iPalimpsest

Joe and "The Magician" emailed us after our Happy Happy Happy post. "The Magician" wrote:

My dreams this past fortnight have been darkest pitch. The abyss had taken its toll. Visited by images of half-baked scones, un-tempered chocolate, nuts cleaved and cleaved again until unusable in the most plebeian of tarts. If it be not Lucifer's minions descending upon me then it is no less than the memory of fair Baking's touch upon my brow now gone cold. I am forsaken. WHY? WHY? And yet, I do perceive the faint ray of ocular embellishment rising up to illuminate Cleopatra's tomb. It is not Juliet. It is not the sun. Why it be but fair mortal guardians of knowledge, so lithe in praise that my limbs are as if bathed in Aphrodite's love. My cupcakes raised to heights above the Oracle of Crumbs? Above the Adonis of Magnolia? Oh sweet sweet librarians, thou hast truly given me ambrosia. I am renewed. Awakened. I shall once again lie in fair Baking's embrace to be your humble servant.

Needless to say, "the magacian" not only mixes batter and frosting with ease, but her verbal alacrity is equally stunning. And those customer service skills! Joe greeted me today with a giant happy smile and quickly made his way through a long line of customers (Magnolia has some serious competition, but please Joe and "the magician", I implore you-- don't ever put limits on the number of baked goods we can order like some other Manhattan bakeries, no matter how crowded you get), and offered me cookies that were right out of the oven! "The magician" frosted them as I waited, and it turned out they were Jenny's favorites! I actually preferred the "coffee toffee" cookies, but Jenny is into lemon and coconut and she also likes the vanilla ones we had that very first time.

We just have to learn to create these spectacular creations all on our own. Until we've mastered this... perhaps Joe and "the Magician" will open an uptown Happy Happy Happy? Will they venture so far north, street numbers are even higher than the number of vacation days George W. Bush took during his first years as president (oh wait... then you're in the Bronx.. even we aren't in numbers that high)?

Posted by kate at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

For some reason, though, library employees can be a bunch of patron-hating dickweeds, more interested in perfecting their kid-scaring snarl than in actually, you know, being helpful. Maybe all the generosity and benevolence exhibited by their employer to the general public leaves them bitter and mistrustful. Too bad for them--in the interest of cheap reads, we've developed awfully thick skin. And we know our way around, thanks very much.

--"New York Press" Best of Manhattan, October 13, 2004

I can't help but wonder what happened, exactly, to make them feel this way, and at which branch? It's a very generalized statement to make about all library employees, considering we have 85 branches.

Posted by kate at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From today's L-Word signing. Thank goodness for these blizzard conditions... looks like we'll just have the spend the evening watching the entire first season again!

Posted by kate at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reserve a PC at Hudson Park Branch Library. No more getting to a library needing to use a computer, just to discover all their appointments are booked for the day! Well... some branches still use the paper-pencil-clipboard method, but hopefully we'll see more of the online booking in the future.

Posted by kate at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

BoingBoing posted an objet d'art that consists of a chair that expires after a certain amount of time and a user agreement that requires you to immediately forget your seating experience. The library is getting PC management software that will kick users off of the computers after a set amount of time and limit paper use. While this is a boon for librarians who have better things to do than to count out ten sheets of paper for each user, thank you very much, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Right now only a few branches have it, and it has a nice feature where you can reserve a PC from another computer, just like setting up an appointment for the Apple store genius bar.

Posted by kate at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Anyone want to wait in line with us to get the L-Word Season One DVD signed? It's this Saturday. I imagine we'll have to get there a bit early, in case there's a big line.

Posted by kate at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Move over 'Snice. Happy Happy Happy at 157 Allen Street makes THE BEST vegan treats in the city. Conveniently located across from Bluestockings and MooShoes, Joe and "the magician" offer vegan, wheat-free deserts. We had the chocolate cupcakes for, get this! 85 cents each. That's right! In NYC, place where $3 cookies and $6 teas abound, you can still get a cupcake for under a dollar. They are small cupcakes, but still-- what a deal! They also have fantastic cookies. We tried really hard to get the cupcake recipe out of Joe, but he was tight-lipped as they get, revealing only tapioca flour (as opposed to spelt) and explaining how his livelihood (and that of his partner "the magician") depends on the recipe.

Alas, the baked goods are not kosher, although they are also yeast-free. Joe, in a spectacular show of dedication to his kosher-vegan customers, explained that he offered to glue some foreskin back, but alas, no Rabbi would consider him un-Jewished by such an act, and as a Jew, staying open on Saturdays would be horrible hipocracy, and so he could not be licensed... so, no cupcakes this Passover.

Visit Joe and "the magician"-- Happy Happy Happy has been around a mere 5 weeks. They're new, they're fantastic, and they still only charge 85 cents for what's just about the best cupcake in the city. Even if I wasn't vegan, I'd still take a Happy Happy Happy cupcake over a Magnolia or Crumbs cupcake.

Posted by kate at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another new restaurant coming to Inwood.

Posted by kate at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why do pajama bottoms wear out faster than pajama tops? I always run out of conditioner faster than shampoo. How can I possibly find balance in my life, with all these extra pajama tops and bottles of shampoo? If there's anyone out there with the opposite problem, please email. We'll go on a shopping spree and you take all the pajama tops and I'll take the conditioner. Just to clarify, since pajamas usually come in matching sets, Jenny and I tend to prefer ones with cute little animals, especially bears or puppies, and we like pink or red. We're small and extra-small. If you're our shopping match, we can't wait to hear from you.

Posted by kate at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

'sNice (45 Eighth Avenue, at West 4th Street) has the best chocolate cupcakes I've ever had in my entire life. Teany wins the best strawberry shortcake award, and Red Bamboo gets some great chocolate covered strawberry shortcake kudos, but neither Magnolia nor Crumbs has ANYTHING on the chocolate (vegan!) cupcakes at 'sNice. Pair one with a soy hot chocolate topped with coffee (or cinnamon) flavored marshmallows, and it's like a warm kiss on your belly. Nothing is better. Nothing.

What could be better:
1) Coming home to find that the cat has not peed on your new hardwood floors.
2) If the new yoga studio in our neighborhood gave librarians and educators a fifty percent discount. It's Inwood--! how do they get off charging so much? But you know, I'm totally quitting crunch and joining Inwood Peace Yoga, because now that it's darker in the mornings, I can't seem to wake up early enough to commute to the gym.
3) I could stop being so paranoid about everything from breast cancer (they're just tender!) to a detached retina (they're just floaters!). This is ridiculous. I also need to stop getting health information from the Internet. I never used to be a hypochondriac. When did this happen? I'm taking after my grandma, who also believes you shouldn't a) sing in the park because bugs could fly in your mouth, b) look lovingly at cats because their tails are made of worms, c) ever, ever sleep without something covering your throat or you'll wake up having lost your voice and d) ever be vegetarian... She also looks suspiciously at anyone not Italian, which happens to include the entire Russian-Jewish side of my family (who she's only related to by marriage, but she very clearly loves me even though I'm a product of this nationality mix)... and she doesn't seem to mind that I'm a lesbian, either, which I found so surprising because most of the rest of the US is much less suspicious of cats and collarbone-exposing shirts and much more suspicious of lesbians.
4) If there was a huge blizzard tomorrow and all the libraries were closed and all public transportation stopped and Jenny and I had to do nothing but stay at home playing Prince of Persia and sipping hot chocolate and experimenting with cake recipes.
5) If I could turn this wishlist into an amazon.com wishlist and someone could purchase these wishes for me, like -- tone down the hypochondria for $10 or a blizzard for $500.
6) I wish I hadn't hit my head on the coin slot on the dryer in the laundry machine two days ago. It still hurts.

Posted by kate at 9:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

During the presidential debates the pell grants came up a number of times.

In the third debate Bush said, "Got four more years, I've got more to do to continue to raise standards, to continue to reward teachers and school districts that are working, to emphasize math and science in the classrooms, to continue to expand Pell Grants to make sure that people have an opportunity to start their career with a college diploma. "

Later in the same debate Bush says, "Let me start with the Pell Grants. In his last litany of misstatements. He said we cut Pell Grants. We've increased Pell Grants by a million students. That's a fact."

Kerry responds, "But you know why the Pell Grants have gone up in their numbers? Because more people qualify for them because they don't have money. But they're not getting the $5,100 the president promised them. They're getting less money. We have more people who qualify. That's not what we want. "

From a NY Times article from July 18, 2003, "The figures cited in the report made clear, however, that the new formula would trim the government's primary award program, the Pell grant, by $270 million once it takes effect in the 2004-5 academic year. That amount, financial aid experts said, probably means that hundreds of thousands of students will end up getting smaller Pell grants, not counting the 84,000 who it is estimated will no longer qualify."

Sure enough, from a Nov. 22, 2004 article in the NY Times, " Nearly 100,000 more students may lose their federal grants entirely, as Congress considers legislation that could place more of the financial burden for college on students and their families... Brian K. Fitzgerald, director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which Congress created to advise it on student aid, estimated that the $300 million the administration hopes to save in the coming year will very likely mean that more than 90,000 students, largely among those whose parents earn $35,000 to $40,000 a year, would lose their Pell grants."

The NY Times goes on to say, "the recent economic woes of students and parents who might not have been eligible for help in the past, means that the government spent more than $13 billion on Pell grants in 2004, up from about $10 billion in 2001, department statistics show."

Exactly what Kerry said. Doesn't sound like a "litany of misstatements" to me.

Posted by kate at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From The NY Post:

Fort Greene in Brooklyn, Queens West along the East River, and Inwood on the northern tip of Manhattan show signs of being the hot new neighborhoods, Realtors say.

Posted by kate at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jenny was one of the NYPL librarians chosen to be a volunteer instructor for Presidential Classroom.

Posted by kate at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Jenny and I rented the first two discs of the season one boxset, and I like it a lot. There's a Season One DVD signing in mid-January.

Posted by kate at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy New Year!

Posted by kate at 8:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For Christmas Jenny got me this bear. She has a "purrfect princess" purple t-shirt, and puppy slippers to match her bathrobe. Jenny is the sweetest wife ever. This is our third bear. We got our first one for Valentine's Day our senior at Grinnell, and a second one last year. This one's name is Trixie-Bear.

Posted by kate at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Goodbye, Christmas 2004!

Posted by kate at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)