Cinco De Mayo

Here in our neighborhood, the celebrations are morphed and blended within the different immigrant populations... what's next??? hopefully a Korean Bastille Day!!! I could go for some kimchee croissants!

And on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue, our peach tree is beginning to look wonderful. Last year the tree took a break by only producing two peaches. It had rained the whole month of June and the storms flung all the blossoms and baby peaches to the ground. This year we are as hopeful for the late summer crop to be as abundant as it was the year we first moved into our house...lets hope we have over 300 like that time!!!

Recyling after Thanksgiving

Recycling pick up on our block happens on Mondays and Thursdays, and often lands on a National holiday; Memorial day, etc...

Since we spent the whole weekend unpacking instead of gorging ourselves with turkey and comatose on the couch watching football, we ended up with more than 300 empty boxes to put out on the curb...only this pile ended up becoming a fire hazard blocking our entryway until the next time the Recycling truck came rolling by.

Library of Congress vs. Dewey

Thanksgiving weekend was spent mostly unpacking. I spent approximately 8-10 hours a day cataloguing about 350 books. Yes, I know, I'm a freak.... I pretty much know what books I have, but decided to put call numbers on them when I realized Chaim and I would be combining all of our books together, to make it easier for us to find them. There are a lot of art and design books, so most of the shelves up to this point are filled with N books. I'm much more comfortable with the Library of Congress than the Dewey Decimal call number system of dividing up the books, but the ones that I didn't agree with, I put my own numbers and catalogued them to make sense of it.

I have a few oddball volumes; from Rob, from one of his trips home to Holland, an operetta by Robert Wilson in Dutch; and a found hardback architectural sketchbook with a forged inscription by an ex-boyfriend. These get catalogued in their own special places.

In the new glass fronted shelves that was given to us by Mordecai ben Chaim, we have started an autographed book section. My copy of The Corrections from Jonathan Franzen sits surrounded by Chaim's numerous books from famous authors and artists.
There are about 20 more boxes in the studio that will be unpacked soon, and we haven't even begun with the fiction. oy vay!

Joining our Stuff.

We are finally at the stage of moving boxes and beginning to unpack. This is the first time that Chaim and I will have all of our belongings together under one room. When I say all of our belongings, this means my studio (with large power tools), old art in crates from the countless sculpture exhibits where nothing was sold, my library, both of our art works and report cards from elementary school, his 10,000+ menu collection, his collection of hockey sticks, plastic spoons, chewing gum, graffiti stickers, 30 lbs of keys, and the list goes on for may pages.

My mother came with a car load of belongings I didn't even want or have room for.


Two weekends ago, Chaim and I took a one way flight to Buffalo and drove a 12 foot truck filled with more stuff, like the aforementioned hockey stick collection back to New York. Thank goodness we got a few pieces of furniture to store some of this stuff in. Currently we are living in a cramped house, resembling more of an antique or thrift shop. We have very little furniture, so the boxes and crates act as night stands, and side tables.

Since Chaim and I have been living the luxurious lifestyle (NOT!) of having two apartments plus a 500 sqft studio, we have doubles, and sometimes triples of some items. In the Kitchen, these multiple items are most prevalent. We have just unpacked only one quarter of our boxes marked KITCHEN, and already we have a few boxes of repetitive gadgets and flatware, items that will soon be packed away to be given away the next kid we know that goes off to college, or sold for very cheaply in our first ever yard sale in the spring. We also finally got to unpack and open our wedding presents and are glad to say we still like what we picked from the Williams and Sonoma registry.

Though we are no longer collecting rainwater, our whole kitchen cabinetry is constructed out of used furniture. The first set I constructed out of our old crappy MDF entertainment center. There will be cabinet doors made from a collection of fruit crate wood, among other scrap wood I have from the studio.

We Are So Brown.

It's not easy being green, as I've stated months back when I re-tiled the bathroom in Chaim's apartment on the Upper East side. Now after months of trying to live an Eco-conscious lifestyle, we are now throwing in our non-biodegradable towel and giving up. I got a package in the mail from HSBC bank, with a "go green kit". It contained a very dim fluorescent bulb, this note pad, (that's really just a waste of paper since there is hardly space to make a list due to all the ads), a reusable bag that's too small to use in my current lifestyle, and a whole lot of papers and pamphlets talking about being green. It seems that this green living promoted by huge corporations is a sham.

Let me explain though, that we did try very hard to be green:

1. Recycling Rain Water:
After we discovered how much rain water comes out of our rooftop gutter every time it pours, we began collecting bottles and bottles of it in the 2 litre Schweppes Seltzer bottles. The last time we had a downpour, Chaim was outside on the parapet getting soaking wet collecting rain water for about 20 minutes. He proudly dragged in 32 bottles and we brought them down to our side garden, being so proud of ourselves that we could water our garden guilt free the next time a drought hit Queens.

The bottles sat in our garden for about one day, looking as though we were about to throw a party or we ransacked the Schweppes bottle plant. The next morning, we awoke to 3 bottles sitting in our garden, with our front sidewalk littered with white caps. Apparently, the Hispanic recycling ladies came by and emptied all our bottles so they could get the nickel for the bottles. They had the nerve to dump out all our hard work and pollute our front sidewalk with non recyclable plastic caps.

2. The compost heap.
Early in the summer, I built a nice compost bin out of the lathe that came out of our house. It is compact, well fairly compact (3x4x3 foot box) with a swinging front gate. We have been throwing in all kinds or organic matter into it daily. The amount of organic waste we create, along with the leaves and vines we pulled off the tree proved too much for my little box. Now mind you, we have not had a kitchen for 3 months, so there is not that much food waste being produced out of our house. Just last week, Chaim cleaned out the table saw (though demolition is over, he is still in charge of garbage and food), and dumped five drywall buckets of sawdust into the compost heap. Since the heap is situated in the back of the yard, we thought that the flies and gnats that it attracted would help in deterring our next door neighbors (i.e. the Ecuadorian night club kitchen workers) from opening the Fire exit door to our garden.

It is now November and we still have gnats flying about, sometimes in our downstairs bathroom. Last week I found a slug that had meandered into the house dragging a hair of corncob husk from a summer barbecue, no doubt from the compost pile. There's so much stuff in there, that it is hard to turn the pile, which you are supposed to do every few weeks. And most people tell us that it will take a long time before we can use it for the garden. In the mean time, we need the space outside so that I can build a small shed for the new barbecue grill (given to us by mom and pop Mordecai) along with other gardening odds and ends, since there is no longer room in the garage for such things.

3. Fluorescent light bulbs.
I like the idea of having these low energy saving bulbs in every socket in the house. I've been collecting them, sending away for them, from places like HSBC every time they have a give away program. There are two problems with these bulbs, not including the fact that they are not bright enough to work under.

1. They are a weird shape and thus, do not fit under the glass fixtures in the ceiling lights. The two I screwed in the bathroom fixture immediately broke under the compression of the glass dome covering. The ones installed in the kitchen were too big also, thus, I had to remount the glass cover upside-down, and it looks ridiculous. The second problem is that the new dimmer switches we installed to operate the fans in the remainder of the rooms are not compatible with florescent lights. In fact we learned that no dimmer switches work with these bulbs. So now we have a lot of bulbs sitting in the laundry closet awaiting a new system.

The plumbers have not returned yet, so we are saving fuel, since we are only heating 1/3rd of the house. That's about all we are doing to stay green, or shall we say blue.....

The Missing Plumber

Currently it is 50 degrees outside, and inside it is 65. We have no heat on the first floor of the house. Chaim thinks that Rakeesh the plumber is a sadist. He was suppose to return to finish the job three weeks ago, before my mother came to visit. She has come and gone and still we have pipes dangling out of the walls dripping water into takeout containers, not connected to anything. Rakeesh teases our GC and tells him he will be over at 3pm, and never shows up; never calls and never shows up. He has pulled this stunt at least 3 times. At first we were sympathetic, "oh he must be very busy, " now I think," he better have a good excuse, like gotten into an accident for him to blow us off!"

I think he damaged his testicles, and that's why he has not returned.

Moving

Exactly three months and one day after we closed on our house, Chaim and I finally moved upstairs to our new bedroom. Actually we moved only our mattress (placed back on the floor) and hung up our ketubah on the wall. From our spot on the floor, the ceilings seemed cathedral-like and we yelled to hear our voices echo off the bare walls.

It is now October and the weather has been unusual. One day it is 85 degrees and the next day torrential rain storms with a hurricane warning, and later still the evening dips down in the low 40's. Chaim had a brilliant goofy idea of installing a spigot onto our gutter downspout so that it would be easy to collect rain water. Instead he sits outside in the downpour, with a funnel filling our many seltzer bottles. Rakeesh and his guys have yet to come back and reinstall our radiators, thus we have no heat. We also don't know if our furnace works since the shiny blue machine in the garage has not been hooked up to anything. We hope that he will come back before we can see our breaths inside.

Today, Frankie and his guys are supposed to come back to finish up the electrical work. The list is long, and we are still waiting for the ceiling fan dimmer switches to arrive by Fed-Ex. He will definitely be coming back at another date.

Since the last post we have had Kevin and Fabio (Fernando) come to Stucco the parapet. I was joking about putting in some Doric columns outside, covering the brick, and when I came back upstairs to see how they were doing, he had carved out two pilasters out of 3 inch styrofoam. The process was done in a few steps. On top of the plywood walls, a pink plastic was nailed on. Then on top of that, one inch white styrofoam, made of the same material as coffee cups, gets screwed on with big plastic washers. Then they apply a white fiberglass mesh, similar to what you use to tape drywall joints. Then the first coat of stucco goes on. This step took about 10 hours to do. The next day a different group of guys came back and applied the top coat of stucco on to finish it off. Kevin came back a few days later by himself to caulk the joints.
Smith also came over one day to help paint the final coat of primer on the kitchen area where Diego finally finished mudding.
One of the days I was teaching, the roofer came and cut two holes in our roof and installed some mushroom vents. He also applied a layer of the silver coating to improve the surface of the roof.
The days I was not at school, I hung our closet doors and finished off the bedroom with baseboard molding. I used clear pine and didn't route any edges, so all the simple 90 degrees angles makes our bedroom looking a bit like a Shaker room.

Floors

On Thursday, Rico's guys showed up early in the AM and began sanding. The first thing they did was to take the electric panel off the main circuit box and wired their big Gallaxy 2000 sander to the breaker. They were not going to take any chances with the electricity in the upstairs rooms. They replaced the warped floor boards in the bedroom and patched holes and cracks with putty. It was a day with different accented English spoken by the crew of Jamaican dudes.
I spent most of the day downstairs under the banging working on the computer. At around 7pm, they had put the second coat of polyurethane on the floor and said they would return on Saturday morning to do the final coat.
We avoided the upstairs for two days, wanting it to dry without disturbances and waiting for the smell to dissipate.

It is now 10:30am on Saturday morning and we are sitting here waiting for them to show up. We just went up to peak at the work and was a bit disappointed. The floors are way too glossy, and polyurethane really turned them yellow. Plus the new boards they laid down do not match the old color, and the putty did not turn yellow to match the rest of the wood. I hope they come soon, so we can have them fix it.

A Peach for a Peach

Last night's meal at EGB was a little different. On top of BYOB, we also BYOPP: we brought our own peach pie. The last of the peaches on our tree were picked by an artist named Meg Duguid, who does performance art with pies. She and her boyfriend came over about a month and a half ago and took the remaining peaches of the season. We were a little bummed that the peaches were no more, but when she told us that she would bake two pies, and one would be shipped to Chicago, and the other to us, we got excited.
Two nights ago, we ended up having dinner later than usual. It ended up kinda late since le porte-fenetre had to be installed. Slappy and Taco came to install it after their normal work day was over, so we wrapped up around 10:30pm. We rushed over to EGB before they closed and as usual, had the place all to ourselves. We noticed it was more quiet than usual, due to the fact the daughter wasn't there to wait on us. The mother told us that she was at the emergency room all day, for a sinus infection. She had gone to school earlier that day to take a test, and couldn't focus, so she left school with t high fever. We also found out that the family calls her Peach, because she is cute and sweet. So when the pie arrived in the mail, we thought it would only be appropriate to bring Peach a piece of pie as a get well gesture. The four of us returned last night, (this time PV instead of Slappy) with the crate in tow, weighing $60 worth of shipping and handling. After dinner, Paul, the owner-dad, heated the pie up for us in the oven and brought it back up. We had ordered a new appetizer called Golden Bag- a deep fried wanton skin filled with shrimp, water chestnut, and mushroom, served with a delicious sweet lime sauce that tasted like key lime pie. So we requested for more of that sauce and put a big dollop onto the peach pie. The crust was a bit undercooked, but the peaches had been soaked in ginger for a week, and were delicious! We ate half the pie and left the remaining half with the restaurant for Peach. I had noticed that the restaurant had a Junior's cheesecake sitting on the counter, when we walked in. Apparently we could have some of that tonight for dessert when we go back.

Our order: Golden Bag- excellent.
Golden Corn- ground chicken, corn, cilantro, red curry and Thai sauce- very good.
Fresh Roll aka Por pia (Chinese sausage, shrimp, eggs, bean sprout, tofu and cucumber with tamarined sauce)- good but kinda ho hum.
Everything Pad Thai- good but a bit too sweet.
PV got the Mustang burger-Louisiana spices and jack cheese- excellent according to him.
Taco got the Thai Burger-Thai curry and peanut sauce- excellent according to him.
total bill was $38.00 plus tip. WOW.

We can almost see the light at the end of the Tunnel

Early on Saturday, Chaim began the demolition for the upstairs patio, aka, bump-out, parapet, smoking section.
I dug up my old cold chisel and sledge hammer, a tool I hadn't used since trying a hand at stone carving my Junior year at KCAI.
Apparently, that was the right tool, because Chaim finished the job in less than 3 hours.







After all the exterior rubble and stucco was cleared away, it was unbelievably simple for the rotted away wood wall to come down. Almost too simple!!!










Right after the guys took the 3 walls down, it began to pour. The weatherman had obviously lied about his forecast for the weekend. I went to the bank and when I returned I found this Rube Goldberg-esque set up, diverting the roof rain water from coming into the house.












The guys set the new French doors in the spot where we think it should go.
One evening last week, a woman from Paris came over to interview me for her Ph.D dissertation. After the interview, I brought her upstairs to show her the reason my studio is still in storage.
We asked her "what are French doors called in France?", expecting an answer similar to-"Chinese food in China is called food". But instead she told us that French doors in France are called porte fenêtre or door with windows. So now we have both, a porte fenetre and a porte sans fenetre!
Slappy takes a break from the work to have a quick hamburger from our favorite spot across the street: EGB. He and PV ended up eating 4 meals in a row from there that weekend. Lunch, then a buffalo wing snack, then dinner with the rest of the crew, then another full day of eating on Sunday.










A view of the demolition bits and pieces from the upstairs parapet piled in front of the house after we threw it out the upstairs window. It sure beat having to walk up and down the stairs with it all!

Ralphie, a man of many hats.
Frankie, Ralphie and Joe, (aka Spencer, Giseppe, etc..)
return for the umpteenth time to install some more wiring.
Hopefully the next visit will be their last.

The 2x4 and plywood wall goes back up in the parapet, awaiting the final installation of our porte fenetre. But before the doors can go in, the roofer must come and put a new membrane on the area.
This Thursday Rico, the floor guy comes to sand and polyurethane the floors!!!! But before then, David and Flocko, the Argentinians have to come back and sheet rock the ceiling of the kitchen and the walls for the new parapet. We don't have time for the mud guy or painting before Thursday, so I suppose all that will get done after............

Food Review #4: The Free Pizza and others

We haven't had a good Chaim-cooked meal at home for some time, since the stove is not hooked up and a thick layer of plaster dust covers the kitchen. The other night, we decided to order in and get pizza. We had already tried a so-so pepperoni pizza from Pizza Boy II on Roosevelt Ave., and decided to try a different place.

So we looked in our menu folder and came across this place. (50-22 39th Ave)

The menu is one of those quintessential Italian 7 page documents, with every type of pasta, pizza and salads, with catering, just like Carmine's in Manhattan. They have a fresh Mozzarella Margarita pizza, so we decided this place was worth ordering from. The large is priced at $19.95, five dollars more than the rest of the pizzas. We thought it must be a tremendous pie! We called at 7pm, and they said it would take 30-45 minutes. An hour later, no pizza, so we called to see what was taking so long. Oh it's on it's way they said. Forty minutes later, still no pizza, and we are starving. The phone rings at this point, and Donato's is calling us apologizing profusely saying someone took our pizza. I said to forget it, we don't want the damn pizza, and the manager said, "It's on us, we will give it to you for free". Five minutes later a huge mediocre pizza arrived at our door. The crust was undercooked. (what can you expect with them rushing) and the mozzarella cheese was cut into 1 inch chunks. If we had paid $20 we would have been very upset.

It's hard to get a pizza as good as Grimaldi's in Queens.

There are however many other things we can get here that I couldn't get to eat in Brooklyn Heights. Like corn slathered with mayo, sprinkled with Mexican queso blanco and dusted with red chili peppers. Mmmmmmmm. When I was little, in St. Louis, I used to put mayo on my corn when everyone else was melting sticks of butter on theirs. They would look at me appalled, to see the mayo/corn combo hit my mouth. I was so excited when Chaim took me to Spanish Harlem years ago, and saw that corn on a stick with mayo was normal.

A little man was passing by our house with his shopping cart, with a cooler filled with steaming corn, and some large tupperware containers. He had about 50 layers of aluminum foil folded together as his hot mitt, so that he could hold onto the steaming corn as he put layers of mayo and cheese on it. It was delicious, and all for $2.




Our third visit to EGB or "Eat Great Burger: Thai and American" Restaurant.

Last night, we went back to our new favorite eating place across the street. Since our last visit, they had replaced the hand written sign saying "we have Thai desserts for sale" to a more professional looking ink jet printed sign taped to the front window. They had hooked up the television and had a bowl of silk flowers sitting on the bar. There was even one other table occupied, by a Thai family. It turned out that it was one of the chef and her family. We were greeted warmly like always, and sat at the window table for the first time.

We had brought an open bottle of wine from home so the daughter brought us some glasses right away. After filling our glasses, she says, "five minutes, I come back"

Three minutes later, she came back and seeing that we didn't have enough to drink (it was only a half bottle) she asks us,
"do you like beer?"
skeptically we answer back, "what kind of beer?"
"we have a beer in the refrigerator."
knowing they still don't have a liquor license, we ask again, "what kind of beer?"
"it's a small beer. it was left."
"can we see the beer?"
"ok." and she comes back with a bottle of non-alcoholic Coors lite.
"you don't like?"
Then we have to explain that it is not really beer, that it's basically beer flavored water.

We decided to order new things, and no repeats from other visits. The second visit, when we came with PV, we got the Buffalo chicken wings (excellent), fried calamari (very good), a repeat of the green papaya salad, a Pad Thai (excellent) and a Cesar salad. PV was amused at the site of the Cesar salad and papaya salad coming off of the same menu.

This time we ordered the Naked Shrimp salad (excellent), tabbouleh (which they didn't have yet), beef stewey noodle soup with a hint of cinnammon and anise (excellent but almost too rich) and a ground chicken salad that I can't remember the name of (very good). We also ordered some sticky rice, and got a mound of it wrapped in a banana leaf. This is the first time in all the hundreds of times I've been to Thai restaurants that I didn't get microwaved sticky rice wrapped in saran wrap inside a wood basket.

The daughter told us she is studying to better her English to get her MBA. She wants to become an accountant. I asked the High School son how school is going? and he said he had swimming that day. I thought he was on the swim team, but he told us that he was learning to swim, and it's a good thing that he can float. We didn't see the father but I guess he was in the basement cooking away.All in all, our third meal at EGB was excellent.

A Very Busy Week

There's so much going on I can't keep track...

Windows and French doors delivered, and stored in the garage until the boom truck can lift them up through the window opening, since they don't fit through the staircase.

more lathe that got taken away, wrapped up and bundled with festive red and green Christmas ribbon.7am, foam being pumped into the empty oil tank in our side garden. Finally we can put that job to rest.

We put up the 1 inch foam insulation on the ceiling, making it look a bit like a disco when the lights flashed on.

I painted a brighter yellow stripe in front of our garage.

The taxi strike went on for 3 days, and this cab was parked right outside our door for the whole duration. We finally saw the cab driver and he gladly moved the cab just so the boom truck could park in the necessary spot under our front window.

the boom truck lifts up the stack of sheet rock through the window opening.

After the sheet rock and windows get boomed up, Slappy and Taco install the front windows.

Putting in the first layer of insulation into the closet.

Chaim cleans up after we put up the second layer of wall insulation.

The young Argentinian guys put up the first piece of ceiling sheet rock.