The Compound

For the past six years, I've gone upstate for a weekend around my birthday since it's also the time of my nephew Parker's birthday. Seven years ago I spent my birthday in the hospital waiting for him to be born; he finally arrived at 4AM on March 26th, missing my birthday by mere hours (dang kids, always trying to upstage the adults).

In the last two years, he's gotten very bratty about gifts, and if he sees a GAP box he moans and groans and completely mortifies my sister. He hates getting clothes. Unfortunately for him, that's usually what I get for him. As I've told him, he grows too fast, and he can't walk around naked. This year, I got him a pair of Converse sneakers, denim colored, which he liked.

After a dinner of pizza and ice cream cake (Carvel with the chocolate crunchies) I went up to the Compound with my dad. The next morning, I saw the destruction my parents have been talking about since the blizzard that brought them 21 inches of wet, heavy snow; large tree branches down all over the yard, and smaller trees destroyed by the larger branches that fell. The yard was littered with the wooded casualties of that storm. The late February storm was a boon for the tree removal industry of Dutchess County; it was only this Saturday night that the contractor called my dad to tell him that they were coming out on Sunday to start the work, more than four weeks after the storm.

I returned back to the city today on the 12:50 train. I wanted to get back so I could pay attention to Salem and make my usual Sunday yoga class. At the Beacon train station, this group of four got on the train, and immediately two small dogs started barking. I looked up from my book, and sitting across the aisle from me were two guys, both probably 6-feet tall, dressed in fake fur squirrel costumes. One was carrying a briefcase and wearing a "I heart NY" t-shirt. One of their companions asked if I would switch seats with them since she wanted to get the Hudson River in the background of the photos. I of course complied with their request - how could I refuse two guys willing to go out in public dressed as squirrels? Lots of passengers were asking questions, and the conductor joked with them about forgetting his squirrel traps. One of the squirrels quipped that that is how he lost an uncle. There were lots of photos taken, and they ended up getting off the train at Tarrytown. Story is, they were putting together a proposal for an "I heart NY" campaign.

People like that are indeed a reason to love NYC.

Moving

My office is moving. The partners are looking for a permanent space (my fingers are crossed for the space at 39 Broadway, a 15 minute walk for me), but for the next three to six months, we will be in the same building seven floors down.

As I've been cleaning up my desk, I'm having to finally deal with all the personal items that have accumulated under my desk over the past 4 1/2 years, such as:
A picnic basket: I inherited this from an ex-coworker who was moving to New Orleans. This has been under my desk for, oh, maybe 18 months?
A single black slingback shoe: I'm hoping it's match is at home.

A pair of black patent leather heels: These have only been there for a week. By the end of the day, my feet were killing me, so I wore another pair of shoes home that had been sitting under my desk for a couple of weeks.

An insulated lunch bag: Not really sure how long that's been there.

A lamp: Not sure about that one. Maybe free swag from ICFF?

A vase: Flowers from my 40th birthday. Almost exactly a year ago.

15 CDs: Half of them are from the Score! subscription a group of friends got me for my birthday last year, so they've been under the desk for the past couple of months. Brought them in to add to my iTunes.

A 15 foot long carpet runner: This was a new addition to the under the desk collection last week. Benefits of working in an architect's office.

I swear, I'm not a hoarder.

Soda Bread, Corned Beef, and all things Irish

Growing up in an Irish community, St. Patrick's Day was a big day for celebration. When my sisters and I were in elementary school, we would give an Irish Step Dancing demonstration in all the other classes in the school. My mother cooks corned beef and cabbage for dinner every March 17th, and she would bake a soda bread in the morning (that is not reserved strictly for March 17th though). After an overindulgence of currants when I was four years old I would pick them out of the bread when ever she served it - my mother would keep boxes of them in the pantry since they were hard to find, and Erin and I split a box of them once (about 2 cups between us). That experience ruined my stomach lining for a while, and I couldn't stand the sight of the shriveled fruits for a long time - this also extended to raisins since they were so similar.

No matter what my aversion was to currants, I liked the taste that they left in the bread. Since the recipe was my Nana's (my Irish born grandmother), I always saw currants as the authentic fruit for Irish Soda Bread. To this day, when I see The Bread with raisins, I scoff and dismiss it as a pretender.

This predisposition against raisins left me surprised when my cousin Maureen was raving about her Soda Bread recipe which she had gotten from her mother (my mother's sister-in-law). I assumed it was the same recipe, but she sent it to me, and it was not. Her recipe called for raisins, and also eggs and baking powder. Shocking! I was all astonishment. It differs from my mother's recipe quite a bit, and I assume that its a totally different type of bread. We've agreed to try each other's recipes since we each swear by the one we have used for years. We'll see.

Yoga Challenge 2

It's yoga challenge time again at OM Yoga, the yoga studio where I practice. By 'challenge' they mean practicing yoga everyday, and the most challenging thing I've found has been finding time to do yoga every day. Out of the past 15, I've only missed 4 days, which is a 73% success rate. Two of the days were due to work deadlines, one due to a hangover (damn strong dark and stormies at the Harbor School Benefit!), and one because I felt I needed a break. I'm half way through, we'll see how the rest of the month goes.

I've been taking a lot of classes with Brian, one of the senior instructors who I hadn't taken classes with before. He's very soft spoken and relaxing to be around, which is good characteristics for a yoga teacher. He also talks about movies and TV during class, and that's entertaining - it loosens things up, sometimes yoga can be so serious. The other day he was talking about Alice in Wonderland, today The Partridge Family.

Strangely, all this yoga is making me want to run. I've been running on Fridays and Sundays, days that I don't need to be up for work or boat maintenance. I tried getting up this morning to run, but with daylight savings, that just wasn't going to happen. Maybe tomorrow.

SPRING!

I know it's still technically winter, and we just got through a powerful Nor'easter, but with the arrival of Daylight Savings Time it feels like Spring has arrived. I'm looking forward to it being light later, I'm looking forward to it continually getting warmer, and I'm looking forward to sitting in sidewalk cafes.

In a way, it reminds me of Spring days in Blacksburg, where after dinner, people would gather at Henderson Hill to catch the last sunshine of the day, drinking coffee (or eating ice cream) from Gillies. It would stay light until about 8PM, and the architects would all resign themselves to getting back to Cowgill Hall to finish our projects.

It's also time for Spring cleaning. Cleaning is definitely a chore, but in looking at my closet and shelves, I need to cleanse. I'm going to try to start that today.

Facebook issues

Since I joined Facebook, I've always been entertained by what some people have posted, photos that have been shared, and just getting in contact with friends from my past. In the past couple of weeks, I've had some interesting things happen among my Facebook 'friends', in reaction to which I've had a variety of responses. All in all, it's still entertaining, and yeah, some of it, just plain silly. First, a couple of things about my experience with FB.

Earlier this year, a friend told me about a seminar that NYU ran for incoming Freshman about what a friend is. The future students had been questioned about how many friends they had. When the university started getting responses from the kids, the responses were unreal - students were claiming to have friends totaling in the thousands. It didn't take too long for administrators to realize that the kids were referring to their Facebook friends, most of which were people that they hadn't even met. Apparently, NYU felt they needed to explain to the incoming youngsters what the definition of 'friend' was.

In my experience, I have had people that I've never met extend a friend request to me. I ignore all of them. I've also ignored requests from people from high school that never gave me the time of day when we actually could have met face to face. I've somewhat relaxed my standards for friend requests, and have accepted people that I've met once, although recently. This has led to issue number one.

The other day at work, I was running around the office a lot, and when I got back to my computer, I had an IM over gmail from someone I didn't recognize. I ignored it, figuring it was in error. When I did realize who it was, I was somewhat surprised - it was someone that I barely know, but had accepted his friend request on Facebook, so I guess he felt a certain familiarity. I don't IM with a lot of people, in fact I think I can count them on one hand. There are even fewer people with whom I will carry on an electronic conversation with during the day, especially when I'm at work. So I blocked him. The assumed closeness of Facebook can be disturbing.

Issue number two: defriending. Or is it unfriending? I use the two terms interchangeably, not knowing which is correct. Have you ever severed a Facebook friend? I've thought about it, there are definitely people from who I've accepted a request, and then wondered why. It could be because I haven't talked to them in years, but they found me and I didn't see the harm in accepting from them until they started sending me Farmville or Mafia Wars requests, or posted views that are in complete opposition to mine, like thinking Rush Limbaugh is The Man. That's not to say that I don't accept people into my life that have different opinions from mine on the issues of the day. However, if the only thing that we seem to have in common is the proximity of where our parents decided to live, I think I just may cut the cord.

Then there are the people who you were actually friends with, but have had a falling out with for whatever reason. Same with ex-boyfriends/girlfriends. I recently had a former friend drop me from her Facebook family. I've also had an ex drop me. The ex dropping me had a much more profound effect. The former friend, well, no big surprise.

The greatest revelation about FB lately has been the announcement and instant comments about life events. My sister had a baby last week, and the past four days has been a constant parade of photos from her husband, and congratulations from family and friends. Since my sister lives across the country, it's been a great way for the family (all of us on the East Coast) to share in their happiness. I won't be able to see her until mid-April, so this is a satisfying way of keeping up with what's going on in California.