So hey, what the heck, I'll make muffins." Last night was my monthly Princeton Women's book club meeting, where I had yummity lobster ravioli at Cucina Cafe, in the MetLife Building above Grand Central, or the Pan Am Building to us old-timers (hey, did you know the "M" and "L" on the MetLife sign each weigh TWO TONS?!).

Apparently, it is now the Nova Scotia Lobster Festival in NYC this summer (May 22nd - Sept 6th). Since I had just had scallop risotto the night before with my friend Sam at Le Zie in Chelsea, I opted for the 5 immensely plump lobster ravioli (~$14) while two of my friends had lobster risotto ($14.50) and our fourth had broiled lobster with butter ($19). Everyone was happy with their food, so I may need to wander over there again this summer, since our next book club meeting isn't until Sept. 17th (just like schoolkids, we have summer vacation too).

Tomorrow night, I am meeting with some other friends for a new and different book club at El Castillo de Jagua in the Lower East Side. Since we are reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, it seemed only fitting that we meet at a Dominican restaurant. The book is quite gripping but also a bit frustrating, since it uses many Spanish/Dominican idioms without translation or explication. Sure, I can gather positive/negative connotations from context (and the remnants of four years of high school Spanish) but I lose the precise flavor of the insult/praise. I mean hey, if a book requires its own annotated glossary/website to help us poor non-Latinos out...at least I have enough comic book geekiness to get all of THOSE references. So instead of stopping after every page to look up stuff, I've taken to writing down or highlighting unfamiliar terms for looking up later.

Speaking of the book, I need to finish the 2nd half (!) but since I am going in for chemo today (my penultimate round! wahooo!) that's usually at least a few hours of waiting around. Time to go shower and get ready... ciao!

Section 310

Okay, I admit it: I love photo stitching software. This photo was merged from a bunch of shots I took Sunday with my dinky cellphone cam. We were in Section 310 at Citi Field, otherwise known as the medium blue section up near first base on the seating map.

Ciao!

Oops

So yesterday was a beautiful day -- 70s, breezy, sunny -- a perfect day to spend at the new Citi Field and watch the mets actually WIN. I got 4 tickets the through a vendor at work (at the insanely expensive 2nd deck: Excelsior level = $138 face value per ticket! the pricing matrix is mindboggling!) and took my engineer, his best friend and his best friends young sun to the new ballpark, which is pretty spiffy, with lots of womens rooms (heh -- something the American Restroom Assn takes very seriously, as noted in this NY Times article).

And unlike the new Yankees stadium (those bastidages, as one former coworker used to say euphemistically) they do not utterly extort you for a hot dog or sausage sandwich. Jimmy (my sweetie's friend) pointed out that his treating all four of us to a round of wieners and drinks (including a beer for himself) was only [ ! ] $40, whereas at an NFL game it would have easily been $60. (He is a rabid Giants fan, so he would know. If only I could find a photo of him during the 2007 Giants-Dolphins game in London: he and his friends were photographed by the tabloids, covered completely in blue and white body paint, spelling G-I-A-N-T-S, one letter per guy. Now visualize this nice NJ boy trying to explain to a Mayfair cosmetician WHY he needed buckets of blue and white eyeshadow...Heh)

It turned out that Al, owner of the harf was also there yesterday. If only I had known! I could have said hi before he moved to Chicago this month. Of course, since I think he was there with my ex and his other best buddy, perhaps that might have been a bit awkward...

Ironically, the famous Mets home run apple has apparently not been in use for 80 innings, but was called upon to rise twice in the 7th inning -- and failed. Apparently, according to the NY Daily News, it requires 2-1/2 minutes to reset the mechanism, and the second home run was just too quick. HA!

This resulted in much booing by the fans since they hadn't seen a homer in almost 10 games (remember: only HOME runs get it to pop up, not regular RBIs) and chanting of "Ap-ple! Ap-ple!" which finally yielded an appearance (see, right) at the bottom of the 7th. Heh.

Afterward, we drove home to Jersey City, dropped off Jimmy's son at home with his mom (Jimmy's divorced) and went to a new beer garden, Zeppelin Hall. There must be a dearth of venues in JC, because we were nearly flattened by the stroller brigade there!

My sweetie and left Jimmy to his third round and we went off to dinner at a cute little tacqueria which hates ersatz Mexico food such as fajitas (they have rules about what they will NOT serve there -- hee!). The back garden was delightful, but we were still a little hungry, having had only 2 little tacos each.

Since the countermen were overrun with an influx of new customers, we left and went to another place, the ever tasty Saigon Cafe and had dinner (well, okay -- more appetizers) and a show: a trucker was illegally going down this street, and well, there are reasons certain roads are zoned for NO TRUCKS! Please note the toppled traffic light draped over the truck. The restaurant owners called the cops, and there was much to do. If you click the image a larger one will open, the dangling wires (!) are more apparent. See? Dinner and a show!

Initiation to the tribe

So this weekend was the annual 4th of July blowout BBQ my sweetie's mom throws. Her family has assured me that really, the vast quantities of food and 25 or so people are really (really!) a scaled back version of her usual extravaganza. Uh huh. If this is what she's like when she's 80, I imagine that she was absolutely overhwelming in her youth. Heh.

The photo below gives you some idea of the scope, bearing in mind that a bunch of people are off camera. And oh yeah, that white glare in the upper right corner is part of the tent they set up every year. I told you -- this is a serious shindig.



Last year I had only been seeing my sweetie for 2 months and so was understandably not present. This year I helped with the prep and cleanup. Isn't the fruit salad pretty?

The watermelon "basket" was really cute and carved by my engineer's niece. The stars are not just a fun decorative touch, but they're also practical: like a bowling ball, they provide finger holes for gripping the lid. (As I said, many years of practice.)

And in the evening, we had comfy seats for the fireworks display thrown by the nearby town of Beachwood, NJ (a/k/a "The Pearl in the bed of Toms River"). No jostling crowds, just us and the neighbors.

Ironically, I found out today that my boss and I probably "saw" each other that night and didn't even know it: she and her family were also visiting their beach house which is nearby, and had watched the same fireworks from the river in their boat. (See pic below.)

The photo at the top of this post is of some of my sweetie's mom's flowers. I have no idea what they are but a co-worker who gardens says they're tiger lilies. I just thought they were pretty (yes?) and unusual. My engineer's dad says she orders these colors from a nursery in Maine (or somewhere in the great white north, I forget exactly). She also has a vegetable garden in the backyard and wages daily battle against the bunnies (did you know you can buy fox urine to discourage them?) who find her veggies just as tasty as her family does. Heh.



And speaking of animals, I have been fascinated with a some virtual ones the past few days. For example, this electronic panda bank (they also have piggy banks) makes me bow to to the Japanese in their infinite ability to make ridiculously cute gadgets, since it is not just a piggy bank, but also an (ta da!) alarm clock! It recognizes coins from any currency apparently, but since I haven't figured out how to buy iPanda from it's Japanese manufacturer, I guess I'll never know firsthand.

I have no idea exactly how I wandered across the iPanda (sigh of longing) -- as with many moments of internet digging, the path eludes me now -- but it probably has something to do with SmartyPig, which I read about in a recent New York Times article.

Since my mortgage will be adjusting downward (woohoo!) and the current capital assessment fee for our condo complex is ending, I will have (in theory) extra cashflow each month. Rather than applying it to my mortgage (really, when you have a jumbo mortgage -- and every mortgage in Manhattam is basically a jumbo mortgage according to the rest of the United States) do the words "drop in the bucket" ring a bell?

And if I simply left it in my checking or savings account, that extra bit of dosh would magically evaporate somehow, you betcha (sidebar: that woman is NUTS! can't wait to read It Came From Wasilla in this month's Vanity Fair & hey, am I the only one unmoved by the endless Jacko hoopla??) so instead I'm going to have it automatically deposited in a 2.75% interest savings account at SmartyPig.

And in a final digression (and the probable reason I wound up wandering across iPanda), did you know the history behind the term "piggy bank?" I leave you with this explanation which has some neat photos.

Carrots and sticks

Look! Something to combine 2 of my favorite pasttimes: food porn AND yarn porn!

Those 2 sandwiches and carrots are actually knitted items currently on display at the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. It is indeed a very pleasantly designed place, stocking not just their standard all-synthetics-all-the-time products, but the recently introduced "LB Collection" yarns -- upscale organic and/or natural fiber yarn lines such as cashmere.

I went there tonight to buy yarn for the Little Bubbles sweater I'm going to make for my friend Margaret's future son (or as I like to call him whilst he is as yet unnamed: XY).

See? Aren't they nice? The hank is one of their organic cotton yarns, while the skeins are from their cotton bamboo line. Not only are they all machine washable (natch, it is for a baby after all) but they're all incredibly soft. So okay, the organic cotton is technically hand wash, but I say... into the machine it goes!

And regarding Margaret, I am just giddy with delight: I have used American Airline frequent flyer miles to book tickets to visit her at the end of August! Woohoo!

It all started because her husband invited me to her baby shower sometime in August, whose date is still being negotiated. While all that was going on, it occurred to me that "Hey! I can just go visit her ANYWAY, regardless of when the shower is!" My chemo will be done (FINALLY) by late August, but my daily radiation treatments will not have started yet. Plus, I have (or rather, had) 169,000 miles on AA, so I can burn through 50,000 of those for round trip business class tickets without batting an eye. Yippee!

Yes, it took me a while, but I realized I needed something fun to look forward to, since I wouldn't exactly call my disability leave a VACATION, and I was otherwise trapped in place until after radiation ends in early October. (Cessation of chemo, while desirable, is not exactly an active "reward", but merely the ending of a round of biological punishment.) Since my boss has been generous enough to treat my endless disappearances for treatment and aftereffects as sick time and not vacation days, I still have 15 days awaiting me this year. Her exact words were, "No, you save your vacation to go somewhere fun after you finish all this [treatment stuff]." So hey, I'm taking her advice!

Speaking of upcoming Little Bubbles sweaters, here's my progress to date with my great-niece (grand-niece?) Lillian's birthday present. Although it looks different from the sample photos on the Knitpicks site, and I changed some of the instructions (in one case, accidentally, and in another, deliberately) it still looks pretty darn cute.

Along those lines, I hate dealing with buttons and buttonholes, so I am going to use a zipper instead. Besides, I happen to think their trim is a wee bit narrow to fit buttons in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I mean, would YOU want to deal with 1/4" buttons (should they even be available) while a garment was on a wriggling baby?

Working on this, I have already mentally starting revising the design/instructions for little XY's sweater to be more to MY liking. Heck, I might even try for the goofy hat in the kit, since the Lion yard adds up to over 1,000 yards, and the Knitpicks kit onlytotals around 500.

In fact, since I am knitting the 18-month size, I doubt there will even be enough Knitpicks Comfy Sport yarn left for a hat after I finish the sweater.

And finally, bringing the p*rn full circle to food, I give you a photo of the yummy Dean & Deluca cupcakes my friend Ellen brought over earlier this week: Banana, red velvet, marble, and blackout. The were all scrumptious, but the blackout cupcake even had pudding in the center. YUM!