How I Spent the Morning

tags: , , , , ,

Broken A Train.

Photographed while standing around, waiting for the engineers (and everyone else) to figure out if they can fix the downtown-bound A train that broke down at 168th street and Broadway this morning (Upper West Side of Manhattan, NYC).

Image: GrrlScientist, 23 May 2009 [larger view].

So, how did you spend the first morning of your three-day holiday weekend? I spent my first morning standing around, watching the conductors, engineers, and roughly six thousand passengers trying to fix the downtown-bound A Train, which broke down at 168th street and Broadway this morning.

Three hours later, I have finally finished running around Manhattan taking care of people's pets -- a task that should have taken slightly longer than one hour.

Now, I am sitting in a pub where I can get "free" wireless (for the price of one beer per hour), drinking a beer, smelling like a mixture of dog breath and cat litter, eavesdropping on native New Yorkers sitting at the bar, justifying loudly to each other why it is acceptable to throw away good food when there are hungry people in this very city -- do NYCers do anything quietly? I didn't think so! And of course, I am trying to post new entries to my blog.

Hrm. Let's conduct an experiment: will this publish after I click the button? Let's see ... *click*

More like this

I spent part of the morning vacuuming enough hair off of the old sagging "dog couch" to create another entire Labrador retriever. Couldn't take it out for walks on windy days, though.

Re the conversation about throwing away good food, I really don't know where people get off making comments like that under the current economic conditions. Or why some think it's OK to mock or disdain the poor. I was disgusted to read how NY Times journalist Edmund Andrews and his wife have milked the wacko credit system and now expect sympathy for it, all the while looking down on lower income and frugal types (articles linked at Razib's blog). One commenter suggested that Andrews and Barreiro be "punished" by being forced to live in a less than 2000 sq. ft home, and by having to eat homemade soup, or scrambled eggs and toast.

And here I thought I was doing pretty well to cook healthy meals for myself and to be able to afford a traditional, fixed-rate mortgage on a 1500 sq. ft. suburban house. Silly me! It's punishment!

barn owl -- that's an affordable way to clone a dog! why didn't i think of that?

regardless of anyone's poverty or lack thereof; it is immoral to throw away good food. worse, did you know that some of the restaurants in manhattan have decided to stop freegans from helping themselves to five-star cooking scraps by pouring bleach on all the food that they discard at the end of each day? that's just .. sick.

Ugh ... that is just evil. Freegans don't harm anyone, and in fact some of them pool their scavenged resources, prepare meals, and feed even more people that way. I had an internet friend who was a freegan living on Long Island, and who told me that one could essentially make minimum wage by collecting bottles and cans for the return money, at least in a state that has a bottle/can deposit. Of course minimum wage is not always a living wage, but he had other jobs as well. I'm not sure I could be so resourceful.