Studio!

There is a park outside that is thick and dense and full of green!


I am sooo excited about my studio space. It is large and smells of art. I can feel the positive energy.

Yesterday, following my last orientation for the week, I spent several hours unpacking boxes of supplies and tools. Most of my paper made it through the move, which I am thrilled about. Need to do a little shopping but I am ready to get working right away!

Time to fill some walls and spaces :)


Randel and I think the space is close to 400 square feet in a rectangular shape. I love the tall windows and ceilings. If I feel that I need a larger space in the next couple of years I have the option to move. But for now I am thrilled with this gift of space.

Surprisingly the ocean water IS warm, Sandy!

As native Oregonians, Randel and I have childhood memories at Lincoln City and Newport beaches. Those were days when we could wade and body-surf the waves for long periods of time without minding the frigid effects on the body. Our beautiful Pacific Ocean along the Oregon Coast is very cold but I have yet to experience a more commanding, mesmerizing body of water.

Last Tuesday Randel and I went to Wildwoods State Park, about 20 minutes from where we live. It is on the north shore of Long Island. Originally I had plans for us to hike the trails around the park, but upon arrival, Randel decided that we should walk along the beach. The sand consisted of pebbles and shells. Millions of agates. The waves were small swells, probably due to the fact that were weren't staring the Atlantic in it's face but rather a sound. It truly reminded me a lot of the Puget Sound in Washington...without snow-capped mountains. The water was quite clear and WARM. We couldn't believe how warm the water is! Randel, who hates putting his body in cold water more than anyone else I know, was actually considering surfing and scuba-diving as activities for another day at the beach. We walked for miles at this beautiful park and are looking forward to seeing some "waves" at the south-shore beaches soon.

Pizza Quest: Manhattan Pizza

Manhattan Pizza off of HWY 347 and Stony Brook Road is Scrumptulescent. In the above photograph note the 4 different slices. Starting at 1:00, a spinach pizza with a tasty, creamy cheese sauce. At 4:00 is the stuffed artichoke and potatoes pizza-- super filling and great texture! At 7:00 is the spicy chicken with gouda (?) and at 10:00 is our current favorite, "Grandma's." It is a slice with cheese and a heaping amount of sauce on the top. All crusts were thin, flavorful, and topped with sesame seeds. The head chef/owner said we would love his pizza, and we'll be back.


Simple Mathematical Relationship: Thick, stuffed pizza = thick, stuffed Kathryn

PS--- Did you know that there is a Pizza Connosouir Magazine? There is!

What success looks like...

We purchased an air conditioner and this is how Randel celebrated....


... I finally caught the ice cream truck and celebrated with a soft serve with chocolate and peanuts.

Evaded by the Ice Cream Truck!

As you already may know, I LOVE ice cream. And since we've been here, I've had quite a bit...

9:57 am---- Oreo and mint ice cream on a sugar cone at Dunkin' Donuts. It was already freaking hot outside and we needed to kill time before the LIRR arrived.

2:36 pm--- Chocolate milkshake in Port Jeff. Shared some with Randel. Delicious.



... so imagine my disappointment when the ice cream truck turned away from our house yesterday! She always drives around the neighborhood at the same time, and right past our house! But yesterday she turned a different direction! "Next time, Gadget, next time!"

25th Birthday #2

The grand entrance-- brachisaur and a toothy fellow....


Randel and I traveled to the American Museum of Natural History for his 25th (26th... but I didn't tell you that) Birthday. We saw as much as we could in the 5+ hours that we were there, including a special Live Frog Exhibition and a Planetarium show. Once at the museum, we paid a lot of money to a machine that doesn't thank you for your patronage, and then we quickly ate in the air conditioned bliss of a cafeteria in the basement of the museum. We wandered through several dinosaur fossil halls (my first time seeing dino bones... real ones), the biodiversity wing, the undersea hall, and the Asian Mammals and and Asian peoples wings.

Velocoraptor-- not a cast.



"Who has a walnut-sized brain and a spikey tail?? This Guy"


In your face!


"Hello, my name is Red. Nice to Meet you.Name fits, doesn't it... my parents are assholes."


Biodiversity Wing... freaking awesome. Could spend a day there reading all of the intricacies.

Other firsts for Randel today: Visiting Manhattan, the Long Island Rail Road, New York City Subway, Central Park. Randel says the subway is freakishly efficient and that he was impressed.

Japanese Spider Crab....and Randel

65 million years old...

I got to touch a 65 million year old stegosaurus fin today. Boo-yah!

ADDENDUM-- Nobody believed it BUT HERE IS PROOF--- LEVI.....

Correction-- this plate was 140 million years old :)


Enjoying this way too much.....


:)

Budget Truck Meets Newark, (Part Deux)

One hour to drive .8 miles through Chinatown. And this was in the morning.

The strangest thing was, though, that large trucks are actually supposed to take THAT route. I'd like to ask the city planners if that was their idea of a practical joke. But I guess Randel and I just aren't used to that sort of driving. Pedestrians weren't using the crosswalks and were shuffling in between cars. Right in your face! NYPD was regulating traffic when things got extra sticky. And of course there were archetype delivery guys on bikes.

I think I remember the Holland Tunnel being mentioned in episodes of I Love Lucy. All of a sudden traffic was moving too quickly for us to decide whether or not our Budget truck would fit through this tunnel. 2 lanes. One direction. Yellow tile. It was quite Clean. There was one elevated concrete walkway only for maintenance workers (walkway was no thicker than 2' wide). It truly would have been a terrible time for an earthquake as we traveled under the river. Randel did his best not to drive next to anyone and let others pass him at their own risk of being squished.

2.5 miles later we were spit out in New Jersey. Thankful that we didn’t hit a car or the wall in the tunnel, we started wondering how far ahead our exit was. Earlier in the trip we received a voicemail from Lois, our rentor, saying that we needed to be careful because parts of the city were “rough.” We really weren’t sure what to expect. Newark looks like a giant shipyard for Manhattan, anyway. Someday I hope to see why it is really dubbed “The Garden State,” because all I saw was rusty metal, concrete, and abandoned warehouses. That is, until we followed Raymond Ave. to the Prudential Building. Apparently the local ice hokey team is very loved because that neighborhood was quite clean, organized, and more importantly, had about a million fewer vehicles than Chinatown. But guess what folks? We still couldn’t figure out from which angle to approach the train station.

Someone actually answered the phone in baggage/express at Amtrak. First time EVER! I felt like we’d been given a gift. We were given explicit instructions about which parking lot to enter. We were so wound up from the drive that the security guard had to yell at Randel to stop at the gate entrance. National security. We apologized because we really hadn’t seen him. He showed us which dock to use. It took all of 15 minutes to get our boxes loaded into the truck. 3 hours to get there for 15 minutes of loading.

In our naïveté, we assumed that there had to be a better way to get home than the way that we arrived......

Random Mural in Chinatown

First Honk at Port Jefferson

Today I learned that Port Jefferson was once called Suwassett ("land of small pines") and Drowned Meadow. I also learned that the town was later renamed after Thomas Jefferson (have we honored him enough yet, guys?) It used to be (still is??) a port of entry into the United States, and in the 1800's- WWI was part of a north-shore ship building boom. Now it is full of crazy tourists like ourselves and really cool places to eat. Also, there are minnows swimming amongst jellyfish and larger, bulkier fish swimming below. We REALLY wanted to throw our lines in, but alas, I couldn't McGiver myself a fishing pole using only my sandal and sundress without a sharp tool. Still unsure what the law is concerning carrying knives in this county. Knowing their gun laws, they'd probably throw me in prison.

:)

BTW-- fantastic game shop is located in Port Jefferson.

ABTW-- The main road intersection in Port Jefferson is an accident waiting to happen!

Chinatown, 15' Budget Moving Truck, and that was the easy part

We shipped our must-keep belongings via Amtrak from Oregon to New Jersey. Why not ship to New York, you ask? Because Penn Station Manhattan does not have a loading dock for large shipments. Double-parking on the streets of Mid-town Manhattan, only to hoof up form underground a few boxes at a time--nightmare. But Newark Penn Station had a drive-up loading dock. Much simpler and it wasn't too much farther than Penn Station NY.

Rewind. We didn't have computer or internet access for 5 days. So we went to the local library to googlemap directions from out bitty apartment on Long Island to Newark. After staring at the outlined path that google generated, we realized that while we would avoid toll bridges, it wasn't "a straight shot." Being timid and unsure about my navigation strength in NYC, I decided to follow the directions instead of winging it as we drove.

We drove down the LIE to Queens; pretty cool, traffice was smooth. Entered another interstate with took us over Brooklyn. Then I directed us over the Williamsburg Bridge. Oh crap--- are we in Chinatown? We made a wrong decision. I thought I made an error in navigation because I thought were supposed to go over Statan Island. But we ended up on Manhattan Island-- exactly the place I wanted to avoid. Damnit. I jumped out of the truck, as traffice was going nowhere, to ask a traffic cop where the hell to go. She was new to the area and didn't know what to tell me, so she directed me the the "white guy" on the corner adjacent to us. He told me to turn around and go back over the bridge. Let me remind you how large our moving truck is, and that nobody uses a freaking turn signal in this state, and thats noone wants to let a truck merge lanes. 40 minutes later we successfully completed a figure 8 through one-way, narrow streets, flirting with gridlock. What do I mean by flirting with gridlock? People purposefully block the intersection if they want to trun left across traffic. Cars are configured in a yin-yang manner, until the crosstraffic has a red light. The sterotypical guy with an accent hung out with window and was delivering the F-bomb to some poor chap who was following behind us and couldn't move. Once we got to where we could see the Williamsburg Bridge, I realized that we were, in fact, on the road we were supposed to be. Funny thing about those East Coast road signs; they are few and far between. I was the street name on the awning of a random shoppe.


More to follow......

New Surroundings

I woke up in NY about 5 days ago and I am still here. I feel like I've been here for weeks, not a mere few days. Our quaint little apartment is slowly starting to turn into a home as we finish up the drywall project in hopes of splashing some paint on the walls. We have an upstairs bedroom that we can't sleep in until that project is complete for fear of getting nasty paint particles in our lungs. That is the price of doing rennovative work on a place with historic charm. But there are plenty of boxes to empty while the paint dries.

We picked up our load of goodies from Amtrak yesterday. Only a couple of casualties so far. It is nice to be surrounded by familiar sentimental items that remind us of the people who helped us get where we are. And thank goodness for webcams. The cat's nose is no longer a raw shade of pomegranate, which it absolutely was during both flights to get here, but white and cool as per usual. I pulled her dishes out of a box today and was pleased to present them to her, as all objects are presented to cats. Whether or not they accept or reject your offering really depends on a) if they truly are a cat and b) what sort of mood she is in. She was pleased with my find and ate readily. Randel and I ate tater tots for 3 days in a row to save $$. The cat eats better than we do.

So now I am going to go lay on our blankets that are lovingly spread on the bottom floor of our place. They stack together to create our bed. We only had a sheet and comforter for a week, but now we have all of our blankets that we shipped. SOOO much more comfortable now. I will set my .50 glass full of water on a makeshift cardboard table. Randel and I have picked up crossword puzzles. "Rap" means knock/whack/hit.


Our bed.... a sheet and a comforter in a room