If you are reading this as the top entry in my journal, it means that either you are not signed into LJ or you are not on my friends list. I post a picture every day (sometimes I miss a day, but I catch up); whether you are missing out on anything depends on whether you like to look at my pictures and read about my thrilling life.

To get on my friends list:
1 - get an LJ account
2 - add me as a friend
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Here is a picture of my dog in my backyard, so you won't feel as though you came here in vain:

Since I decided not to get a puppy until at least August, I should have time for this.

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make
- What I create will be just for you.
- It will be done sometime this year
- You have no clue what it's going to be.
- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!

Tasha has 7 puppies from one litter and 5 from another, all about 2 months old, right now. She brought 3 of them that were sold already to the vet (where my dog is now, waiting for the groomer to wash him and clip his nails) for their first set of shots; after that, the new owners take care of them.

She has 2 females still unsold. If I got one, I would have to set the alarm to wake up at 1:30 or 2 to get up to walk it until it is paper or pad trained. I might get a video and/or book about training when I go to the library later. I have never had a puppy before, only a 100% outside dog, the senior dog that died last year, and the senior dog I have now. Tasha says it needs puppy food for a year; also, I have to give it a nutritional supplement because yorkies have trouble with blood sugar levels.

Andrew says I can get it, but that will make 2 cats and 2 dogs, and there will be no 5th cat or dog. Also, I'm not allowed to complain about taking care of it or whatever it eats, chews, or pees on.

Should I get a puppy at this time? Please discuss.

( The two other puppy pictures are behind the cut so they won't sway you. If you look, you will be begging me for Tasha's phone number. )

Woohoo, yesterday I inspected two of less than a dozen places in my two zip codes combined that is not a deli/grocery or a supermarket. Besides Efrain's meat-and-cheese warehouse, I went to the one wholesale bakery I have. I should really learn to spread out the excitement over a longer period of time.

Ahmed and his 2 associates own a deli/grocery on Fulton Street in Bed-Stuy, not far from Restoration Plaza. The place started out as a disgusting bodega a few years ago, but every time I go back, there's an improvement, sometimes small and sometimes really big, and Ahmed is always coming up with more ideas. He is younger than average for a deli corporation president, and consistently cheerful and polite. If every deli owner were like him, my job would be a breeze.


To the right of where Ahmed stands is a picture of that other president, and above that, a painting whose sensuality and beauty I could not capture from where I could stand, although I tried 4 or 5 different shots. Behind the veil, her lips are very full and red, and it's quite the sexy picture. Ahmed said that the artist was, iirc, a Palestininan professional artist who had some kind of accident where he became quadriplegic and needed extensive hospital care, and Ahmed and his family were some of the people who gave money for the medical bills. After the guy got out of the hospital, he learned how to paint with his mouth, and he painted a thank-you gift to each of the donors. If, God help you, you should ever find yourself in that neighborhood, it's worth a visit... see the painting and for a dollar get a coffee and a snack cake, but of course, not the peanut butter kind.

Earl plays the steel pan (with some kind of karaoke track behind him with rhythm and such) on the A/C platform at the Broadway/Nassau station in lower Manhattan. He has an open instrument case with his gospel CDs for sale and a few dollar bills and coins. I did not have a conversation with him. I would not cry if he went and died in a fire. In December, you might hear a Christmas carol from him, but for the other 11 months you will only hear:
1) Amazing Grace
2) Blessed Assurance
3) When the Saints Go Marching In (and I haven't heard that one in a while, so he may have forgotten it and be down to a repertoire of 2 hits)

The only thing worse than Earl is the preachers and nondenominational crazy people who scream on the trains without asking for money. At least Earl is doing it as a job, such as it is.

Joey is the mail clerk in the regional office where I hand in my work. He started working for the department over 25 years ago. When you start working for the state, you accrue sick and vacation days immediately (half a day each, every 2 weeks) but they change from imaginary to real and usable only after you stay in service for 6 months. At the beginning of each year of service, you get 5 personal days which you have to use or lose before your anniversary; those are the only things you can use before you are there 6 months. (Those 5 personal days were very precious to me when I started work for the state in February 1986, when Rose was 1 year and 5 months old.)

Anyway, in the first month that Joey worked there, he got sick and took a week off, using up all his 5 days. Management groaned, thinking he was going to be one of the small group of probies that can't hack showing up for a government job every day; some of them disappear during the first pay period.

One of the longtime managers told me that Joey hasn't taken a day off from work since then. That would mean that he has lost every personal day since then, every vacation day past the, I think, 300 hours you are allowed to accrue (8 hour days), and I think sick time maxes out at around 1300 hours.

Joey is very friendly and encouraging. This was almost painful to me during the worst part of my depression, which was almost all of 2005 and part of 2006, when he would still tell me how nice a person I was and how much he loved to see me smile. Normally, when someone asks me to smile, I tell them to go fuck themselves in as close to that actual expression as the circumstances and my relative social standing will allow, but Joey is just too genuinely nice. He's even friends with this one grumpy slow-adult conservative guy who is a clerk in another area who doesn't like anyone else and whom no one else likes. (The only time this other guy ever speaks to me is if Joey is speaking to us both near his desk. The guy will turn his back to me in the elevator bank so he doesn't have to say hello.)

Joey likes various movie monsters and large furry characters. His favorite is Chewbacca, but he will also happily discuss Jaws and King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. He does impressions of all of them as well as of various employees on request, very funny but all in good fun; I've never seen him *make fun* of or bad-mouth anyone. We've never had a deep conversation, but he's one of my favorite co-workers, past or present.

Mike may not look as strong as Mike Tyson, but be assured he can hold his own in a fight. He is really friendly and helpful when I bring drunks, addicts, emotionally disturbed persons, OD cases, suicidal perople, violent people, etc, into the hospital.

Just last week, there was a middle-aged ex-boxer (no one famous) passed out in a train station with a couple of empty bottles of liquor in his pockets. When we picked him up he became somewhat responsibe and was fighting a little. I was not the driver on this call, so I was in the back of the ambulance with a young male observer, talking soothing 5-year-old-type talk to him. He kept trying to launch his head between my knees from the stretcher, so I put the metal clipboard in my lap. Every time his head came toward my knees after that, he would stop about an inch away from the clipboard and lie back down. (I should have asked the cop on the scene to ride with us; I realized that mistake about 1/4 of the way to the hospital, which took a very long five minutes.) What I could understand of his mumbling was past profane and becoming progressively more obscene.

Mike and his assistant got the guy to get off our stretcher and lie down on the hospital bed and behave while they put the four-point restraints on him. With less extreme cases, a gentle hand on the shoulder and a few words of admonition with the eyes of warning are usually enough.

Paul used to work in a butcher shop in Crown Heights North; it shut down several months ago due to loss of business after it lost its food stamp privileges. Whatever happens to the owner is his business, but I'm glad whenever I see one of the guys that used to work for him land on cats' feet. I was in Bed-Stuy this week, and he came into the grocery to pick up a few things. When I went outside after the inspection, he was loading up a car in the freezing weather with stuff to bring to a customer. He calls me "Miss Elaine," which sounds funny but is 100% better than the names I get from a lot of guys in stores who think nothing of calling a woman, even an older professional woman,"mami" or "baby" or "sweetheart."

Melissa has been cutting and coloring my hair for a few years, and is the main reason that the color lasts almost the two full months that I wait in between visits. The person who did it before her used to make it more brightly purple, but the color would fade in a couple of weeks and the gray would be visible in a month. Since I refuse to bleach my hair before coloring (due to my mother and grandmother both getting cancer-like scalp lesions after years of coloring their hair with the two-step process), the hair will not get bright and stay bright. She did the two-step process on one of the other stylists, and his hair is black with shiny dark blue highlights, like a beautiful bird. I don't like to think of myself as someone who opens up to hairdressers, but this week I shocked myself with the stuff from 25 years ago that I'd forgotten about and somehow got to discussing with her.


Melissa's partner Yvette came by toward the end of my time at the salon this week, presumably to go home with her. Yvette, like me, used to sell real estate, although she worked in a well-known franchise and I worked in a small family operation. One of my favorite deals was done with her: the 4-family/bodega building that Andrew and I bought along with 2 of his former coworkers after they got a severance deal (because they all stayed to the bitter end to help their longtime employer Prudential Securities transition smoothly after the Wachovia takeover). The negotiations were smooth and reasonable, and she didn't drag her feet over anything, unlike a lot of listing agents who can become defensive and hysterical on contact after years of dealing with bullshit buyers and sales agents. The building is low rent, and we had to do some repairs in the beginning because the previous owners were absentee, but it now has a slight positive cash flow. Considering how the money we put in the bank has done lately, Yvette may have helped us into our best investment of the severance money.

The holidays are over, and Gary needs a rest. He was due for 2 days off beginning about 16 hours after this picture was taken on Sunday afternoon.

I chose Gary's restaurant as the meeting place for the holiday party of the Greater NYC Chapter of the Betsy-Tacy Society. Last year no one could agree on a place... people did not like my suggestion of dim sum. They wanted somewhere not too noisy (although 15-20 women in one place can get pretty noisy themselves), better than fast food, and no more than $25 including tax and tip. We got all that at Prince Street Cafe & Catering in SoHo, at 26 Prince Street near Mott Street, only 2 short blocks from our bimonthly book club meetings at the McNally Jackson Bookstore. I stopped in there for gnocchi once before a meeting and was blown away.

For our $25 including tax and tip we got: baskets of nice bread with butter; choice of soup or a giant bowl of salad (I had butternut squash soup, done to exactly the right viscosity of puree with no lumps and no annoying gagging amounts of herbs and spices); plates of delicous sandwiches and wraps brought to the table to pass (and some women didn't like the selection and asked for, say, tuna salad and were accommodated at no extra charge); soda, coffee, and/or tea, with plenty of refills brought; and plates of cookies, cupcakes, and Danish passed around.

I didn't take too many pictures, because I don't like to bother people when they're eating. Here's a picture of Suzanne, who collects all the suggestions and the reviews thumbs up and down on those suggestions and then makes the calendar of what books we read when.

The Giants were busy eating it on the TV behind her.

We have a book grab bag at every holiday party. I left before the three hours we had reserved were up, because I get too stiff sitting in a little chair in a small space for too long and it was getting loud in there, too. I chose the book I took away based on the pretty wrapping, and I'm glad I didn't open it there because I might have said something unpleasant. It was a $5 paperback edition of Anne of Green Gables, which we read as a group about 2 years ago. You would think whoever had that book would have remembered why she had it and not pass it along to someone else who by definition would also already have it or at least have read it. At least Harry loved the ribbon that was around it. He has played with it every day from Sunday to today.

It was a good book, anyway... if you want it and will be at Mystery Hunt, let me know and I'll pass it on. Ditto on the electronic children's sudoku that inexplicably arrived in yesterday's mail to my husband from my mother.

The books I contributed were The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, which I recently read and enjoyed very much, and Poetry in Motion, a collection of short poems that have appeared in place of public service announcements on NYC subway trains that I've had for a while and figured I'd never get around to reading.

I have a new routine where I drive to Edgewater and go to Whole Foods on Fridays. When possible, I skip shopping locally, especially now with all the ice on the sidewalks and my not wanting to wait in line at the local supermarket just for Bounty and pens, if that's all the non-food non-organic stuff I need. There is a Duane Reade in the same shopping center as Whole Foods, and the aisle signs are not too helpful, listing less than half the types of things in each aisle. Last week, on my 2nd trip to that Duane Reade, Jay was very helpful in both helping me to find what I needed as well as checking me out at the end. I asked him, what, did everyone desert you and leave you to work by yourself? and he responded that it was ok because he knew where everything was and how to handle it. I bet he does.

Jamie Blau has been my chiropractor for several years and is part of why I can walk despite the constant problems caused by my job and volunteer activity along with weight, aging, and old injuires. She is the boss of Upper West Side Chiropractic over the Fairway on Broadway near 74th Street. 212-496-1630

Louis was hired as a carpenter/woodworker, but says that everyone in his department simply refers to him as the bench man. He drives around Central Park in a van full of tools and bench slats, replacing the slats that are broken or rotted. He also installs the occasional donor plaques you may find on some of the individual benches.

Most of the time when I'm in Central Park, I'm on a long walk, but I'm happy that the benches are maintained well enough that I *can* use them whenever I want to. Back in Brooklyn's Prospect Park in the late 60s when I was a kid, you were lucky if a bench seat had 3 slats on it. An awful lot of them had none.

Rolando was a sweet young man, and if I'd had more nerve, I would have taken two close-up pictures. One would be of the starburst pattern of braids on the crown of his head, which was beautiful; you'll have to go to the Vitamin Shoppe on Broadway in the low West 80's to see it the next time you need some vitamins. The other close-up would be of his nametag, which identifies him as a Health Enthusiast. Apparently, the powers that be at Vitamin Shoppe don't hire any sales clerks, or more likely they think everyone loves corporatespeak as much as they do.

About three times a year, I take my mother to her GP, where she undergoes various tests and a checkup. She is diabetic and has coronary issues; however, the consistent volume of coughing during the 1-2 hour jet-cooling time in the crowded waiting room is drowned out only by the volume of Oprah or Maury or whatever other asshole with a psychic is on TV, so I guess the other patients are all deaf and stupid and have TB.

Fortunately, I found a safe haven about two blocks away, down an alley off the commercial street around the corner from the doctor's office: Rose's little coffee shop. In the summer, I can bring the dog and sit outside. Her views on politics and social policy are not exactly progressive, which is typical of the older Staten Island Italian-American population, but she brews excellent coffee and espresso, doesn't blast any kind of noise, and runs a very clean and tidy operation. Her coffee shop is a cocoon of bliss in what would otherwise be an entirely stressful trip.

Harry and Poppy representing how all the residents of our house rang out the old, rang in the new.

12/31/08 daytime:


12/31/08 nighttime:

Renee works with the dolphins at the Mirage in Las Vegas. She says she and her coworkers are always looking at the dolphins' bodies to notice any changes or problems.

( More pictures of Renee and the dolphins behind the cut )

Pasquale told visitors to Mandalay Bay's aquarium about the rays and horseshoe crabs in the touch tank. He told me that he likes when he occasionally gets to feed the animals, but mostly he just educates people about them.


This was the first time I touched a live horseshoe crab, although I handled a lot of their empty shells on beaches as a child. I asked Pasquale why I never saw live ones in the wild, and he said that I would have to go to the beach in the springtime when they come out of the water to mate.

You've already seen the Conservatory at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. George is one of the people who makes its displays possible.

Here he is explaining his work to some interested tourists:


...and replacing the flowers in one of the snowmen.


(Yeah, it's still Vegas. There are 2 more days of this before we move back to the NYNJA.)

Primavera works in a kosher candy factory on, as luck would have it, Taaffe Street in Brooklyn. I thought her title would be something like "candymaker," but the boss said that she gives almost everyone who works there the title of "general helper" so that nobody says "it's not my job" when she asks them to do something.


Here she is with Elena, another general helper.

Louie is a potato chip man. He is the only delivery guy whose name I remember, but there are other snack guys as well as Pepsi and bread guys who are also friendly when our paths cross on the job.

The potato chip guys are my stool pigeons. Just as customers try to get over on store managers by bringing in last week's rotten food for return along with the receipt for the food they bought yesterday, store managers try to get over on potato chip guys by seeking damage credit for bags that were chewed by mice. Do that one too many times, and he will report your ass.

I will write up a seizure form if there is even one chewed bag on the snack rack, because it is the little grade-school kids who are eating the 25c-35c bags of chips, especially the ones on the lowest racks closest to the mice. Whether or not little kids should be eating potato chips that will give them ulcers and diverticulitis later in life, I don't think they should be putting their hands to their mouths while they're handling foil bags that are covered with mouse piss, the Hanta virus, and who knows what else that will make them sick this week.

Right now I am drinking my favorite beer ever, Stille Nacht from Belgium, which I managed to get 5 bottles of this year and which I will miss from the end of the 5th bottle until next December. I toast Louie and all the other guys who drive all over Brooklyn with one eye over their shoulder to see who will rob them, violently or not, and wish them a great 2009.

Cathy works with the animals in the Bronx Zoo's Madagascar exhibit. She told me the name of the lemur she was feeding; I can't remember it, but it sounded "old money," so perhaps the lemur was named after a wealthy donor.

( Three more pictures of Cathy feeding lemurs behind the cut )