Friday, July 31, 2009

Home Again

I had hoped to fill this blog with pics of my final adventures but I never seemed to remember my camera. Tourism sort of fell by the wayside in favor of hi-jinks with friends. I did manage to do a few new things in between karaoke sessions a 2nd on 2nd, an impromptu Michael Jackson dance party at Fresh Salt, and playing board games at McCarren Park in Williamsburg. My very last day I went to PS1 MoMA in Queens for some contemporary art, beer, and dancing. It was a great send-off and left me missing New York more than I ever thought I would. Staying for that last month and a half was both good and bad. Good in that I managed to get a fair amount of work done and spend time enjoying myself a bit. Bad in that I got a taste of what living there would mean if I had the luxuries of time and money to really enjoy myself.

Since being home I seem to be always doing something. Yet the pace has slowed somewhat. Part of it is just the settling in aspect (and man, it's hard incorporating a studio apartment's worth of stuff into this house), and part of is just the fact that I pretty much left my social life on the east coast.

As for the fate of this blog, who knows? I'm thinking of morphing into a foodie blog devoted to my adventures in fine dining and cooking with brief sojourns into knitting projects. Thoughts?

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Memorial Day etc

Back from a very long weekend in Phoenix, AZ visiting Mary and nursing a sprained/twisted knee while I upload photos and avoid thinking about work. Given my usual knack for injury the knee should come as no surprise although to be fair I didn't fall myself. Rather I was knocked down by a very exuberant Weimaraner. See the culprit, Reilly, here with her very patient owner Max.




Despite this, and two nights with a bit too much sangria, it was a great trip. We hiked in Flagstaff on Saturday (the scene of said accident) which was a nice change of pace given that I usually only experience the desert side of AZ. Flagstaff feels more like Colorado than anything else, cool and evergreen.


Monday we went to the Chihuly exhibit at the Desert Botanical Garden. Chihuly is a glass sculptor and this exhibit was particularly gorgeous when paired with the desert flora and fauna and seen in the late afternoon sun. I took too many pics to post here but these are some of my favorites.







Now I'm back, icing my knee, swallowing painkillers, wondering if I absolutely need to go to campus today, and trying not to miss space and sky so much. I never really thought about space until I moved here and now it seems like all of my problems really come down to lack of space. Since making the decision to leave New York, I've been thinking a lot about my ideal living space and coming up empty. I like urban spaces because of the proximity to culture, good food, a variety of people etcetera. At the same time I've overdosed on crowds, dirt, and concrete. Flagstaff seems an attractive area to teach in a lot of ways. Yet I remember how small Ann Arbor felt at the end of my four years there. Chicago too seems crowded and unbearable sometimes until compared with New York in August. Then it seems very livable.

Given the nature of my work, I have to be prepared to end up anywhere and deal with it like a grown up. So for me the real quesetion isn't "What's my ideal space?" but rather "How do I cope once I'm there?"

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Yikes!

Has it really been so long. Eep! How can I possibly condense everything that happened in one short-ish post? Oh I know. Movie!!





The rest of the trip was pretty great, if somewhat stressful. My first day on my own it rained buckets so I parked myself at one the many expat coffee shops in the old quarter and read while drinking many glasses of watermelon juice.  The next day I finally ventured out on my own braving the crazy traffic. Crossing the street is terrifying in Hanoi, more terrifying in a way that riding the Se-om (motorbike taxies).  The was also pretty awful. That coupled with the crazy jetlag meant that I would walk around in 2 hour stints and then sit down someplace with air conditioning for an hour and a half.

Mikka is now stateside and plotting a new adventure in Japan and hopefully that will mean more trips for me too!


In other news...


...I've spent the last eight months rooming with Meg in the Financial District just two blocks south of the World Trade Center site.  July will find me back in Chicago to spend the year writing my dissertation, traveling to different archives, knitting, cooking, and learning how to make cheese. Oh yeah, I got BIG plans.




But that also means that this blog will no longer be about New York livin'.  Guess I'll have to find a new subtitle.