Hello lovelies.
I flew out to New York on Father’s Day and back on Midsummer’s. The quick trips are the hardest ones. There’s no time to adjust to the time zone, and the ratio of plane time to ground time is less than ideal. Even so, I’m going to miss all the travel when it ends.
1. Be careful what you wish for. Monday morning, I told my secretary I missed east coast thunderstorms and I was hoping we’d get a good one while I was out there. Monday night, as I was thinking about finishing up for the evening, the rain started to beat against the windows. The umbrella I’d brought in case of rain was, of course, in my suitcase in the hotel. I waited out the worst of it, then had a nice walk home in the rain, very thankful that it was warm out.
2. Beauty Queens. I admire those girls who treat Sephora like their own personal makeup drawer. You see it a bit out in CA, but New York! Walk into almost any store and you’ll see them, lipsticks and eyeshadows and foundation from the sales floor arranged before the mirrors, products you know they can’t afford on their not-quite-an-intern’s salary. I wish I’d had the guts to do that in my twenties. Hell, I wish I had the guts to do that now!
3. They sure don’t. I noticed a nail in one of my tires when I got home from the airport yesterday, so I took it into Pep Boys to get it repaired. The guy who checked me in was nice, but slow – I’d made an appointment for 6, got there 5 minutes early, and it was 6:30 before he finished helping the one person in front of me. We chatted a little as he was filling out the forms, and I ended up telling him that I’d woken up at 1 am local time for a flight from New York, and I was exhausted but doing this tonight so that I’d have it done before I picked up my daughter the next day. An hour and a half later, the tire was fixed and he came around to give me my keys. I asked how much I owed them. He told me not to worry about it, then added, “I bet they don’t do that in New York!”
4. Midsummer’s Day. It’s hard to believe that the nights are going to start getting longer, that we’re halfway through another year. Z starts TK in August, which just doesn’t seem possible. I look at her, four years old, her very own person (as she has been since the day she was born), and I still feel this sense of disbelief.
5. Commune Life. Friday night was one of those impromptu family dinners, where we all raided the fridge for things to throw on the grill, since it was too hot to even think about turning on the stove. The kids played in the wading pool then ran around gloriously naked for a bit drying off – because if you can’t be a kid and be naked in your own backyard, then what good is summer? The chicken coop is almost done, which means there will be fresh eggs, and there is a kitten upstairs named Jupiter who will, when he gets bigger, be charged with keeping the squirrels from eating all the plums and apricots off the trees.
Links and Things
This article on the redefinition of luxury seems apropos after the Melania Trump/Zara jacket kerfluffle.
After reading about air traffic control radio – where you can listen to live feeds from almost any airport in the world – I listened to the flight deck radio on the flight from SF to NY. I have to say, I found it oddly soothing.
It’s not gentrification, it’s foreign investors.
Years ago, I heard Alec Baldwin read Colson Whitehead’s short story Lost & Found on the selected shorts podcast, and it’s haunted me ever since. (I looked and wasn’t able to find the podcast, which originally aired back in 2011, but if you manage to hunt it down please let me know.)