Two Poems Are Better Than One

It's poetry month!

I think the only publisher who actually celebrates this month is

Random House.

I get a poem a day from them

for the month of April every year

in my e-mail.

It's a lovely thing.

Anyway, I'm not sure how prolific I will be this month,

but here are two poems

just for you:

"Two Cats"

*(Wee came up with the first two lines.

When I asked her what she does when she's sad,

she said she hugs her cats.)

and

"Dead Bird"

*(It's about the dead bird I saw this morning of all mornings.)

I'm a little rusty at writing poetry, 

so just laugh with me.

Okay, here goes:

Two Cats

Two cats are better than one

Two cats are so much fun

Two cats, paired like peas in a pod

Two cats, neither of them are named Todd

Two cats, frowning at your skeptical face

Two cats, next on The Amazing Race

Two cats hike the Appalachian Trail

Two cats will never fail

Two cats are asleep in your shoes

Two cats got into your booze

Two cats think your stupid joke is funny

Two cats fart after tasting honey

Buht, buht

Buht, buht

Buht

Two cats slide through a box

Two cats chase the fox

Two cats love, love, love fish

Two cats, they share a splish!

Two cats nap on your head

Two cats, they pretend that you're dead

Two cats are better than one

Two cats are so much fun

Dead Bird

Oh, bird.

You once took flight,

high up in the air,

morning, noon, and night.

You loved what you did,

though perhaps a little too much.

Now you're feeling

a bit out of touch.

As they saying goes:

Pimpin' aint eazy.

But just keep swimming,

just keep swimming,

and life was but a dream. 

Naw mean, bra?

My Green Thumb (?)

For Christmas 2011,

Jon got me a device that grows stuff in foam.

I opened it up the other day,

and planted some Japanese tomato seeds that

he got me in spring 2012.

At first nothing seemed to grow,

but then they started to sprout!

And shortly after,

they grew some more!

And some more!

Now I have no idea what to do once or if they actually grow into

a real tomato plant.

(I feel like they're probably going to rip themselves out of the machine.)

But trial and error and all

that survival of the fittest stuff.

Grow, my little ones!

Grow! 

Swing Tree by Discovery

I heard this song on Pandora the other day.

(Sorry, guys, Spotify just doesn't know what songs I might like!

I need something that guesses right most of the time in my life.)

The song was so summery,

and it had the dubby beats that's

nearly the same as the Electric Slide,

which I associate with my Italian side's weddings/celebrations of all sorts.

And it's just fun and awesome--both Swing Tree and the Electric Slide.

This photo was an August sunset over the great state of NJ.

I miss sitting by the river and watching those like whoa.

Glittery Snow

It snowed on Friday.

Superglittery snow.

Like, I guess you get a sense of the glitteriness,

but there were lots more surrounding us.

I finished up a freelance project

and the longest four day work week, ever.

Jon met me at work to go to Bill's Burger.

We sat in a booth and got burgers,

mini corn dogs, and disco fries.

We ate it as if we hadn't eaten anything in a month.

It was Irish coffee day or something,

so their alcoholic shake had Baileys and Jameson.

We passed and got hot chocolates for the long trek home.

(It's been so cold out that getting a cab home has been

scarcer than getting one during a downpour.)

My sister told me about one of her patients

that had a rectal temperature of 70 degrees.

That's cold.

Your butt should be at least around 99 degrees.

NYC didn't seem to bother plowing.

The hot chocolate helped a bit, 

but the snow was hitting our faces.

Jon found it too sweet.

What was pretty about the snow

was that it like shined like little diamonds.

They weren't the fat ones.

They were small and shiny.

This is a photo we took together.

I held the camera and a hot chocolate in each hand.

Jon pressed the buttons to take the photo 

and his held his hot chocolate with each of his hands.

Teamwork!

Discarded Forest

"So . . . now what?"

the trees ask.

Time to pack up our little black tree.

The holidays are over.

That was quick, huh?

Happy 2013!

Jon, Dani, Hetal, and I celebrated the last minutes of 2012

and the first minutes of 2013 in Central Park,

watching the Road Runner's fireworks--like what Jon and I did last year.

The girls were funny--they asked me what they did last year 

(because I have the memory of an elephant and the deductive skills of the Mentalist):

Dani was coming home from working a crazy ER shift at the hospital.

Hetal was in Vermont.

It was pretty cold.

Definitely not fifty degrees out or anything like last year.

(The best purchase I made in all of 2012

was this superwarm white puffy coat.)

This is what we looked like in 2012.

This is what we looked like at the beginning of 2013.

The fireworks seemed like it was set further back this year,

so we walked toward it.

I love this guy.

I also went on Google Hangouts

and tried hanging out with anyone who seemed to be online.

I hung out with Dom and his friends at his apartment for a bit,

then we got disconnected, 

and I hung out with Wee and Chris for a good part 

of the duration of the firework show.

It was fun!

No crazy incidents to report.

Well, actually . . . Hetal did accidentally fall.

It's been the first time since high school that it was the three of us,

and she just dropped.

(She does that.)

But she was wearing my red Keds,

instead of her five-inch-heel stilettos,

so it sort of makes sense.

And the sidewalk was a bit uneven.

This was the first new year's we spent together in like ten years.

It was crazy awesome.

2013!!!

Hollywood!

In late September/early October,

I went to LA for my third cousin's wedding.

I couldn't believe that LA was as bad

as a lot of people said it was,

but it was--even with Jon.

Other than layovers, the last time I was there I was a junior in high school.

The band performed at Disneyland,

and we went to the San Diego Zoo.

We had the worst turbulence coming back home,

and I felt so sleep-deprived from that trip

that I was pretty suicidal when I got home.

It was a weird time.

The time before that

I was about twelve or thirteen, 

and I went with my brother and dad.

(My mom and sister went to China on a gymnastics trip.)

We flew in to LA and drove up to SF,

then flew to Oahu and Maui.

It was a really awesome trip,

yet odd because I was at that age where

I hated my body,

and I was really introverted and thought I was being very philosophical.

I had a uniform of

traditional low-top black/white Converses,

indigo jeans, men's tank undershirt (or the light blue girl's one),

and a blue and navy cardigan from Esprit,

and the alternative was jean shorts and polo shirts.

When I wanted to feel girly,

I had a striped polo dress.

I wore everything with my Cons.

 I had to tell myself to stop living in my head

and start experiencing life.

I wrote a lot of terrible poetry then,

if only to get my thoughts out of my head.

When I first landed in LA,

I was in awe of the palm trees.

Actual, real-life palm trees, like on TV and the movies,

existed in LA.

My dad rented a car, 

and we drove north on the PCH highway 

until he got too sleepy to drive further.

I remember eating a lot of salami and pizza (AWESOME!)

and getting car sick from the twists and turns (not awesome at all) on that trip.

When we drove through Malibu, I thought that it was

the scariest place on earth.

There were so many HUGE houses--like mini castles--on top of sprawling hills.

The people crossing to the beaches were so tan and built and blond.

It looked like Baywatch.

Totally unreal.

The first night we stayed at a hotel that was so booked up that

we had to sleep in one of the really fancy suites.

It was so fancy that you had to use your elevator key to get to that floor

AND it had a free buffet breakfast in the special suites' floor lobby area.

I hated eating in public and didn't want to be judged by all those snooty families

that had planned to stay in those suites (not landed there because there were

no vacancies otherwise), so I didn't really take advantage of it like I should have.

The bed was so big that it fit me, my brother, and dad with

no overlapping issues.

We went to Monterrey Bay and SF.

It was awesome fun.

And Hawaii was even better.

I remember being so enthralled with the rolling hills and valleys and mountains of CA,

thinking about how when I'm old enough,

I was going to live in each state for at least two years of my life

to really see the USA. And then I thought some states suck,

so I didn't have to live in all of them--just the cool ones.

Now that I'm old enough to know better,

the only states worth living in are NJ or NY,

and I can spend weeks at a time in any other city in the world.

Oh, young Christina.

In any case, here's the Hollywood sign as taken from the top floor 

of one of the buildings at the LACMA.

I think it connotes a lot of different things for everyone.

New York Hall of Science

So besides Gwenyth Paltrow and her kids,

there were a few other activities

at the New York Hall of Science.

This display in the photo above 

took an image with one light,

and another image with another light,

and a third light erased it all.

It was cool.

This showed our hotness levels.

Short legs!

Long torso!

This is the hall of mirrors.

It was incredibly lame.

There was this mirror and two others.

Chris threw three balls:

baseball,

tennis ball,

and golf ball.

The experiment was to see which one went the fastest.

Guess which one went the fastest!

I had to zoom in.

Wee climbed all the way 

to the top of the rock climbing wall

WITHOUT a harness or anything but her purse.

Freakin' animal.

Not all things were Wee-awesome though.

She's as tall as a display showing how many molecules

--as represented by sand--

would represent a short human.

(Most likely meant to be a kid.)

(Okay, fine. She's just a bit taller.)

What's that?

Ha-ha, you flatter us.

We're not actually astronauts,

we just look like them. . . .

posing in the exact same way.

Jon's body shrunk.

I think Wee is hunched over slightly.

I'm a bit on my tippy toes.

Space suits are amazing!

Next to the display was a giant fan 

that you could power by pedaling a bike.

It had the tiniest seat

that looked mightily uncomfortable.

A very large boy

enthusiastically demonstrated it for us though. 

We thought about heading into space since we were dressed

in our space gear anyway, but then Jon remembered

the aqua fresca lady selling that and some Mexican food

out of a shopping cart

under the nearby underpass.

(Thank goodness she went back to her minivan to go home instead.

I could just imagine the stomachaches from eating

street shopping cart food.)

That's the Hall of Science

as taken from afar

on a very hot Saturday.

Maybe when we have kids old enough to run around

it'd be worth going back,

but as adults,

it's really not that great of a place to spend your day.

We really should have gone to the beach,

in spite of the predication of rain!

My Husband Is Very Corny; Me, Not So Much

As we made our way to Jon's cousin's wedding on Labor Day,

we passed by a farmer's market with the coolest corn statue.

It was about two p.m.,

and we needed to still get changed

for the wedding that started at two thirty p.m.

There was plenty of time. . . .

I was starving,

but I was trying to save my appetite for cocktail hour.

The bride and groom

went to culinary school,

so their wedding food had to be tasty.

Jon got a roasted corn that a dude 

at the back of the farm

was selling.

Jon didn't like the corn very much.

He said it was too late in the season for good corn.

To put Jon's love of corn in perspective,

earlier this summer,

we bought corn from D'Agostino,

which in the scheme of life isn't a good market for produce.

However, it was really awesome corn.

To his chagrin, they didn't have corn for a while after,

so he bought a ton of corn from Fresh Direct.

When he got that corn that weekend,

he toted around with us,

in case we landed somewhere

(my sister's house was a huge possibility)

for him to cook and enjoy it.

He was so paranoid about sharing it though

that we ended back home

so he can eat it all himself.

I like corn.

Creamed-canned corn was my favorite.

I thought it was God's nectar

when I was a kid.

Sweet, salty, creamy goodness.

As a finger food that needs to be gnawed

(see: ribs, wings, etc.)

corn on the cob falls into a love/hate category.

Still, the lack of fresh corn on the cob

in the fall and winter and spring

just illustrates why fall and winter and spring

suck.

On a side note,

the farmer's market was selling fifty pound bags of potatoes

for only $12.99!

That's cheaper than some cocktails!

Blue Moon!

Winked at the blue moon for Neil Armstrong.

Took some pics with the new camera.

It was a nice night.

Derecho: Or a Very Cloudy Afternoon

A few weeks ago,

NYC and the tri-state area

faced the evil

DERECHO.

It's simply a hurricane

that comes from the land

vs. the water.

So the things to fear were:

heavy rain

hail

high winds

lightning

I had only heard of the term "derecho"

as I was walking home.

At around 6 p.m.

it was supersunny

and there was hardly threat of any rain.

What actually happened

about an hour later

was just a midsummer evening's rain storm.

It was as anticlimatic as Irene,

which is always a good thing.

Lots of people got cool pics of it.

At the time, Twitter had millions of Instagram photos.

Jon's account of the derecho:

He fell down the stairs of his office building

with his bike.

Then realized he forgot our food to make dinner,

so he walked back up to retrieve it.

He securely fastened the groceries to his bike.

He raced the derecho home,

but since his bike fell

the gears weren't correct,

so he wasn't moving very fast.

He saw a cool opportunity for a photo,

but he wisely decided against stopping to take it.

(It started pouring as he got to the apartment.

His ankle was extremely swollen for the weekend.)

That Time We Went to Governor's Island and Forgot Our Tutus and Hula-Hoops

Jon, Dani, Wee, and Chris 

have never been to Governor's Island before.

So Nat and I (Governor Island veterans)

showed them around.

What we didn't realize

was that this art event 

called Figment 

was happening at the same time.

While I remember seeing ads for it with 

the Statue of Liberty's face,

I didn't realize that one should also

dress appropriately for this by wearing

tutus, sequins, and/or flowers,

or just body paint. . . .

In any case, 

I think we all had a good time outdoors

doing something new.

Note that when I waiting to take a photo 

that was supposed to have been with

my head up by the Statue of Liberty's nose,

the guy right before me started humping it

for his Facebook profile. . . .

So I just took the photo above.

We took the 1 train down.

It is the slowest train ever.

It took us about half an hour to travel 

from 50th to South Ferry.

What?!

The terminal entrance and fro-yo!

Dani's camera

Lest we forget the microbacteria balls

(poop?)

that we wore rubber gloves

to throw the poop into the river.

If you see the poop man, though,

do NOT accept his hand-sanitizer.

It smells like poop.

Yuck!

On the island, taking a panorama

inside the castle.

Inside the walls of the castle,

spying on Wee and Dani.

Dani tries lifting the canon ball. 

Team Governor's Island!

And the Statue of Liberty in the background.

Jon is grimacing because he just finished

a whole box of nachos with the works

that I couldn't finish.

And the Statue of Liberty in the background!

Swings!

Chris swung pretty high.

He touched the sky, sky, sky. . . .

He flew out of the swing and rolled over.

Wee's dusting him off.

Nat and Dani swung too,

but they finished their swinging before we did.

The statues in the background are from Storm King.

Lighthouse?

Nat's photo

We forgot our hula-hoops, too!

  

Pikachu!

We saw some people riding around on bikes 

with similar nylon pieces.

We called them the dinosaurs.

This must be their mother.

There was a small parade

that we kept running into

that finally settle here

to do a dance in a circle.

The gold figure behind and to the right of the tree

is a naked woman

being painted.

Rafters of the chapel.

Nat's photo

Stained glass.

Nat's photo

Taking a break on a pew.

  

Generator?

The Brooklyn ferry lets off nearby it.

I recall it saying that it was illegal or hazardous

or something that makes me not want to ever trespass.

I'm so happy that I finally was able to 

circumnavigate the island!

And hang out with some friends and family, of course!