Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

I joined this facebook group called "Buy Nothing Chelsea" where you give stuff away to your neighbors. It has to be totally free, no money can be exchanged. By way of background, here's few facts about Chelsea according Wikipedia: 1) 55,000 people live in Chelsea, a neighborhood in Manhattan, New York City. 2) It is 0.75 square miles (2 square kilometers). So yeah, Buy Nothing, Chelsea is total low key chaos at all times of the day and night. I mean, if you want a little snack, it's entirely possible you can find one in a two block radius and pick it up faster than you can get take out. Such as: 2 almost full jars of peanut butter. #Flash give - which means pick them up NOW! OK fine, you might not get to pick and choose your food groups, but almost every weekend someone is giving away a tote bag of dairy products, baby carrots and like a piece of cheese cake because they're going on vacation.  Or every now and then you can pick up what amounts to a full fridge wit...

Cruise ships are huge!!!  A cruise ship on the Hudson River heading out to sea past the  island of Manhattan in New York City The ships dock in midtown and the only reason I know this is because tourists get off in packs of a thousand and no one tells anybody to look both ways when they cross the bike path alongside the dock where eBikes go 90 miles an hour. Someone occasionally misses their matinee due to an unfortunate ER visit. You'd think there'd be lawsuits and traffic cops at this point but no. It's not the finest welcome in the world, I think we all can admit. So Tom and I are minding our own business doing a thing we call Hiking to Dinner along the Hudson River. As we do now and then. Some may not consider it much of a hike considering total elevation gain is 0.00 and the path is paved and there is an outdoor bar you can stop at if you're really parched, but yeah. We go down to TriBeCa to this Indian place we discovered during the pandemic.  Suddenly we hear thi...

I just want to point something out before we begin. How you say "vegetables" in both Swedish and Norwegian is e xactly the same word : "grönsaker," which literally translates to "green things."  I also want to point out that many Swedish and Norwegian words are exactly the same .  I'm telling you this in the hopes that when I tell you this next part, you might find it sort of hilarious in a "someone has been double crossed!!" kind of way.  So it all started with a text I got from my friend Petrina, who is Norwegian. She probably thought I'd laugh out loud because while I speak Swedish, I am not Swedish. She would be right, by the way. Spoiler alert. So anyway, Petrina sent over a link to a video on Instagram which I'm including for posterity but if you don't speak Swedish, yeah. Maybe just skip it and take my word for it.  In short: It's a game show.  A bunch of Swedes get asked how to say "banana" in Norwegian. A...

The local music fest in Sunnyside, Queens   A friend of ours invited us to a music festival in Queens, it was a fundraiser for their local park. So we go, there's a whole bunch of us. This photo above is from early on in the evening, it got a little wall-to-wall blankets as the night wore on. Mostly the crowd was families and lots of sneakers and practical clothing chosen for comfort and warmth and walking home with a backpack full of lawn gear. I say this as foreshadowing. I will also point out that the Chelsea area of Manhattan where we live, has been, less so now, but has historically been known for its very out gay community. Marchers line up for the Pride parade in front of our building, and it doesn't matter who you are, you know when it's Bear Week let me tell you.  When we first moved in, they'd call 8th Avenue near our building "the runway" and it sure was. The outfits you could spot on the weekends were legendary. While I'm on this topic, I reme...

A major component of all my museum-going endeavors is to calculate when to show up to avoid the worst of the crowds. I occasionally succeed. There's just too many variables, including but not limited to: - Whether school is in or out. Both can be a problem, meaning school field trips vs. families on vacation or coming into the city for the day. - The weather. Again, it's not a clean if/then. If it's sunny, you'd think people would do outdoor things and not be at a museum. But also, if it's sunny, people leave their homes for an outing, such as the Met. Definitely though if it's raining, there are more tourists at almost all the museums. - The time of day. But just when I think I have the perfect arrival time all figured out, I get there and there's a line out the door. So I have no idea with this one. Anyway, I say all this to say, when Tom and I popped in to see the huge and extremely popular exhibit of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollack 's work... it was...

The three jewels of Refuge . I enjoyed learning about this! I decided to take a three-part class after work called "Taking Refuge" that was billed as helping to find peace in a crazy world. It's at a meditation center. As with most of my calendar-related decisions, I RSVP'ed yes because: 1) I can walk there. 2) It's at a convenient time. A minor consideration is often "did I actually read the whole description thoroughly." (see prior Day 2 post ). Apparently I thrive on not quite knowing what's going on. So I go trucking uptown to make it in time for the first class, and turn on the cross street. This is in that weird no man's land between midtown and Chelsea. I pass a couple of those handbag stores selling, you know Pradda and Louis Vuittin. They're closed with the metal security doors down because it's after hours and dark. I pass a closed lunch place and a bunch of old dark office buildings and sign for a pottery studio on the 8th floo...