Fall Starts

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Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

For those of you who haven't been lucky enough to visit upstate NY in the fall, here's a tempting few pictures to show you what you've been missing. Enjoy. Michelle and I did.

Let Me Up There

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Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

Michelle does yoga and sometimes does it on our roof. On one of those special days I snuck up the ladder with my camera and started snapping away. Scratch saw me on the ladder and wished that, she too, could do some yoga (or napping) on the roof. Click the picture to see more photos.

Give Me Pint and a Song

We live next to a cool bar and know it. We know it. It is damn cool. We talk about. We agree that it’s a great place. Friends agree. And we never go to it. What’s up with that? I don’t know, but I do know we visited last night. There’s always live music there and in Brooklyn, that normally means good music. Every single person with a guitar and a dream goes to L.A., Nashville or Brooklyn.

Last night the bar, Bar 4, had open mike night. One person, one mike and two songs. At one point I counted 14 guitars in the room… and I missed quite a few guitars. As night went on guitars kept showing up with would be rock/folk/rock-rap-folk stars. Each one let it all out in song. It was cool. It’s a cool bar. We should go to it more.

Ummm... it's a grocery store

What if you walked into a grocery store that had been in a horrible, mangle inducing crash with the animatronics from the Tiki Room in Disneyland? You might think you’ve gone mental. You might want to jump on the singing cow on top of the dairy case. Or maybe you’d just brake out in some “It’s a Small World of Soy Beverages” type song. What Michelle and I did when we visited the Stew Leonard's in Yonkers NY was stare. It’s not often you walk into a place to pick up some cheese and you leave feeling like you should have spent more time looking for the Abe Lincoln robot that talks about salsa. It was a weird experience. Not bad, just weird. I didn’t bring the camera because I had no idea that the Stew Leonard's Farm Fresh store was Fred Meyers and Walt Disney’s love child. But I did find this short clip on YouTube.com (see below). Just check out the first 15 seconds and you’ll get a small idea of what it was like. Or you could visit Chuck E. Cheeses and ask an employee where to find the cat litter.

The Poem of Last Sunday

fix that tire
Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

Popped a tire.
Fixed it on the road.
Finished the bike ride.
Went and had a beer.

Another Saturday Morning

farmers market
Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

There are a lot of people here. There are a lot of cars here and a lot of concrete. And, lucky for us, there are a ton of farmer markets. Fresh fruit, fresh bread, fresh eggs, fresh cheese, fresh as much as we can get. One of those farmer markets is open on Saturday in Prospect Park. So pretty much every Saturday morning we find ourselves mingling with the locals, clothe bags in hand, picking up as much local food for the week as we can. It’s become kind of a weekend ritual for us. We get up and go for a jog (we drove today) to the farmers market and pick up what eventually becomes our weekly meals.

September 22, 2006

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Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

Yesterday was exactly five years after our wedding date. It’s been a great, interesting journey so far. Thanks for being a part of it.

Bush Visits

So Bush is town for a big shindig at the United Nations. The city is under a cloud of security. Roads are shut down and gridlock ensues, and this city doesn’t deal well with gridlock (unleash the horns). On my way to work yesterday I walked through Madison Park and had to weave my way across Madison Ave through a thick, completely motionless, never ending line of vehicles. Thank god I was walking.

Granted, Bush isn’t the only one in town. A whole host of other dignitaries and heads of states have landed in Manhattan. Lucky us.

This morning I woke up to NPR reporting that, of the 25 largest cities in the United States, NYC is the safest. Now how does that reconcile with the fact that, today, we have Mr. Bush in our city? I guess the safest city data wasn’t collected while he was in NYC, or safe doesn’t mean without war mongers. How many more days do we have left of his presidency? The world is counting the days with us.

Yes, We Visited the Vermont Teddy Bear Factory

Vermont Teddy Bear Factory
Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

I’m hanging out on my couch (futon) watching the new Monday Night Football game on ESPN (so far I think it was better as the old Monday Night Football on ABC) and trying to decide what I’m going to write about last weeks Labor Day trip up North.

This is what I’ve got to say—Vermont is spartan but awesome. New Hampshire sells liquor at its highway rest stops. Rhode Island is small, I mean really small. Massachusetts is a New England movie set. Connecticut needs to get rid of that Republican light Senator. And New York loves toll roads. Along the way we ran into Paul Reveres’s grave, some micro-brewed Vermont beer and the beginnings of the fall season. Michelle had to stop at the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, just because it would be so un-cool to stop at the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. We went for a bike ride along Lake Champlain and one through Massachusetts into the historic town of Concord. And to top it all off we found an REI in Boston. It was awesome.

Not Saddle Sore

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Originally uploaded by Polish Carpetlayer.

Let humidity hang out somewhere down south. Michelle and I don’t want it. And on Sunday, we didn’t have it. It was an absolutely beautiful September Sunday, full of great weather, clear skies and humidity levels that someone from the northwest could appreciate. It was also the perfect day to take our new bikes on a long, long ride.

Some of you may know that we just purchased road bikes (two Trek 2100's) and we are learning the wonders of wheel sets, cranks, carbon forks, saddles, saddle soreness and the like. Yesterday we took our bikes on the North County Trailway, a 22.1 mile paved bike trail just north of New York City, and rode for 35 miles. It was the longest ride we’ve had in the 2 week period we’ve both had bikes. Neither one of us had any problem with the distance and I’m happy to say, I love blowing past those runners on the path.

I don’t see any Tour ‘de Frances in our future, but I can see many long rides together. Of course, Michelle is already talking about “our first 100 mile day”. She can’t wait until we have one, while I’m just happy to be on the bikes together. We’ll see what happens. All I know is that this biking thing has got a future. We can’t wait to do some miles on some of the beautiful Oregon roads.