Love Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry For Posting Photos of Him Kissing a Camel

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

While in Tennessee, we stayed at a B&B cum farm called Ocoee Mist. We affectionately termed it Llamatown due to the (unphotographed and kinda shy) llamas on premises. Also on premises:

two camels
some donkeys
a horse (maybe more)
a slew of goats
a potbellied pig
three dogs
a cat (or two)
two peacocks (one dead and stuffed, one alive and shy)
some parrots
some other birds not native to Tennessee
occasionally some guinea hens from the neighbor's farm

If this sounds a little crazy to you, let me assure you that it is. In the most wonderful of ways. I hope Kevin and Carole know they're a little eccentric and that if it ever gets back to them that I said as much that they take is kindly. Because they were amazingly nice people who ran a beautiful property and served one helluva breakfast, but it's not every day you encounter people with a hobby farm full of llamas, camels, and peacocks.

Mel the camel, took a special shining to devoted partner, even before we had the apples. My narrative couldn't possibly compete with the evidence, so please, enjoy the slideshow. In the interest of fairness, I included an unflattering picture of myself being gnawed by a donkey.

The One Reason I'm Sad We Never Lived In Brooklyn

Last night something unusual happened: I was double-booked. Now I am not an event-attender. Most evenings find me cooking something, knitting something, and staring aimlessly at the magic picture producing box in the living room. I'm trying to be better about that. Yet, the when it rains adage has been proving quite true recently as I will also be double-booked on Saturday. But we're talking about last night.

The evening started (and ended too soon) at an event for Aidan on the Upper East Side. Held in a model apartment in a new condo, it was a terrific event, very well attended, and filled with the kinds of people I may have enjoyed talking to more had time permitted. Also, like an idiot, I left my copy of Aidan's book at home, preventing me from getting it signed (I hope when next I see her she might be kind enough to overlook my hasty exit from her event and sign my book anyway). As penance for skipping out, I just purchased the book of the other speaker, Jes Gordon. Nog and Noggin' will never look the same.

And while I was predictably out of place as nearly the only woman without kids/a JD/a horking huge fingerrock, I found myself perfectly ably to nod politely at discussions about school admissions and apartment hunting. It was the only room I've been in for a long time where, when I told people I lived in Greenwich, I got supportive looks as opposed to giggles (for the record, I'm still a giggler about it).

After a quick cab ride to Grand Central where I met devoted partner, we were off to Brooklyn for Clay's photo show. At Habana Outpost in Fort Greene. AKA my new favorite place that I will be making lots of excuses to visit again. It was a great turnout with a couple of college friends not glimpsed in person in many years, and a high school and college friend. Wives were met. The vibe was decidedly less intimidating even though the room was no less filled with successful professionals and handsome people. Maybe it was the Cuban sandwich. Billed as the best Cuban sandwich in NY, it does not disappoint. And I didn't even order one. Devoted partner, in fairness, asked me if I wanted anything and I demurred only to devour, with little shame, half of the sandwich he ordered. (If I'm being honest, I could eat one right now.)

And Clay's photos looked great. Yeah, I stalk him on flickr and see the photos that accompany his blog posts, but there is, indeed, something different about seeing the photos printed and on a wall. They seem somehow more real and therefore more impressive - and I though his photos were pretty damn good as mere pixels on my screen.

But when we ended up on the 12:25am train headed home, having missed the preceding train by about 30 seconds (you know what is not interesting at night? Grand Central), I realized I was zonked. We had the Amy over to the house for part of the weekend, an event at which a stunning amount of alcohol was consumed, and until we leave next Friday, we are wall-to-wall booked. I know a lot of people live entire lives like this, but boy are we ever out of practice.

At least I made time to floss.

Stamford

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

I think that I will forever be a person with snobbish attitudes about what constitutes a city. I realize that I could use a different set of vocabulary to make things easier and transfer my notions of 'city' to 'megalopolis' thereby preserving the word 'city' for such places as Lincoln, Charleston, and Tucson which I am sure follow the dictionary definition. But I'm not really going to do that leaving me to call places 'town' that really are more than that. It's just that I don't even consider Los Angeles a city as it is more a sprawl than anything else and has never had a center. Hong Kong is a city; London is a city; Chicago is a city. You other places? I don't know what you are.

Stamford, therefore, is very much a town. A town that plays host to UBS and R(u)BS and some other glass menagerie dwellers. It has a couple blocks that could be called a downtown plaza, a shopping mall, and a host of undifferentiated condos. I have known of Stamford for many years because it was where devoted partner and I traveled when we had need of items Greenwich didn't provide. Devoted partner, a Greenwich native, knew the bars, the Mongolian restaurant (sadly defunct), and the various houses of ill repute. But we never spent much time in Stamford.

Recently, however, we have made a couple of forays that led me to a new found appreciation of the town. I don't know from whence it developed, but Stamford has some pretty spectacular architecture, from a strictly kitsch point of view. Take this, my favorite building in Stamford, the one I never feel I adequately capture. Does this not fill you with Saarinen JFK terminal bliss? Come on, look closer.

It makes me want to go out and buy tons of impractical furniture. It makes me want to paint things obstreperous colors. It makes me want to wear a white minidress. It makes me want to drive a vintage Jaguar. In short, if you can't tell, I love this building. One day, I might love it so much as to find out what's inside.

So when work yet again took devoted partner's Sunday, I decided to head on out to Stamford and practice with my camera a bit. I was shocked by one thing: the streets were entirely empty. It was a beautiful Sunday morning, the kind of Sunday morning which, in a city, would see young couples pushing strollers and people lining up for brunch. Stamford was so deserted that I found myself grateful that the people who were out and about were patrolmen. I had hoped to take pictures of people, something I am notoriously crappy at (why must you be so blurry, people?), but there just weren't any.

As I rounded the corner back onto the main drag, I was quite pleased to see church letting out as it at least gave me the opportunity to try to catch better people pictures (still failing, methinks switching to manual and jacking up my shutter speed might be the answer). But the people dispersed immediately. They returned to their cars without stopping for brunch or coffee or a leisurely walk. Whatever else was going to happen on this beautiful Sunday, it wasn't going to happen in Stamford.

And I think that's where I come to the problem of calling places cities. A city is alive all the time. Stamford may thump to the beat of the markets Monday-Friday from 7am to 7pm; it might even have some thumping on the weekend nights, but it doesn't sustain its pulse. Places like Dallas, which have a downtown business district, but where most people live in surrounding suburbs, are different. Life, the life that happens between families and friends, happens elsewhere.

The downtown is a utility, a place for work and shopping, but not a place for being together. So I don't know what to call it. There are people who live in Stamford proper, the neighborhood boasts these dramatically ugly, yet fascinating, round tenements and, as mentioned before, cookie cutter condos and rentals for the singles who UBS and RBS, but the areas surrounding both types of lodging were empty. And, frankly, that made me a little sad. Because the more I walked around Stamford the more I saw the twins opportunity and failure. The number of empty storefronts for rent and the number of cute places that were still open spoke to great potential.

The town of Stamford has done a great job with greenspace and gleaming sidewalks and buildings. I wanted there to be more cafes with outdoor seating and people in the seats because here I saw something cute just waiting to be realized. Last summer we visited the farmer's market that was in one of the squares and after my morning peramble, its problems were brought into focus: very few vendors, several not even selling their own wares, and fewer people in attendance. Stamford, for reasons a citygirl like me finds incomprehensible, doesn't make it as a hub. People who live in the area don't want to go there in their free time. They'll got for the Target, but they won't stay for long. It's not hip, it's not desirable. But, for me, it has certainly made a good argument for repeat visits.

Where The Wild Things Are

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Originally uploaded by reallyct

So something you might not know about me is that I'm not opposed, either in theory or practice, to the outdoors. Sure, there are things that exist in the outdoors, bees, opossums, drifters, that I'm not especially partial to, but oftentimes the outdoors is pretty and I like pretty things. I also have this fancy new camera which I need to learn how to use. And it is far nicer to take pictures of pretty things than to snap shots of, for example, your collection of dustbunnies.

With this in mind, I decided to find myself some attractive outdoors for a little photo practice. I looked at a google map of my house and found the nearest bits of green which denote nature. About 30 minutes from my house is the Ward Pound Ridge park. It looked quite green on the google map.

And in fact it was greenish in person. And by green, I mean nature-y. It had the requisite trees and hills and rocks and water. Armed with my camera, two tripods, and a phone that probably wouldn't have gotten service any way, I proceeded to hike. It wasn't the loveliest of days and there was quite a bit of precipitation on the ground from one of the many deluges favored by our region of late, but it mattered not, for I had wisely chosen boots as opposed to Converse. For I am not an enemy of nature. Yea, I am pro nature and am quite at home amidst the wonders of creation.

Wait. Did you hear that?

That was clearly not a nature sound. That was very very very much a human sound. A male human sound. And, while it was just momentary, I heard crazy in that sound. And now that I've paused, I see another person. A male person. Most likely crazy. And only about 50 yards behind me.

I should pause now and say that bears, rabid deer, snakes, poisonous toads, none of these frightens me. Because they are part of nature and nature is good. Other people in nature, however, are, with practically zero exceptions dangerous crazy people of the I-am-coming-to-rape-and-dismember-you variety and should be avoided at all costs. And, as luck would have it, one was less than half a football field behind me.

Fortunately, my cunning survival skills were at the ready. The first, and most important thing was to put down the camera because there would clearly be more moss to photograph later at a time when I did not need to protect my person from raping, and get to higher ground. I should be able to see my attacker from above (where I could rain rocks down on his head etc.). As I scampered uphill, I kept my eyes peeled for nature's weapons: pointy sticks and rocks for braining. A pointy stick would be preferable, but in a pinch, I felt certain I could hold a rock in my fist (roll of quarters style) and fend off my attacker with my Mohammed Ali-like grace and agility.

I guess now would be as good a time as any to explain my particular brand of hubris. In pretty much any fight I give myself at least even odds. This is why I don't fear small (under 6 foot) sharks, black bears, pythons, and the religious right. I figure that in a showdown with any of them, I stand as good a chance, if not better, of being victorious. There is no basis for this in fact, but my thoughts are: if the shark is about my size, I'm sure I could inflict as much damage on him as he could on me. Devoted partner assures me this is ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE, but I think he's just being a worrywart. So, even though I only caught a glimpse of the crazy man in the woods on his way to chop off my body parts, I am completely positive that with a pointy stick at hand, I could incapacitate him prior to losing any limbs I really care about (I also spend no time wondering exactly how much blood a person could lose before she would be a less effective fighting machine - math is for people not as primed for a fight as I).

So the stick in the first picture was what I settled on (albeit long after I had lost sight and sound of my attacker - presumably he found a nice squirrel to torture). And, I won't joke, for a good fifteen minutes I was in super fight/flight mode. My pulse was up, I tasted metal, and I prepped myself heavily for the coming battle. I reached high ground quickly and surveyed the area below, assessing all possible routes of ascent. The good news is that when the threat of imminent ouchiness was deemed neutralized, I was up on top of high ground able to look at the pretty bits of nature that surrounded me.

I can't decide, in retrospect, if hiking alone in an unfamiliar place is a horridly stupid idea, or if thinking that what essentially amounted to a solo walk on a marked trail in a state park is a stupid idea is an even stupider idea. The good news is that I found a pretty and large (4000 acres) green area nearby that I can explore further as the weather improves. And I can arm myself with the greatest weapon of them all: devoted partner.

Thursday Nopropos

The miracle of power has distracted me from most things. It was simply Promethean in its significance. I could see while I peed. Truly amazing stuff. It just makes me wonder how people in olden times even survived.

I don't, as a rule, hand out money to people on the subway, pretty much regardless of their pitch. However, I'll admit that the school kids selling candy DURING SCHOOL HOURS kinda pisses me off. The level of math they will use to make change from a five strikes me as less apt to help them advance in life than the math they would use if they were in school. Which makes me want to make my donation predicated on their ability to demonstrate that it's ok that they're cutting school to sell candy. Like, if they could tell me the chemical symbol for salt; or tell me the formula for the area of a circle; or who the 3rd US president was. And I think I chose easy ones (originally I was going to ask for the quadratic equation before realizing that I never remember it either and that it most likely isn't even taught in NY public schools).

I am seriously considering a mildly radical hair change (is that an oxymoron?). I need to solicit more opinions . Now I realize this girl is blond and skinny, has unbelievably huge eyes, and is probably Danish - so we're not sharing a lot of background similarities, but I've been wanting long, face-softening bangs for quite some time and I'm at a point in my life where my philosophy is firmly in the, "hey, it's not like the hair won't grow back," position. Devoted partner, with the caveat that under no circumstances should the brown hair be blondified, voiced no initial objections. Also her hair looks super awesome when she puts it up (yes, I also realize that this girl's job is to be beautiful and that someone spent quite a bit of time on her hair).

I bought Ad Hoc at Home after seeing pretty much every food blogger I read cook something from it and rave. I finished paging through it yesterday while sitting outside my house (where there was light) and I think I might be firmly committed to making everything in the book. It all looked good and it all looked devoted partner-approved. I'm even going to make the stuff I think I won't like because I should try more things (I'm looking at you poached salmon). I can be like all the other bloggers and obsessively document it because...

Devoted partner took first prize in the anniversary pool by procuring from me the drool-worthy camera I had been talking about for months; in fact, he did one better, he procured the newer, just released model of the drool-worthy camera. The Canon Rebel T2i should arrive today or tomorrow (backordered as it was due to its supernewness). This is super exciting! Devoted partner is really rather nice to me. I should poison his food less.

And finally, also courtesy of devoted partner, this.

Delayed Gratification: A Grownup's Tale

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Neighbors decorated their bare
Japanese maple with xmas balls - love!
Originally uploaded by reallyct

I am an Econ 101 textbook in action. I am the definition of marginal propensity to consume. When I have money, I buy the things I want. When I don't have money, I don't buy much of anything. Recently devoted partner have been having conversations about how this fiscal strategy is unsound. There has been a lot of kicking and screaming and, "but I want it now!" from my corner.

But, and it pains me to confess, he's completely right.

However, this accelerated, though long past due, grownupifying could not have come at a worse time. I want a new camera, and I almost had the money for it without invading any personal savings (paltry though they may be). We decided (and I would like you to read into this a sincere tone in my voice because it is there) that a better use of my money would be to put it in a retirement account.

But I still want a new camera. A shiny DSLR so that I can learn to take better pictures.

Aha, but here's the rub. The camera won't take better pictures for me, it will merely be the tool by which I take better pictures. Enter Plan B. In Plan B, I will study in advance of getting my sweaty hands on said pricey electronic device. I will apply what I have learned to the adorable point and shoot I currently have, and in that way demonstrate to myself that my desire for a shiny camera is about wanting to step up my game, and not about having shiny things (and I do like shiny things).

But some of the lessons involve my being cold and tired. The first book I read, courtesy of best friend's holiday gift, told me I could have the fanciest camera known to man, but if I tried to take my pictures at noon, they'd always come out looking like crap. Good photos must be taken at dawn or at dusk.

For three consecutive mornings I have lain in my warm, comfy bed, looking out the window at the magic hour light and then busying myself deeper under the covers. But not this morning. This morning, I heaved myself out of the bed and into a pair of sweats, a sweater, my llbean parka of winter wilderness, and boots, and made the long trek...to my backyard. I won't lie or pretend I am harder core than I am - it was effin' freezing!

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The rose in our driveway that will not die
Originally uploaded by reallyct

I took a couple of pictures before realizing my neighborhood is not especially photogenic, and simultaneously realizing that my window of being able to walk around my neighborhood early in the morning with a tripod and not having someone call the cops on me was slowly closing.

Of the pictures I took, I got four I sort of liked. In all fairness, I let the cold get the best of me and fled for the warmer climes of my house before truly giving my picture-taking finger a workout. Now I am thinking that perhaps this needs planning. I should scout a location I would like to take pictures of at dawn and then GO THERE. I would like the weather to be a little less polar because I am a delicate and sensitive flower when it comes to the cold (the less generous among you might call this wimpy). So if you see me outside of your especially bucolic house with my camera and tripod, could you at least ask the cops to pick me up some cocoa on their way to arrest me for trespassing and criminal surveillance.

Ultimately, I will get a new camera, unless during this wake-up-at-dawn trial period I decide that no hobby is worth this kind of inconvenience, but in the meantime, I am considering this a "learning experience." Kind of how normal people don't buy everything they want everytime they want things. I'm going to try that on and see how it works.